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

84 Chapter 4 The Playwright
Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room or the vibrator play received great acclaim in its Broadway appearance in 2009–2010.
Its key action shows a late-nineteenth-century doctor treating female patients’ “hysteria” with the newly invented
electric vibrator, which not only “cures” but delights his patients. Known for her witty dialogue and off-beat,
semicomical characters (see later in this chapter), Ruhl’s play—and its surprising central “prop”— wonderfully penetrate
the miscommunications between men and women on matters of sexual intimacy, then and now. Les Waters directed
this Lincoln Center production; Maria Dizzia is the patient and Michael Cerveris the doctor. The period costumes—
petticoats and all—were designed by David Zinn. © Sara Krulwich/New York Times/Redux
and soon Jean is dining with the dead man’s family,
coupling with his brother in the back room of a stationery
store, heading off to “the airport in South Africa”
to surgically remove her kidney in its waiting room, and
even meeting up with the dead man himself in a laundromat
located in heaven—cyberspace and paradise have
joined hands. Like The Clean House, Cell Phone’s plot
is abstract and convoluted, but the validity of the play’s
social issues (e.g., Does modern technology bring us
together or keep us apart?), the elegant novelty of Ruhl’s
spoken dialogue (“Life is essentially a very large Brillo
pad”), and the surprises of its ever-twisting action create
a comic and an altogether engaging potpourri of rare
entertainment.
In the Next Room or the vibrator play—which became
Ruhl’s first Broadway venture—displays a more coherent
and intriguing plot (at least through the first act),
and is her greatest public success to date. Its first act
is pure dynamite. In a suburban New York home in the
late 1880s, a “Dr. Giving” has discovered he can “cure”
women from “hysteria” and other emotional “diseases”
by applying the newly invented electric vibrator to their
lower regions. And when the vibrator doesn’t do the
trick, the added manual insertion of his nurse’s finger in
those quarters will trigger the appropriate reactions. But
as neither the nineteenth-century medical establishment
nor its polite society has yet associated the resulting
orgasmic spasms with the ecstasies of sexual pleasure,
the play’s first act, which takes place for the most part
under discreet sheets in the “operating room” (the “next
room” of the title), becomes a comedy of manners—or
mis-manners—since all pretenses of propriety have
gone delightfully awry amidst the women’s unfamiliar
shrieks and tears of joy. Even those being “cured” have