Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 83
Rebeck’s initial dramas sported a sharp-witted and
essentially comical feminist edge. Her first play to
gain public attention, Spike Heels in 1992, centers on
“Georgie,” a classy modern secretary who oscillates
between her shy neighbor and her sexually over-aggressive
boss; the New York Times critic noted that “the drop-dead
shoes of the title are at once an emblem of Georgie’s erotic
appeal to men and symbolic shackles that keep her in subjugation
and pain.” These themes carry over in Rebeck’s
Bad Dates, which was her first work to gain broad national
attention, becoming “wildly popular” according to
American Theater, which ranked it the fifth most popular
play in America in the season following its off-Broadway
2003 premiere at Playwrights Horizons. Bad Dates presents
a fashion-conscious Manhattan woman, Haley, who
chats with us while dressing—and redressing, as she manages
twenty-some onstage costume changes and forty shoe
changes—for a series of “bad dates” she has with various
men. And Rebeck’s The Scene (2006), which presents
Clea, a sexpot from Ohio recently transplanted to New
York and its high-powered and male-dominated theatre/
TV talk show scene, also intertwines social satire, professional
jealousy, sexual electricity, and near-farcical comedy
in roughly equal measures. By now, anyone familiar
with TV’s Sex and the City knows the territory of these
three plays, but Rebeck all but invented it.
Rebeck seems to be drifting away from her feministcentered
themes these days. Her most recent success is
Seminar, which, premiering on Broadway at the end of
2011, features the central character of Leonard (played,
in its premiere, by Alan Rickman), an acerbic novelist
who, after being accused of plagiarism and no longer in
favor, is reduced to giving private writing seminars for a
stiff $5,000 fee. Four young New Yorkers in their midtwenties—two
men and two women—have signed up for
his latest class, which is held in the lofty Park Avenue
apartment of one of the women. With a cruel but comically
wry wit, Leonard trashes all of their work, often
viciously. As always in Rebeck’s work, sexual complications
abound, but in Seminar they are not central to
the play’s theme or major action, and the final scene is
a reconciliation between Leonard and his most promising
but antagonistic (male) student. The play is now (in
2015) becoming popular around the United States, as
performed in Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, and
other major American cities.
SARAH RUHL
With her Pulitzer-nominated The Clean House in 2004,
her MacArthur “genius” award in 2006, and her widely
produced Dead Man’s Cell Phone in 2008, the highly
unconventional Sarah Ruhl has made quite an impact
on the American theatre. And with her 2009 Broadway
hit, In the Next Room or the vibrator play, which earned
her nominations for both a Tony Award and a Pulitzer,
Ruhl has clearly entered the top tier of current American
dramatists. And she surely is not content to rest on
her laurels—her work continues to explore new thematic
and formal terrain, as with the 2014 play The Oldest Boy,
which draws from Asian theatre traditions to tackle the
idea of reincarnation in contemporary America—with
the role of a three-year old child, apparently a Buddhist
monk in a new body, played by a large puppet.
Ruhl was born in Illinois in the mid-1970s. Educated at
Brown, she received her B.A. and then an M.F.A in playwriting,
the latter while studying under Pulitzer Prize–
winning dramatist Paula Vogel. National attention came with
her play The Clean House, which premiered at Yale Repertory
Theatre in 2004 and, after being performed at other
regional theatres, received widespread exposure with the
play’s Lincoln Center debut in New York, directed by Bill
Rauch (who had also staged the Yale premiere). Clean
House is, by turns, charming, delightful, and bewildering.
Set in a coolly luxurious American living room, it centers
at first around two sisters, Lane and Virginia, a doctor
and a germophobe, and Lane’s Brazilian housekeeper
Matilde—who hates housecleaning. Soon Ruhl brings in
Lane’s surgeon husband Charles and one of his cancer
patients, an Argentinean who is now his mistress, and the
plot not only thickens, it begins exploding. The women
fight, make up, and fight again. Charles flees to Alaska
to find a tree that he believes may cure cancer. Since
the plot is multilayered and absurd, the actors double in
various parts (at least in the New York production), and
a healthy portion of the play’s language is Spanish and
Portuguese—with no subtitles—the play may be seen as
more tantalizing than gripping, but it is certainly provocative
and entertaining throughout, acutely touching serious
contemporary issues in America’s social environments.
Dead Man’s Cell Phone moves Ruhl into a purely
metaphysical world. It begins when Jean, its central character,
finds herself irritated by a ringing cell phone in
the luncheonette where she is dining. Since its apparent
owner is not picking it up, she wanders over to his table
to complain, only to realize that he’s not being rude; he’s
just dead. Not knowing quite what to do, she picks up his
ringing phone and answers it: one of the most astonishing
opening sequences in the history of theatre! Refusing
to tell the caller that the intended receiver has died, she
becomes his receptionist/secretary, telling callers what
she thinks they want to hear. One thing leads to another