Hysterically Funny Theater
Review of Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room
(or the Vibrator Play)
by Robert Miltner
Literary periods produce certain writers whose work becomes both symptomatic and emblematic of that era. A Shakespeare or Molière, say, George Bernard Shaw or Noel Coward, Samuel Beckett or Edward Albee. Sarah Ruhl is rapidly becoming the emergent signature playwright for the 21st Century. Nominated for Pulitzers and Tony Awards, and producing plays at a rate (twelve in as many years) that rivals Woody Allen, Ruhl is a dominant presence both on and off Broadway and consistently attracts larger audiences to her work.
While her early plays were adaptations of Chekhov (not a bad place to hone one’s craft), culminating in her brilliant adaptation of the difficult Virginia Woolf novel Orlando (2003), or her modernizations of classical Greek tragedies, especially her widely-produced Eurydice (2003), Ruhl’s newer plays, including Dead Man’s Cell Phone (2007) and her recent Stage Kiss (2011), fuse, hybridize and satirize recognizable subgenres of the theatrical cannon.
In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) (2009) was recently staged at the Cleveland Play House’s new Second Stage in the Allen Theater, using a thrust configuration that places the audience on three sides of the stage. This was an excellent choice for this play, configured at the floor level as a Victorian parlor at the front of the stage where Catherine Givings, convincingly and charmingly played by Nisi Sturgis, greets her husband’s patients, her wet nurse, and the Romantic painter Leo Irving, whose performance by Zac Hoogendyk practically steals the show with his jaunty cap, Bohemian scarf, sparse whiskers, and inspired delivery of memorable lines—“Love animates everything!” and “I love incomplete paintings”—ultimately representing the artistic sunny side of life. Science, its odd and dark twin, is represented by Dr. Givings whose medical offices are on the raised back stage that provides the audience an opportunity to look into what Catherine and the others only hear from behind closed doors: patients being treated with electric vibrators in early medical procedures to reduce hysteria and depression.
This seems to be Ruhl’s point, really: that what science discovers and utilizes objectively, art will raise to the level of romance by discovering its subjective possibilities. For what is in the next room, that is, the medical offices, is the treatment by Dr. Givings and his midwife assistant Annie, of cures for “hysteria”—what Freud called a sexual disorder—rooted in feminine depressionand dis-ease during the 19th century, believed to be connected to the uterus (root word for hysteria). The cure: by the good doctor with an electric vibrator or by Annie through manual message. The result: straight-laced, high-collared Victorian women experiencing the unexpected paroxysm of orgasms.
Sarah Ruhl’s plotting and scripting lead just as equally to paroxysms of laughter on the part of the audience which is privy to actions both inside and outside the medical offices, including the bizarre contraption, looking somewhat like a pseudo-sadistic apple corer used for anal stimulation, invented by Dr. Givings who treats men for hysteria, Leo Irving in this case, as Givings pronounces that “Hysteria is rare in a man, but [Irving] is an artist!”
The play is largely about control as the dominant medical community of men believe themselves to be in control of their wives and their private lives, and in homes in which the (in)ability to have children (Sabrina Daldry) and (in)ability to breastfeed one’s own child (Catherine Givings) are the primary social identities of the wives of socially important men.
So when Sabrina and Catherine enter the medical offices, and discover that they too can operate the mechanical vibrator, they leave objective science behind and head happily down the road toward sexual discovery and subjective agency. The saddest comic moment occurs when Sabrina and Catherine ask Elizabeth the black wet-nurse if she has ever experienced anything like they have, and as they describe the vibrator-produced orgasms, Elizabeth replies that it sounds like what happens when she and her husband are intimate. Sabrina and Catherine laugh—well, hysterically—with their bodies jerking almost as if being shocked, in a scene that portrays the absurdity of sexual intimacy and satisfaction between bourgeois Victorian couples. But Elizabeth doesn’t laugh, her silent sadness evident. We feel it too in our theater seats.
We come to laugh, be entertained, but we come to understand that In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) explores the psychology of emotion. Ruhl has said in an interview that her plays are based on “a more medieval sensibility of the humors, melancholia, black bile, and transformation,” suggesting that ritual—and theater and performance have historically done this—is a form of renewal, regeneration. “Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him,” Ruhl once said, and this play is about Catherine Givings externalizing the emptiness inside her so that she may be renewed.
In the play’s final scene, Catherine convinces her husband that it is not the vibrator, a mechanical substitute for intimacy, she wants—she wants human intimacy, she wants love. Outside, in the snow, the first time the audience sees them in a natural setting, they undress and the now-naked Dr. makes snow angels and, as they embrace, they are transformed into dynamic dopplegangers as they rise on a mechanically lifted stage section as if on a pedestal to love, a romantic variation on the plastic couple on the top tier of the wedding cake, snow falling like iced frosting as the stage fades to black.
Really? How did this exposé and satire of the medical community and patriarchy take us here, to a send-up of a snow globe? Rather than “connect the dots psychologically in a linear way,” Ruhl has said, she prefers to create emotional and psychological states through transformation of the performance space. And in performance space anything is possible, and that is as true for the characters as it is for the playwright who is also transformed through her career working in the transformative space of the theater.
Ruhl has come a great distance since her apprenticeship of adaptations, arriving in a place where her work is becoming more layered, textured, blurred, blended and hybridized, as evidenced by In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) which is simultaneously a comedy of manners, a drawing room drama, a burlesque, a mystery of sorts, a retro-manifesto for feminism, a work of experimental theater, a romantic comedy replete with eavesdroppers and a happy ending, the type we know from Shakespeare’s great plays where, unless the stage is knee-deep in the dead, everyone’s difficulties, problems, issues, and damaged hearts are repaired as couples join hands, or, as in the case of the Givings, make lady-on-top love in the snow-globe of a garden. No wonder critic John Lahr praises the boldness of her plays: they are “full of mysteries, surprises, and astonishments,” for they give the audience not the known and proven, but the unexpected and the delightful. What better reason could there be to attend a performance of a play by Sarah Ruhl?
