Sarah Ruhl's Style

She says...
"I like to see people speaking ordinary words in strange places, or people speaking extraordinary words in ordinary places."
--Sarah Ruhl

Other people say...
"Ruhl wants to project the delights of pretense, 'the interplay between the actual and the magical."
--The New Yorker

"But if Ruhl’s demeanor is unassuming, her plays are bold. Her nonlinear form of realism--full of astonishments, surprises, and mysteries--is low on exposition and psychology. 'I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life,' she has said. 'Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. They’re pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.'"
--The New Yorker

"She is known for charting complex currents of desire and broaching weighty topics such as bereavement with a light, whimsical touch...Ruhl is an optimist; her heroes and heroines resolve their difficulties and attain happiness."
--James Al-Shamma

We say...
Ruhl is drawn to the quirks and intricacies of relationships, especially in crazy circumstances. But amidst all of the mythology and absurdity, she looks for that humanity, that big story, that "bad opera" inside of everyone.

Some of her common structural elements include:

• mythology
• dreams
• play within a play
• heightened language

Some of her common themes are:

• intimacy
• marriage
• optimism
• whimsy
• theatre affecting real life
• earnestness
• heroism

What else she's written

• Melancholy Play
• Tilly’s melancholy is of an exquisite quality. She turns her melancholy into a sexy thing, and every stranger she meets falls in love with her. One day, inexplicably, Tilly becomes happy, and wreaks havoc on the lives of her paramours. Frances, Tilly’s hairdresser, becomes so melancholy that she turns into an almond. It is up to Tilly to get her back.
• Virtual Meditations #1
• An experiment in interactive drama. Two volunteers become the actors in the play by providing their faces and names to virtual actors, and their measurable biological signals are used as input to influence the performance of the play. Their desires and fears of touching each other, of holding hands with a stranger, become integral parts of the play itself, changing our perception of what is traditionally thought of as a theatrical experience.
• Passion Play
• A three-part play that explores the lives and obsessions of people presenting the Passion Play in Queen Elizabeth I’s England, Hitler’s Germany, and Reagan’s America
• Eurydice
• A modern retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, focusing on the point of view of Eurydice and her reunion with her father in the underworld
• Late: A Cowboy Song
• Mary, always late and always married, meets a lady cowboy outside the city limits of Pittsburgh who teaches her how to ride a horse. Mary’s husband, Crick, buys a painting with the last of their savings. Mary and Crick have a baby, but they can’t decide on the baby’s name, or the baby’s gender. A story of one woman’s education and her search to find true love outside the box
• Orlando
• Meet Virginia Woolf's Orlando, your typical Elizabethan Man: a favorite of the Queen, madly in love with a Russian Princess, fleeing an Archduchess, and waking up one fine day in Constantinople to find he has become, of all things, a woman. She survives three centuries grappling with what it means to live fully in the present, in our own skin, in our own gender, and in our own time.
• The Clean House
• A young Brazilian woman, Matilde, who hates cleaning, is hired by a couple who are both doctors. The husband brings home a patient, his lover, who is dying of cancer, while the wife’s sister does all the cleaning for Matilde, whose life ambition is to come up with the perfect joke.
• Demeter in the City
• A retelling of the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, set in modern day Los Angeles. Demeter is a heroin addicted mother in Compton whose daughter is kept from her first by Child Services and later, by a College Republican.
• Dead Man’s Cell Phone
• A woman becomes completely consumed by a dead man’s life when she answers his cell phone. An exploration of what love and relationships mean in our crazy, digital, over-convenient age.
• Stage Kiss
• When ex-lovers He and She are thrown together as romantic leads in a long-forgotten 1930s melodrama, they quickly lose touch with reality as the story onstage begins to follow them offstage. Stage Kiss is a hilarious, off-beat fairy tale about what happens when lovers share a stage kiss…or when actors share a real one.