Theatre Links, November 24

• Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play--which I saw at its first preview at Berkeley Rep--has now opened on Broadway. Here is a round-up of the critics' opinions. Going by this scale, I think my personal grade would be in the B or B-minus range... generally enjoying the play while also thinking that it tries to stir a few too many themes together and doesn't quite gel. Then too, I tend to be indulgent of such faults (over-ambitiousness, over-cleverness) since they are the faults that I am prone to myself.

• Boston Globe theater critic embarrasses himself by a. writing a review that is a gushy mash note to one actress in a large and complex production and b. getting the actress's name wrong. Linking to this because the actress in question is someone that I went to college with! (She played the leading role in the first staged reading of my first play.) Good for her... I guess?

• The play that my college friend is acting in is called Sleep No More, and actually sounds really intriguing--an immersive mash-up of Macbeth and Hitchcock. Here's a Boston Globe preview article, a better review, and a blogger who also mentions my friend's scene. When Isaac of Parabasis recently asked "What plays do you refuse to see again?" I nominated Macbeth, because I don't consider it one of Shakespeare's best plays and I am really sick of it (within a 6-year span, I saw 3 productions and acted in 1). But if I were on the East Coast I would SO try to see Sleep No More, even though it's a Macbeth adaptation--and even if I didn't know any of the cast members!
  

Cell Phones and Kidney Lamps

It was the lamp, shaped like a kidney, that really pushed me over the edge. Prior to the appearance of this bizarre prop, I'd been hedging my bets on the production of Dead Man's Cell Phone that I was watching at the SF Playhouse--liking some of the amusing characters and lines of dialogue, but also frustrated at how much of the play seemed forced, rather than organic. The characters were overly prone to engage in philosophical reflections about how the cell phone has affected modern life; some of the attempts at whimsical humor fell flat because they tried too hard, e.g. "You are very comforting--like a very small casserole"; and even though the play was about the death of a real nogoodnik, and the woman who tells increasingly big lies about him to his grieving family, I could see a "redemptive" ending approaching from a mile off. Though I suppose I should know to expect that kind of denouement from a Sarah Ruhl play by now--even if it doesn't always fit. (For the record, I thought that the ending of Passion Play was forced--if ever a drama deserved a tragic death scene, it's the story of the Passion!--but that the redemption worked all right in The Vibrator Play.)

But, as I said, that lamp was the last straw. Jean, who was sitting in a cafe near a stranger named Gordon when he died, and has since been answering his cell phone and "comforting" (that is, lying to) his relatives, has just learned that Gordon was in the business of organ trafficking. When his phone rings and it's one of his business contacts, Jean consents to fly to Johannesberg and meet her at the airport, but instead of bringing the agreed-upon kidney, she makes a papier-mache lamp shaped like a kidney and attempts to give it away instead. And that's where I completely gave up on the play. The kidney-lamp was neither funny nor cute; worse than that, this was not even a recognizably human thing for Jean to do. I felt as though the actors were floundering up there, trying to make sense of a character who behaved in a completely alien way. (I had a similar reaction to The Clean House when Charles came onstage dragging a fifty-foot-long yew tree, having chopped it down in Alaska and flown it in a personal plane across-country, as a healing gift for his sick wife.) And after that, the play continued to go downhill--a poorly choreographed fight sequence, a trip to the afterlife, a revelation of the oh-so-whimsical things that Gordon's relatives are doing several months after his death, a coy love scene, and a self-conscious curtain line. Sheesh. At least The Clean House had a good final line.

I believe that there are very few subjects that are inherently "bad" ideas for a play--what really matters is how you dramatize the material. Act One of Dead Man's Cell Phone works because it is basically a character study of Jean's interactions with Gordon's relatives; if the play had stayed on this, recognizably human, level, it might have succeeded. Could have got a bit Six Degrees of Separation-ish, even--the story of someone who tells lies to ingratiate herself with a group of strangers. I liked the scenes with Gordon's mother (an imperious dowager in a fur stole) and the one where his widow was getting drunk at a bar. These characters are not really subtle, but they're not going around giving kidney-lamps to people, either. Another fun scene is the monologue that opens Act II--Gordon talking about the day he died. Paradoxically, the dead man becomes one of the most alive characters in the whole play, because he gets to be snarky and nasty and cheerfully amoral--all qualities not usually possessed by the inhabitants of Sarah Ruhl-land. That is, until the redemptive urge starts to kick in, and Gordon confesses "I saw her across the café... She looked like an angel." And with that, the monologue dies on its feet.

Then again, this play seemed to have been written more as a way of laying out a series of philosophical arguments about cell phones and human connection, than to investigate the inner lives of its characters and the truth of their stories. The musings on cell phones aren't profound enough to justify this approach; and I daresay that this is the wrong impulse from which to begin writing a play, anyway...

Photo: Amy Resnick, as Jean, holds the offending lamp.

The Operating Theater: "In the Next Room, or, The Vibrator Play"

Last week I attended the first-ever public performance of Sarah Ruhl's latest, In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) at Berkeley Rep. I'd been hearing about this one for a while (and I'm glad she amended the title) so it was nice to be in the San Francisco Bay Area when it premiered! This is also probably the best area of the country to premiere such a play, considering San Francisco's reputation (the famous sex-toy shop Good Vibrations even gave away freebies at the 30-Below after-party). It is based on the historical oddity that vibrators were one of the first electronic devices ever invented, used by medical doctors to induce "paroxysm" in their female patients and cure them of "hysteria."

In the Next Room might be the first Sarah Ruhl play that contains nothing in it to violate the laws of physics, biology, chronology, etc. It's still got a wide streak of lyricism, and it's based on a quirky (but true!) premise, but everything that happens in it falls within the realms of human plausibility. Indeed, I suspect that Ruhl made a conscious choice to use Victorian-style dramaturgy in this Victorian-set play. In the Next Room is staged to take place on only one, richly detailed set, representing the parlor of the Givings' home and the adjacent room that Dr. Givings has appropriated for his medical examination room/"operating theater." And the characters never break the fourth wall, either. It is impressive to see Ruhl the rule-breaker, queen of the impossible stage direction, create an entertaining and original play using a more conventional style of playwriting.

The play's two heroines also seem based on Victorian iconography: chatty, bubbly blonde Catherine Givings (you get the sense that Catherine was a "popular girl" in school) and haunted, sensitive brunette Sabrina Daldry. What's interesting, though, is I feel that most modern playwrights would be attracted to Sabrina's darkness and pain, and make her the principal character. Instead, Ruhl focuses on Catherine, showing us that this woman, who at first seems comparatively shallow and untroubled, has her own insecurities and her own discomfort with the constraints of Victorian society; she just hides it better than the "hysterical" Sabrina does.

I did have some structural quibbles about In the Next Room. The second act is longer than the first and yet I still didn't feel like the story of the secondary couple (the Daldrys) was satisfactorily resolved. Also, for much of the play, I felt that the subplot wherein Catherine hires Elizabeth, an African-American woman, as a wet-nurse for her baby daughter was unnecessary. The play is already juggling several large subjects (gender, sexuality, mental and physical health) so that it seems overly ambitious to tackle race relations as well. Also, though the play obviously strives for political correctness, it still felt stereotypical, or condescending, that Elizabeth is the only woman in the play who has achieved orgasm during sex. (You know, the old cliché that black people are less inhibited, more sexual than whites.) Still, Elizabeth eventually delivers one of the most affecting monologues I have heard in a long time... so does that make it worth it? I don't know.

What is most revolutionary about In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) is how innocent it is. The characters' attitudes toward the vibrator are governed by this Victorian-era syllogism:

a) Sexual pleasure is sordid
b) Thus, respectable upper-middle-class white women do not experience sexual pleasure
c) Thus, the "paroxysms" that the vibrator induces in these women have nothing to do with sex, or sexual pleasure
d) Thus, the vibrator is perfectly healthy and wholesome

So the amazing thing is seeing how these women, who are so inhibited in every other aspect of their lives, are completely uninhibited when it comes to the vibrator, because they don't know any better. In this play, emotions and relationships can be messy and lead to guilt, but orgasms are always guilt-free. And even in the 21st century, that is a bold and refreshing sentiment.

In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) is at Berkeley Rep through March 15. I strongly recommend it, despite my quibbles--I haven't even mentioned how funny it is!

Top photo: Maria Dizzia as Sabrina, Hannah Cabell as Catherine.
Bottom photo: Melle Powers as Elizabeth, Hannah Cabell as Catherine, Joaquin Torres as Leo Irving.
All images © Berkeley Repertory Theatre. All rights reserved.

The City Play

The City Play. That's what I would title my next work of drama, if I wanted to make sure it got noticed by American theaters: it combines two fads in play titles that have caught my attention lately, and started to annoy me.

First, the trend of plays whose titles end in "city." I just saw Adam Bock's The Drunken City at Playwrights Horizons, which got me thinking about this. In addition to Bock's play, Shining City by Conor McPherson, Dead City by Sheila Callaghan, and Dying City by Christopher Shinn have all recently been seen in New York. Oh, and a play called Liberty City just opened as well. It's getting pretty hard to tell them all apart! Perhaps this trend dates back to the TV shows Sex and the City and Tales of the City--and I'll admit that, as a wee lass, I always confused those titles as well.

The other, more irritating trend, is to label plays with the word "Play" in the title. Edward Albee (The Play about the Baby), Suzan-Lori Parks (The America Play), and Jordan Harrison (The Museum Play) have all done this, but the major culprit is Sarah Ruhl. I'll give her a pass for Passion Play because, after all, its subject is the history of passion plays, the impact of theater on life, etc. But otherwise, putting "Play" in the title just seems cutesy or tricksy. Couldn't Melancholy Play have been called something like The Melancholics, for instance? Would we still be talking about Death of a Salesman if it had been called The Salesman Play? Unless a play is explicitly about the act of making theater, what is the point of sticking "Play" in the title?

Worst of all, these titles sound like working titles, not names for completed works of art. I mean, here on my blog, or when talking to my friends, I'll refer to "my play that takes place in 1934," but I sure as hell am not actually going to title it that; its name is The Rose of Youth. Ruhl's latest, which will premiere at Berkeley Rep next season, is officially titled The Vibrator Play. This sounds like what you put at the top of your first draft when you have a vague idea of writing a play about the history of the vibrator but not a sense of the finished work. But by the time you're done, you should have progressed beyond this--finding a title that makes a resonant thematic statement, instead of merely acting as a label.

What's strange about this is that Sarah Ruhl was originally a poet, and aside from her titles, her plays are filled with lyrical images and metaphors. Why, then, does she title her plays so prosaically?

"Passion Play" at the Goodman

Jesus (Joaquín Torres) learns his lines. Photo from goodmantheatre.org

Chicago's reputation as a theater town made it imperative for me to see a show when I visited last week. I'd first thought I'd look somewhere other than the big regional theatre, the Goodman--maybe Steppenwolf or Lookingglass? But, ironically, Steppenwolf was doing The Crucible, that regional-theatre staple...and the Goodman was doing the big, new, exciting show: Passion Play: a cycle by Chicago native Sarah Ruhl.

According to Ruhl's playbill essay, she "started writing this play ten years ago after rereading a childhood book which includes an account of Oberammergau in the early 1900s." I'm pretty sure I know what book she means--Betsy and the Great World, part of the classic Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace--because it made an impression on me, too. When Betsy goes to see the famous German passion play, everyone in the book knows exactly what "Oberammergau" signifies, and treats the play as a great and holy effort--meanwhile, I'd never heard of it, and I was shocked to learn that the actor who played Jesus would willingly be crucified, onstage, for fifteen minutes!

Ruhl saw potential in this for writing a play that would explore religion and politics, art and life; big subjects, which she handles adroitly. The "cycle" has three acts, each set in a different time and place: Elizabethan England, where the Queen is cracking down on Catholic rituals like passion plays; 1934 Oberammergau, when the Nazis have just seized power; and South Dakota during the Vietnam War and its aftermath.

The play is a backstage drama (like many theatre folk, I've got a soft spot for this genre) where in three different eras, three different sets of relationships are affected by current events and by the play that all the characters are working to perform. This multilayered set-up provides a real challenge for actors. For instance, the same actress (Kristen Bush) plays the Virgin Mary, as well as the woman portraying the Virgin Mary in the passion play, in all three acts. But her relationships to the other characters shift from act to act. In a sense, then, she's playing six different roles--two in each act, onstage and offstage! However, all of the actors at the Goodman were very good: I especially liked how Brian Sgambello (Pilate) and Joaquín Torres (Jesus) slightly altered their physicalities from act to act. Also, because the anti-hero is usually more interesting than the straightforward hero, Passion Play's sympathies lie with the Pilates of this world, not the Jesuses.

If that sounded confusing, don't worry: this concept is much more complicated to explain than to watch. At the Goodman, the play was smoothly directed by Mark Wing-Davey: the set seemed plain at first but interesting elements popped out of it as needed, and the large cast (11 speaking actors plus 5 silent supernumeraries) moved as a fluid ensemble.

The Elizabethan first act of Passion Play is terrific--funny, intelligent, moving, with characters that you care about and Ruhl's trademark poetic dialogue. In fact, I'd even call it a perfect 55-minute play. And those are hard to write: I can think of perfect 15-minute plays and perfect 2-hour plays, but not another perfect hourlong play. In 55 minutes, this act covers a lot of ground, and ends before the themes become redundant.

The second segment of the play (Nazi Germany) is much weaker, and that's a pity, because it probably has the richest material to explore. Should it have been a full-length instead? Here, the actor who plays Pilate is a German soldier, and the actor who plays Jesus is his lover. Provocative stuff, but I don't think Ruhl made palpable the experience of being a gay man in Hitler's army, or even a gay man in the '30s. The study guide mentions that the "Night of the Long Knives"--when Hitler purged the Nazi ranks of all "threats," including homosexuals like Ernst Röhm--occurred in 1934, but this important information is not worked into the play. Another storyline, in which the actress playing the Virgin Mary gets hit on by a Nazi officer, doesn't go anywhere. If it's an attempted comment on the role of women in the Third Reich, much more could have been done with this theme.

Pilate (Brian Sgambati) proposes marriage to the Virgin Mary (Kristen Bush), while Queen Elizabeth (T. Ryder Smith) blesses them.

Thankfully, Act 3 is a lot better. Spanning several years in the 1970s and 1980s, it feels like a bit of a departure for Sarah Ruhl: more contemporary and with plainer dialogue than she usually writes. (The Clean House is ostensibly contemporary, but set in a "metaphysical Connecticut." Passion Play creates an all-too-real South Dakota.) Usually Ruhl's dialogue gets noted for its lyricism and quirky turns of phrase, but when that gets stripped away, as in the South Dakota scenes, you realize that she is a very strong dramatic writer. For instance, I loved an exchange where one character accuses another of belittling him by saying "actually" all the time--it got me to see things differently, since now I'm hyper-aware of when I say "actually"! And I'm glad to discover for myself that there's more to Sarah Ruhl than her vivid and whimsical imagination--she's got a damn solid technique too.

A minor irritant: in a scene set in 1984, a character we know is 14 years old (we know she was born in 1970) says she's in "sixth grade"--but most kids are 11 or 12 in sixth grade. She even talks rather babyishly for an 11-year-old. Would it have been that hard for the girl to say, instead, that she was in "eighth grade" and have slightly more mature dialogue?

A bigger problem: Though, as I said, Passion Play is less whimsical than other Ruhl plays (no one turns into an almond or dies of laughter here), at the end she brings out the old whimsy. I can tell it's supposed to be lyrical, spectacular, and literally "uplifting," but it just seems to come out of nowhere. The earlier parts of the script do not seem to lead to this conclusion, and it feels like a pasted-on happy ending. Actually.

Theatre on the Horizon

On Sunday I'm going to go down to NYC and see 100 Saints You Should Know at Playwrights Horizons. I don't want to sound like a shill for this company, but I got really excited when I saw their season announcement. Their fantastic student-subscriber deal ($10 per show...seriously, the train ride costs 2.5 times more than the show does!) is just the icing on the cake. See, Playwrights Horizons is devoting its season to young "emerging" writers and getting a lot of great press for it (see this Village Voice article). The plays are:

• 100 Saints You Should Know by Kate Fodor
  
• A Feminine Ending by Sarah Treem
  
• Doris to Darlene by Jordan Harrison
• Dead Man's Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl
• The Drunken City by Adam Bock
• Saved by Michael Friedman (music), John Dempsey and Rinne Groff (book and lyrics)
  

Not household names yet, but definitely rising stars--and they deserve it! I have actually been fortunate enough to meet four of the authors: Sarah Treem, Jordan Harrison, and Adam Bock when they had plays workshopped at Portland Center Stage, and Sarah Ruhl after I won a playwriting contest. Jordan is a terrific guy and the subject of Doris to Darlene sounds so intriguing--Wagner and girl groups! I've enjoyed Sarah R.'s writing ever since my freshman roommate was in a student production of Melancholy Play three years ago, and look how her star has skyrocketed since then! Mary-Louise Parker just got announced as the lead, and I've never seen her onstage, so am excited about that as well. Sarah T.'s Feminine Ending was already a crowd pleaser as a JAW staged reading so I am looking forward to seeing a full production. And I love Adam's intricately patterned dialogue and the description of his new play as "wildly theatrical."

I'm not sure what I think about yet another musical adapted from a movie (even if Saved was a quirky indie comedy), but I LOVE Rinne Groff's play The Ruby Sunrise, so that gives me a better feeling. I actually know the least about Kate Fodor (100 Saints is only her second play, it seems) but have heard good things about the play in previews. Looking forward to it, and to my first NYC day in 9 months--it's been too long!

addendum: One last thing I really admire about this season: the equal number of male and female writers! How often does that happen?