The Play & The Playwright

This page supplies a brief introduction to the play, Sarah Ruhl, and some of the main ideas. See pages dealing with Victorian America to learn about historical contexts, accuracy, inaccuracies and their significance. “Page-by-Page” provides an in-depth look at the entire script. “Electricity and Human Connection” will look more at the themes of intimacy and modern technology.

The Play

In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play premiered in February 2009 at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. In October of that year, the play began previewing at the Lyceum Theatre and then opened there in November. It closed in January 2010, after 60 performances. In the Next Room was nominated for three Tony Awards: Best Play, Maria Dizzia for Best Featured Actress in a Play, and David Zinn for Best Costume Design in a Play. The play was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2010.

“For a long time, I used The Vibrator Play as a working title. I was never satisfied with it; it seemed so utilitarian. […] The play is not a sex farce about vibrators. It’s about wet nurses; it’s about the body. It’s misleading to say it’s purely about the object. So I changed the title to In The Next Room, with or the vibrator play as the subtitle. I know that some people will still refer to the play by its subtitle. Subtitles are very 19th-century; a lot of great novels from that period have them.”
Sarah Ruhl on the title,
Lincoln Center Interview

Amy Muse, in her study The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl, calls In the Next Room Ruhl’s “most dramaturgically traditional (that is, linear) work to date” (81). She also points out that this play can be interpreted as being influenced by the works of Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov, two 19th-century playwrights. Ruhl draws from the Victorian era in a number of ways, keeping to historically relevant issues while still focusing on the inner and emotional lives of the characters. Ruhl’s focus on the very human issue of intimacy and not knowing how to approach intimacy seems to be one of the play’s most prominent themes. The title introduces this idea by juxtaposing the privacy of a separate room with a machine built for pleasure. Muse argues that “The play’s subtitle sounds like we’re in for some titillating entertainment but what is ultimately desired, explored, even modeled in the play is not machinery but intimacy […] That in itself may be scarier to an audience. Sexuality, and even more, intimacy with another, is terribly difficult for us to talk about, at least in the United States” (82-83).

“I’m a contemporary woman writing with subsequent knowledge that informs my view of the period. In terms of the sexuality, I was aiming less for self-consciousness than for a kind of innocence. In some ways, people then were innocent of sexuality compared to the biological knowledge we’ve acquired about the subject since. I didn’t want the play to be too knowing.”
Sarah Ruhl on writing for the time period,
Lincoln Center interview

I encourage everyone to be aware of these ideas in the play, and to track the contrasts between machinery and humanity, distance and intimacy, old and new, flame and electricity. Other aspects of the play to consider are the characters of Elizabeth and Leo in contrast to the others, when human touch occurs, and how costumes and elements of the set can also convey thematic meaning. I’m looking forward to the discussions as everyone starts to develop their own ideas and questions about the themes and significance of In the Next Room.

Read on for more information on Sarah Ruhl, her influences, and the idea of lightness in her plays.

Sarah Ruhl

It’s about not having a brain, frankly. It’s about writing with no self. This, again, sounds a little mystical, but I do believe it, and I think it also goes back to this question of improvisation and how do you get the performer, the writer, out of themselves? How do you get them to abandon self to character, so it’s not about controlling the story, controlling the character like a little puppet. It’s about a freedom from self-consciousness while you’re working.
SARAH RUHL,
WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW INTERVIEW

Despite the first sentence of the above quote, Sarah Ruhl is extremely thoughtful in her writing. Muse calls her an “artist-thinker” (xiii), whose plays are taught both in literature classrooms and theatre departments. Ruhl was born in 1974 in Wilmette, Illinois (close to Chicago). She started playwriting when she was in college at Brown University, where she studied with and was taught by Paula Vogel. Ruhl has premiered plays all over the country, including at Yale Repertory Theater, the Goodman Theater and Berkeley Repertory Theater. Her plays have also been translated into twelve languages and produced internationally. Not only has she written over 15 plays, but she has also published a collection of essays and edited an anthology on radical theatre.

Some influences on Ruhl’s work include Ibsen and Chekhov, as already mentioned, but also Ovid and Virginia Woolf. Ruhl cites Ovid as influencing her style of storytelling, in the sense that his narrative strategy was about “one thing transforming into another.” This sort of storytelling Ruhl prefers over the Aristotelian style, in which “a person wants something, comes close to getting it but is smashed down, then finally gets it, or not, then learns something from the experience—I don’t find helpful. It’s a strange way to look at experience” (New Yorker Interview).

“For me, it’s about the rhythm of thought. A lot of actors ask me, ‘Oh, do I need to take a big pause there?’ No, I don’t think you need to take a breath there; it’s more about how a thought follows a thought. It’s more like poetry—when you’re reading a poem out loud, you respect the line breaks to some extent, but you don’t necessarily take a big pause between the lines. It’s more a way of articulating imagery for me.”
Sarah Ruhl,
Washington Square Review Interview

Ruhl also cites Woolf as an influence on her writing style: “I love so much what Virginia Woolf does with the dash. There’s so much in her dashes: there’s so much mental quickness and so much associative thinking, in terms of how one thought leads to another” (Washington Square Review Interview). Sarah Rasmussen describes Ruhl’s writing as a “combination of humor and an invitation into a deep meditation on the truly unknowable, difficult, glorious aspects of being human,” and Muse argues that Chekhov and Vogel acted as models for this aspect of Ruhl’s works (Muse xiii-xiv).

Do you see these influences in In the Next Room? If so, how? And do they affect your reading of the play?

Lightness

Another writer that has made an impact on Ruhl’s overall aesthetic is Italo Calvino. She borrows the philosophical concept of lightness from him. In the Next Room indeed combines this lightness, or “the distillation of things into a quick, terse, almost innocent directness” (New Yorker) and an emotional seriousness at the depth and complexity of being human. This combination allows for the gravity of existence to be explored by, Ruhl says, “stepping back to be able to laugh at horrible things even as you’re experiencing.” Ruhl, in her collection of essays, describes this concept further: “What if lightness is a philosophical choice to temper reality with strangeness, to temper the intellect with emotion, and to temper emotion with humor. Lightness is then a philosophical victory over heaviness. A reckoning with the humble and the small and the invisible.”