IN THE NEXT ROOM or the vibrator play by Sarah Ruhl directed by Casey Stangl September 26 - October 17, 2010 Julianne Argyros Stage
Broadway’s latest mega-hit is set in the Victorian era, just before its corseted women shed their inhibitions. A new electric invention has been introduced to the medical world. Dr. Givings, one of its early champions, marvels at the effect it has on patients suffering from “female hysteria,” while in the adjoining room, his own wife yearns for another kind of intimacy. This funny, tender and illuminating play has generated excitement from East Coast to West.
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Playwright Bio
Sarah Ruhl, a Chicagoan-turned-New-Yorker, spent her childhood reading and telling stories but didn’t turn to playwriting until midway through her college years at Brown University, where she completed BA and MFA degrees under the tutelage of Pulitzer-winning playwright Paula Vogel. She thought at first she would be a poet. In her writing, she is attracted to the irrationality of emotions: “I like plays that have revelations in the moment,” she told The New Yorker, “where emotions transform almost inexplicably.” Ruhl, who is a wife and mother in her mid-30s, is the author of, among others, The Passion Play Cycle, Eurydice, Dead Man’s Cell Phone and The Clean House, which won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for best English-language play by a woman and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2006, she received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" for her “vivid and adventurous theatrical works that poignantly juxtapose the mundane aspects of daily life with mythic themes of love and war."
