The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl 9781350007819, 9781350007833, 9781350007802

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
1. “What Aesthetic Form Might Consciousness Take?”
Snowless
Chekhov adaptations
Woolf ’s Orlando
Dear Elizabeth
Coda
2. “I Like Plays Th at Have Revelations in the Moment, Where Emotions Transform Almost Inexplicably”
Eurydice
Demeter in the City
Melancholy Play
Scenes from Court Life or the whipping boy and his prince
Coda
3. “Getting in the Same Room is Kind of the Dream”
The Clean House
Late: A Cowboy Song
Dead Man’s Cell Phone
In the Next Room or the vibrator play
Stage Kiss
Coda
4. “I’m Interested in Th ose More Invisible Terrains”
Passion Play
The Oldest Boy
To Peter Pan on Her 70 th Birthday
How to Transcend a Happy Marriage
Coda
5. Directing Sarah Ruhl: An Interview with Sarah Rasmussen and Hayley Finn
6. Critical Perspectives
Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play and Contemporary Expressions of Medieval Performance
From Pontius Pilate to Peter Pan: Lightness in the Plays of Sarah Ruhl
Arrested Dev-elopement: Myth-Understanding Father-Daughter Love in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice
Afterword: “I Had Hoped To Give Them Pleasure”
Chronology
Notes
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

THE DRAMA AND THEATRE OF SARAH RUHL

Amy Muse specializes in dramatic literature, theatre theory, and performance studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she is associate professor. She is the author of “Sarah Ruhl’s Sex Ed for Grownups” (Text & Presentation , 2013) and essays on Romantic drama, intimate theatre, female Hamlets, and travel that have appeared in Romantic Circles, Romanticism: The Journal of Romantic Culture & Criticism, Frontiers, and other journals.

Also available in the Critical Companions series from Methuen Drama: A CRITICAL COMPANION TO THE AMERICAN STAGE MUSICAL Elizabeth L. Wollman BRITISH MUSICAL THEATRE SINCE 1950 Robert Gordon, Olaf Jubin and Millie Taylor DISABILITY THEATRE AND MODERN DRAMA: RECASTING MODERNISM Kirsty Johnston MODERN ASIAN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE 1900–2000 Kevin J. Wetmore, Siyuan Liu and Erin B. Mee THE THEATRE OF ANTHONY NEILSON Trish Reid THE THEATRE OF AUGUST WILSON Alan Nadel THE THEATRE OF EUGENE O’NEILL: AMERICAN MODERNISM ON THE WORLD STAGE Kurt Eisen THE THEATRE OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS Brenda Murphy THE THEATRE OF TOM MURPHY: PLAYWRIGHT ADVENTURER Nicholas Grene For a full listing, please visit www.bloomsbury.com/series/criticalcompanions/

THE DRAMA AND THEATRE OF SARAH RUHL

Amy Muse Series Editors: Patrick Lonergan and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Amy Muse and contributors, 2018 Amy Muse and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. ix–x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Adriana Brioso Cover image: Steppenwolf’s production of Dead Man’s Cell Phone. (© Michael Brosilow) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Muse, Amy. author. Title: The drama and theatre of Sarah Ruhl / Amy Muse. Description: London: Methuen Drama, 2018. | Series: Critical companions | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017061325| ISBN 9781350007819 (hb) | ISBN 9781350007802 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Ruhl, Sarah, 1974—Criticism and interpretation. | Ruhl, Sarah, 1974—Dramatic production. Classification: L CC PS3618.U48 Z75 2018 | DDC 812/.6–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061325 ISBN: HB: 978-1-350-00781-9 PB: 978-0-7556-0378-7 ePDF: 978-1-350-00780-2 eBook: 978-1-350-00782-6 Series: Critical Companions Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For D my primary

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Preface

ix xi

1

“What Aesthetic Form Might Consciousness Take?” Snowless Chekhov adaptations Woolf ’s Orlando Dear Elizabeth Coda

1 4 7 12 15 23

2

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment, Where Emotions Transform Almost Inexplicably” Eurydice Demeter in the City Melancholy Play Scenes from Court Life or the whipping boy and his prince Coda

25 28 35 38 45 60

3

“Getting in the Same Room is Kind of the Dream” The Clean House Late: A Cowboy Song Dead Man’s Cell Phone In the Next Room or the vibrator play Stage Kiss Coda

63 64 70 76 81 89 93

4

“I’m Interested in Those More Invisible Terrains” Passion Play The Oldest Boy To Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday How to Transcend a Happy Marriage Coda

97 99 109 114 118 126

Contents

5

6

Directing Sarah Ruhl: An Interview with Sarah Rasmussen and Hayley Finn Critical Perspectives Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play and Contemporary Expressions of Medieval Performance Jill Stevenson From Pontius Pilate to Peter Pan: Lightness in the Plays of Sarah Ruhl Thomas Butler Arrested Dev-elopement: Myth-Understanding FatherDaughter Love in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice Christina Dokou

129 141 141 155 164

Afterword: “I Had Hoped To Give Them Pleasure”

175

Chronology Notes Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

178 181 203 212 213

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It gives me great pleasure to name the many people who’ve contributed to the creation of this book and to notice how many have provided overlapping help because they are in my life in multiple ways. I appreciate Sarah Ruhl’s gracious responses and her agent Emma Feiwel’s kindness in sending me production scripts for as-yet-unpublished plays. I am grateful to Kevin Wetmore, series editor for the Critical Companions, for inviting me to propose this book, which has been a joy to write. At Bloomsbury, Mark Dudgeon, publisher of Theatre and Shakespeare Studies, and editorial assistants Susan Furber and Lara Bateman have guided me through the production process with good cheer and forbearance. Many thanks, too, to the anonymous reviewer for Bloomsbury, who provided encouragement and just the right revision suggestions. Photographer Michael Brosilow provided us with that radiant cover photo of Polly Noonan in Dead Man’s Cell Phone. James Al-Shamma, author of the first book on Ruhl, generously shared copies of early unpublished plays including Dog Play and the Chekhov shorts. Hayley Finn and Sarah Rasmussen were warm, generous, and brilliantly quotable in their interview with me, and Tom Butler, Christina Dokou, and Jill Stevenson wrote superb essays expressly for this volume that pushed me to dig deeper in my own analyses. Brittany Kalman Arneson attentively prepared the index. At the University of St. Thomas I am lucky to have colleagues who take an interest in and inspire my work, especially Kanishka Chowdhury, Alexis Easley, Emily James, Joan Piorkowski, Liz Wilkinson, Laura Zebuhr, and, at a late but crucial date, Mark McInroy. My research assistants, Rachel Smith and Kaari Newman, kept me aloft, and the undergraduate students in my Spring 2017 “Love. Death. Drama.” course on Ruhl were a delight, especially Emily Gerkin, Caitlin Morley, and Tove Lilith Conway. Warm thanks to the participants at the 26th Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf at Leeds Trinity University who gave me such thoughtful feedback, most especially Penny Farfan, whose challenges have sparked and honed and haunted my thinking, even if it’s not visible in these pages. At my scholarly home, the Comparative Drama Conference, I have benefited from conversations with Miriam Chirico, Ellen Dolgin, Bill Hutchings, Ann Shanahan, Ariel Watson, Kelly Younger, and Graley

Acknowledgments

Herren, who published the seed essay for this book in Text & Presentation. Martha Johnson is part of my CDC gang and the best book group (thanks, Nanette Hanks, Sarah Spencer, Sarah Taffee, Victoria Peterson-Hilleque, and Heidi Pederson); we’ve seen Dear Elizabeth in Seattle and The Clean House, In the Next Room or the vibrator play, and The Oldest Boy together in Minneapolis, and they all came over to read the script of How to Transcend a Happy Marriage with me. Martha and Mark Frangiadakis have provided me a writing retreat and home away from home in Athens. I am grateful for my parents, Marlene and Bill Muse, for creating a home where theatremaking and theatre-going were family habits, and for my brother Van Muse and especially my sister Ellen Muse-Lindeman, for our decades of shared experiences in the theatre. And everywhere, all the time, and most of all I thank Doug Phillips, my favorite conversation partner, book-finder, travel companion, associative thinker, and seeker of the ecstatic moment.

x

PREFACE

“Lights up. A huge glowing puppet of a moon on the stage. The sound of a dog baying as though his heart is breaking.”1 This is the opening stage direction for Dog Play, which Sarah Ruhl wrote as a sophomore in Paula Vogel’s playwriting course at Brown. Vogel has often told the story of reading the play at home, finding herself sobbing, then sharing it with her partner Anne Fausto-Sterling, the two of them awed by “that playworld, and the recognition of who this young woman could become.”2 (Eleven years later the two of them would jointly officiate at Ruhl’s wedding.) Although Ruhl was only twenty at the time, this short play composed as an undergraduate exercise already contains the aesthetic vision and spiritual concerns that will come to be recognized as her dramatic signature. In Dog Play, written just a few months after her father’s death from cancer, the first character we see onstage is the family dog, played by a person wearing a dog mask and an apron. The dog washes dishes and speaks to us. He knows the father is dying and tells us that when the ambulance arrived: “I didn’t bite the big men who came in . . . I tried to say good-bye to him—but mostly I tried not to get in the way” (2). The intimate precision with which she dramatizes the dog’s perspective exemplifies Ruhl’s talent for moving audiences to smiles and tears at the same time, opening the heart “with the smallest, most elegant pliers, rather than opening the heart with a chain saw.”3 A longing for rituals that teach us how to mourn, how to love, how to live, will also surface repeatedly in Ruhl’s plays. After the father’s funeral, guests congregate in the family kitchen, “wearing death masks”; they “yell mournfully and beat on tin drums” (5). The mother worries, “we did not have the right oils or perfumes” and the family laments in unison, “There are no prayers to say over the dead” (13). The character Daughter, Ruhl’s own role, is visited by a “kindly doctor” who peers inside her mouth with a small flashlight and determines, “I see that inside you are crying!” and asks, “Do you know joy, young lady?” (9) (This insensitivity of the onlooker, trying to divert the griever from her sorrow, will appear again in Eurydice when the three stones accuse Eurydice of mourning excessively.) The Daughter and Dog sit outside. The Father joins them, leaning against the moon, but only the

Preface

Dog can see or hear him. “I’ve missed you,” Dog tells him; “I never got to say good-bye. .  .  . Are you happy?” (11). Father responds, “You’re smart enough to know there’s no heaven or hell. . . . I live on the moon mostly” (11). Addressing the audience again later, the Dog shares, “I dreamed last night that I could speak and everyone could understand. I was telling them that he [the father] is not dead, that I can see him. No one believed me” (15). Over twenty years later Ruhl revisits a similar scene in For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, in which the father and family dog, both deceased, walk about the living members of the family unnoticed by them but reminding us of the continual presence and ongoing consciousness of loved ones. It might be reductive, not to say utterly unfair, to hang an entire career on a single event. Then again, an “event” in the philosophical sense is the wholly unexpected thing that reframes and reinvents our lives.4 It is undeniable that the loss Sarah Ruhl experienced with the death of her father right as she was entering the playwriting classroom of Paula Vogel deeply shaped her body of work. In less than the span of a year she had transformed into a daughter without a father and a playwright rather than a poet.5 The year prior, 1993, she had seen the play that changed her life: Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz. This was before she had met Vogel; she and a friend who had also lost her father went to a student production on the Brown campus, both weeping at the play’s conclusion when the brother and sister dance together, realizing death is parting them and they will never do the things they’d long planned. Ruhl writes that she may have “unconsciously absorbed” from The Baltimore Waltz the following, all of which have become features of Ruhl’s own playwriting: How Paula created a modern architecture for grief. How she transmuted personal loss into something formal, and how she both stepped back from the grief formally, but laid the grief bare in an extraordinary, transparent way at the end. How Paula laughs at terrible, terrible things. How she uses gesture and language in that play, and how there was no fourth wall. How she used fragment. How she changed modes and styles quickly, seamlessly.6 Vogel taught Ruhl to write about her father’s death by telling it slant, defamiliarizing the situation, as she had done with The Baltimore Waltz, written as a tribute to her brother Carl, who died of AIDS. Vogel, Ruhl marvels, “creates sites” for an audience “to be given a place to mourn—this is at the root of why we make theatre, in an ancient, ancient way.”7 What Ruhl witnessed in The Baltimore Waltz, “the search for a ritual response to death rather than a medical model,” was something she would turn to frequently in her own work.8 xii

Preface

Since those early days Ruhl has enjoyed critical acclaim, commercial success, and audience affection. To date—she is nowhere near the end of her career—she has written eighteen plays, all of which have been produced and nearly all published; penned a collection of essays on the theatre, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write; and, with Caridad Svich, edited Popular Forms for a Radical Theatre, an anthology of interviews and essays with playwrights and theatre directors about populism and radicalism in theatre practice.9 Her play The Clean House won the Susan Smith Blackburn prize and was a Pulitzer Best Play finalist; In the Next Room or the vibrator play was a finalist for both the Pulitzer and Tony Best Play awards. In 2006, at the age of thirty-two, she was awarded a MacArthur “genius grant” Fellowship, and in 2016 the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award for career excellence. She is a member of New Dramatists and, from 2003 until its implosion in 2012, of the playwrights’ collective 13P.10 She is also a staple on college campuses: a literary playwright whose works get taught in dramatic literature courses and a theatrical playwright whose plays are used in design courses and staged by university theatre departments. Sarah Ruhl is an artist-thinker whose cultural influence will eventually reach beyond the theatre. Her plays, which ask “big questions about death, love, and how we should treat each other in this lifetime,”11 and strive to convey “a kind of primal familiarity wedded to the newness of soaring insight,”12 should be seen as part of a larger conversation taking place on emotion and intimacy across the humanities and sciences, in literary criticism, psychoanalysis, theology, and medicine. I would put her among those whom William Demastes has called the “new alchemists,” artists and scientists who are re-enchanting the world through a grounding in the world. In Staging Consciousness: Theater and the Materialization of Mind Demastes argues that to address the crises of our day “we need to enter (or reenter) the realm once allocated to artists, religious figures, and other non- or anti-empirical dreamers and visionaries,” yet “rather than invoking a sense of mystery from on high and insisting on faith or ‘visions’ to sustain us, this new (re)turn must accept the reality of the empirical world, working from the bottom up (material to spiritual) rather than from the top down.”13 As Ruhl concludes her play How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, “And oh my God we’re all straining so hard for transcendence, and there it was all along.” Ruhl’s special brand of alchemy, her “habitual tightrope act,” as Celia Wren expressed it memorably in American Theatre magazine, is her “flair for joining humor to sadness.”14 Sarah Rasmussen, artistic director of the xiii

Preface

Jungle Theater in Minneapolis, agrees, observing that “a combination of humor and an invitation into a deep meditation on the truly unknowable, difficult, glorious aspects of being human is at the heart” of Ruhl’s work.15 Chekhov and Vogel were models for this dramaturgical and moral vision, along with Italo Calvino, from whom she’s taken the term “lightness” for her own aesthetic. In Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, lightness—a “lightness of thoughtfulness” rather than of frivolity—is presented as the essential quality our literature and lives will need to thrive in the next millennium (what is now our present day, since Calvino was writing in 1988); as an “auspicious image” for the new millennium he chooses “the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times—noisy, aggressive, revving, and roaring—belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty old cars.”16 Instead of dismissing lightness as fluffy and inconsequential, Ruhl asks us to consider, “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.”17 In 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, Ruhl sends a love note to dramaturgs: “We need you to remind audiences that plays are irreducible in meaning, the way that poetry is. To remind audiences that theatre is an enormous, bodily, and irreducible experience.”18 Because she is focused on experience rather than argument, her plays have always seemed to me to call for a more phenomenological than ideological mode of analysis. In this book, then, rather than try to provide you with the meaning of the plays— for that meaning-making is for you to engage in—I will attempt to guide you through them, attending to the ways Ruhl crafts dialogue, uses space and time, and (through her inventive stage directions) envisions the visual and aural environment to affect the perceiving bodies of her audience. I will also engage with production choices and reviewers’ and scholars’ evaluations, and connect the plays with conversations going on both within other dramas and beyond the theatre. Some critics have complained that Ruhl’s plays pack in too many ideas and don’t give audiences a satisfyingly conclusive narrative. If her earlier plays were like poems, her later ones resemble essays, with digressions and free associations and room for audiences to wander and wonder and discover what they find themselves thinking and feeling.19 This is a feature I personally enjoy about Ruhl’s work, and I hope that you will, xiv

Preface

too, if you don’t already. Over the course of reading this book I hope you’ll be inspired to (re)read her plays, to explore some of the works I associate with hers, and to discover what you find yourself thinking and feeling. A note on how this book is organized. I’ve designed it for easy dippingin at any point and for reading in any order. There is an argument to be made for organizing Ruhl’s playwriting chronologically; if we did so we could trace a movement from abstract, poetic, avant-garde work (Eurydice, Melancholy Play) to more embodied, earthy, naturalistic work that more directly addresses social concerns (To Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, How to Transcend a Happy Marriage) and political ones (Scenes from Court Life). Likewise, we could read Ruhl’s plays autobiographically, and observe the growth of a young woman mourning the death of her father and apprehensive about marriage, through plays about courtship and marriage, motherhood, and sustaining intimacy. Instead, I situate Ruhl as an artistthinker and organize her work around her artistic and ethical concerns (although in each chapter the plays are mostly discussed in chronological order). Chapter 1 looks at Ruhl’s early influences—Chekhov, Maeterlinck, and Woolf, who taught her that she didn’t have to write about “this or that issue” but could write “about being”—and the adaptations and uses she made of their work, culminating in her most innovative adaptation to date, her staging of the letters of poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell in Dear Elizabeth. Chapter 2 is focused on introducing the key signatures of Ruhl’s dramatic structure—her experiments with form in Eurydice and Demeter in the City, Melancholy Play, and Scenes from Court Life. Chapter 3 explores romantic intimacy and Ruhl’s writing of plays that help us learn how to love, looking at The Clean House, Late: A Cowboy Song, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, In the Next Room or the vibrator play, and Stage Kiss. And Chapter 4 wades into matters of transcendence and communion: Passion Play, The Oldest Boy, To Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, and How to Transcend a Happy Marriage. The opening pages of each chapter situate Ruhl’s work in larger conversations on staging consciousness, subtext and stage directions, love and intimacy, and Holy Theatre. In Chapter 5 you’ll find insights on Ruhl in performance from two Twin Cities-based female directors of her generation, Sarah Rasmussen and Hayley Finn. Chapter 6, “Critical Perspectives,” rounds out, fills in, and counters my own thoughts with the perceptions of three other scholars who have written essays expressly for this volume: Jill Stevenson on Passion Play and contemporary medieval performance, Christina Dokou on Eurydice as an expression of the Electra complex, and Thomas Butler on the concept of lightness in Ruhl’s plays. xv

CHAPTER 1 “WHAT AESTHETIC FORM MIGHT CONSCIOUSNESS TAKE?”

Sarah Ruhl is a writer unafraid of the soul. Soulfulness is a quality she cherishes in her European modernist influences Anton Chekhov, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Virginia Woolf. “The formless nature of the soul” and “the formless nature of consciousness” inspired Woolf and Chekhov to experiment and invent, always asking, “What aesthetic form might consciousness take?”1 They were “acute observers of that elusive thing called human nature,” and gave her permission not to be content writing “about this or that issue” but about “the whole experience,” to write “about being.”2 While Ruhl is referring to their work, not her own, in those statements, it is clear that this is what she admires and strives for in her writing: the “linguistic music” of Chekhov in which a sound, “the note,” rather than a “thesis or duel,” can complete the play; the “linguistic rhythm” of Woolf that “mirror[s] the speed of the interior” rather than of external surroundings.3 Quoting Woolf on Chekhov, she finds that “the soul gains an astonishing sense of freedom”4 when emancipated from reading and writing conventions. “What if plot,” these writers give Ruhl the courage to ask, “is a rather insignificant and illusory trapping that can be dispensed with?”5 Writers could, then, as Maeterlinck wished, show us “some act of life, traced back to its sources and its mystery.”6 “Rather than relying on the clean sweep of an arc” to carry the reader through their works, Woolf and Chekhov “constantly redirect the reader to the present moment of experience,” for it is “experience itself, rather than the fruit of experience,” that is their end point.7 What pleasure the reader gains from the focused energy of being attuned to the present moment. Virginia Woolf might seem an odd influence for a playwright, since Woolf ’s writing is renowned for its interiority. It is untheatrical, in other words. But this is precisely what Ruhl seeks from her; like Woolf she is less interested in representation than in evocation. She tries, as she told theatre critic John Lahr, to “interpret how people subjectively experience life.”8

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

Echoing that, Adriana Baer, artistic director for Profile Theatre of Portland, Oregon, which held an entire Sarah Ruhl Season in 2015, states: “Sarah Ruhl writes how life actually feels, not how it looks. It’s like she’s tapped into the spiritual subconscious of all of us.” From Woolf she understands that “if you distill people’s subjectivity and how they view the world emotionally, you don’t get realism.”9 Ruhl adapted Woolf ’s novel Orlando for the stage, but the real legacy in Ruhl’s work is her adaptation to the theatre of what Woolf famously called “moments of being.” In Woolf ’s autobiographical portrait A Sketch of the Past she writes that most of life is taken up with “non-being”—that is, all the unmemorable everyday tasks that we do more or less unconsciously. “When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger,” she observes.10 Yet from time to time, unbidden and unwilled, come experiences she calls, in contrast, “moments of being” when she is suddenly shifted into attunement to the connectedness of things, taken over by a “revelation of some order,” able to discern a “token of some real thing behind appearances” and can “make it real by putting it into words”—which is “the strongest pleasure known to me,” she adds.11 Early in her career, frustrated with traditional generic constraints, Ruhl asked, “Why is it that fiction and poetry are permitted the latitude to enact moments of being, whereas drama is often encouraged to only nonmoments of movement toward nonbeing?”12 Admiring the model in Woolf ’s novels of those moments when human beings shift modes of being, Ruhl creates moments of being where characters, and audiences, experience connectedness, or wonder, or bewilderment; they’re not always blissful moments but they are steps out of regular time. Generally they are wordless, crafted from stage directions that signal a slowing down of time and light and/or sound cues. One primary example occurs in Dead Man’s Cell Phone, when Jean and Dwight’s experience of falling in love and of feeling as though they’ve been swept into a world all their own is evoked through a shower of paper houses. The stage directions tell us: They kiss. Embossed stationery moves through the air slowly, like a snow parade. Lanterns made of embossed paper, houses made of embossed paper, light falling on paper, falling on Jean and Dwight, who are also falling.13 2

“What Aesthetic Form Might Consciousness Take?”

The backbone of Ruhl’s play Dear Elizabeth, as I discuss below, is essentially built on these moments of being. Others will be pointed out throughout this book. From Chekhov, Ruhl learned that “the more emotionally charged a situation, the more emotional restraint one must use in writing, and then the result will be emotionally powerful.”14 To achieve this, she puts her focus “on language, instead of grabbing for the most emotional content,” having discovered that “what you want to write about but is very hard to write will come through—it can’t help but come through—when you’re not staring directly at it.”15 Steve Waters, in The Secret Life of Plays, explains that there is a strange contract at work in writing for the theatre—the audience come to be “moved” yet do not wish to be “manipulated.” The task of the writer is to create stories that generate emotional responses; but if writers direct all of their ingenuity to that end, their work becomes ingratiating. Plays that aspire to be machines for laughter can be tiresome in their demand for the audience’s approbation. Plays that endeavor to reduce us to tears tend to leave us cold and unyielding.16 “Doing things with feeling is the primary reason for theatre’s existence,” Erin Hurley argues in Theatre & Feeling; it is what finally makes theatre matter.17 We go to plays like Ruhl’s “to experience an expanded, more expressive, and nuanced range of feeling, imaginatively and viscerally, with the aid of another person or agency.”18 Yet, Paula Vogel comments in an interview with Ruhl: There is an impulse to be ashamed of emotions in theater, which is rather odd because one would think that’s why we have theater. . . . [t]he shift of your writing embraces the emotional vocabulary of theater, which a lot of plays avoid. We’re used to plays that build into their structure a kind of rational mousetrap, but you’re exploring emotional resonance without embarrassment.19 Ruhl responds, “Ten years ago, if you were writing, as e. e. cummings would say, about such trite themes as love and death, you were considered a hack. I felt that theater was actually a place where the voice could be attached to emotion.”20 Like Chekhov she is both highly intellectual and emotional, evoking the play of consciousness, not artificially separating thinking from 3

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

feeling. “I come into the theater wanting to feel and think at the same time, to have the thought affect the emotion and the emotion affect the thought. That is the pinnacle of a great night at the theater.”21 In this first chapter, we will focus on Ruhl’s creative exchanges with her favorite authors, from her one-act Snowless, which uses Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee; to her adaptations of Chekhov’s short stories “The Lady with the Lap Dog” and “Anna around the Neck” and her translation of his Three Sisters; her adaptation of Woolf ’s Orlando; and her magnificent transformation of the letters of poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell into Dear Elizabeth.

Snowless Ruhl’s “beloved Belgian,” Maurice Maeterlinck, who taught her that the “province” of theatre is “to reveal to us how truly wonderful is the mere act of living, and to throw light upon the existence of the soul,” makes an appearance in her play Snowless.22 In 2007, Ruhl and several other writers (including José Rivera, Lisa Kron, Jon Robin Baitz, and Don DeLillo) were asked to create one-act plays that would wake people up about climate change. Their plays were part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, and the following year were brought to the New York University Humanities Festival, which was devoted that year to themes of global warming. Ruhl disagrees with those who think artists have no persuasive power in these controversial struggles, citing W. B. Yeats and Václav Havel as examples of artistic political voices.23 In her usual fashion, her play, Snowless, lyrically rather than realistically takes on the challenge of making audiences care about the fate of the earth, arousing nostalgia more than fear. It opens with six unnamed characters, described as “different voices”; the stage directions tell us that “1, 2, and 3 are older, one might even say, ancient. / 4, 5 and 6 are children.”24 The characters live sometime in the future, “Where the next generation knows nothing of snow. / And the penguins are all dead”  (1). Like characters in a Beckett play, they begin sitting on a bench with their toes in water, and “by the end of the play, the water is up to their chins.  / They don’t appear to notice the water” (1). In Scene 1, characters 4, 5, and 6 wonder in amazement at the things 1, 2, and 3 tell them about snow, which the children have never experienced. They don’t know about the pleasures of sleds or snow days or wet woolen scarves or even paper snowflakes (3–4). Ruhl defamiliarizes the everyday 4

“What Aesthetic Form Might Consciousness Take?”

connections we make with snow, and wonders what else is connected with snow that might disappear with it. 2 Does a child need snow to instruct the emotions to learn what falls without motivation (4) How much will the world change in all manner of unexpected ways if there’s no snow? 4, 5, 6 Don’t get mad at me! Just because I have never put a snowflake on my tongue or made a snow man doesn’t mean anything bad about me or that I’m a bad child don’t make me feel bad just because I never touched a snow! 1, 2, 3 how much silence were you allowed no snow around your ears 4, 5, 6 We don’t want silence! We want noise! Noise noise noise! Clack clack, clack, Let it resound and rebound from the walls, let nothing muffle it, no snow to muffle it, The noise noise noise We love noise noise noise! 5

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

A silence The water is rising up to their chins. In Scene 2, time moves back to the present, where an older man and woman are eating breakfast and the woman, a gardener, is reading aloud from the newspaper disturbing news of the effect on plants of global warming. “The Ohio buckeye, the Kansas sunflower, or the Mississippi magnolia—may begin to disappear within their borders and move north,” she reads. “My God. No State flowers. No State flowers, George?” (7) Reflecting on her reading that 70 percent of the bees have now fled, she envisions the future: WOMAN No bees, no honey. And we will say to our greatgrandchildren: “Let me describe to you the sensation of honey.” They won’t know the taste of honey. Can you imagine? It is the taste of the gods. It is a holy taste. They will have splenda. I will say to them: it is sweet like splenda, but it has weight, and movement, and a golden color through the light of a jar. And it sticks to you. It’s sticky. The man, who’s just been stung by a bee, feels no sympathy, so the woman calls over their neighbor, who happens to be Maurice Maeterlinck, to explain. Ruhl tells us, “Maurice enters, wearing a smoking jacket. (The following is a quotation from Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of The Bee. Thank you, Maurice Maeterlinck, for your beauty)” (10). What follows are gorgeously descriptive passages from The Life of the Bee made theatrical by Maurice stopping during his recitation to confront the man, George, and the audience: MAURICE Where, where are the bees? They are gone, mes amis. It is no joke. The flight of the bumblebees, it is a song, yes indeed, it is our swan song. You laugh, because I am Belgian, and I have this accent. You laugh, you Americans laugh, at things that are different from you, and meanwhile you do not notice that the world you have built is slowly collapsing around you, you are drowning, choking in your own plastic, and you find small consolation in petty amusements, like my accent, yes. You, George, you eat your Puffins cereal, and you laugh, or you look at me with a furrowed brow and you think, I wish 6

“What Aesthetic Form Might Consciousness Take?”

my French neighbor would leave me alone. Because you do not make a distinction between the French and the Belgians. Do you, George? GEORGE Belgian beer, Belgian frites. There. (10–11) Ruhl also adds a romantic twist: Maurice and the woman fall in love while they’re touring her garden and Maurice is lecturing on the bees. MAURICE . . . The bees know not if they will manage to eat the honey they harvest. As they go from flower to flower, collecting more honey than they or their offspring need, let us go from reality to reality seeking food for the incomprehensible flame. WOMAN I do not understand. MAURICE Kiss me then. They kiss. George looks out the window and is surprised. (14) Their kissing, their love, magically causes snow to fall—in May—and brings back the ancient voices. The play closes with all, Goodnight Moon-style, wishing goodnight to a host of things that in the future have disappeared from the earth, including snow, bees, elephants, trees, seasons, and reason.

Chekhov adaptations Richard Gilman recollects that Chekhov was once derided for being “neither passion nor thought but some drowsy, moody, ‘bittersweet’, wispy thing in between.”25 Today this seems funny (his moody bittersweetness having been so influential on modern literature) while also true, and a clear appeal for Ruhl to adapt his work, which she’s done three times, having created stage versions of his short stories “The Lady with the Lap Dog” and “Anna around the Neck” for the Piven Theatre Workshop and a new translation of Three Sisters, commissioned by Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. From the age of ten Ruhl took classes at the Piven Theatre Workshop, where Joyce Piven was one of her lifelong teachers and an early supporter of her professional development, commissioning both the Chekhov adaptations and Ruhl’s version of Woolf ’s Orlando. In the Piven Theatre classes she frequently worked with Chekhov, learning how to illuminate the rich and complicated consciousness of his characters onstage. In March 7

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

2000, the Piven Theatre Workshop presented Ruhl’s adaptations along with stories adapted by Piven in an evening titled Chekhov: The Stories.26 Chekhov’s stories often explore the illusions we tell ourselves, particularly concerning the boredoms and misunderstandings of married life and the longings and desires of intimate encounters. The primary challenge in adapting a narrative to the stage is figuring out what to do with the narrative voice; this is all the more challenging when the work is almost entirely interior monologue and narrative description rather than dialogue and action. Ruhl’s choice is to have the characters narrate. As she writes in her production notes to Orlando, the Piven Theatre Workshop ensemble for whom she wrote the Chekhov and Woolf adaptations was “already wellversed in using narration on stage” and assures actors that we understand intuitively how to narrate because “we tell stories about our own behavior all the time ‘and then I said .  .  .’ or ‘and then this guy walked in and he was wearing a blue shirt and he said . . .’ It is a linguistic modality as old as language and a theater modality as old as the Greeks.”27 She encourages them to use the narration to invite the audience into the performance, creating a storytelling environment of “you and I will tell each other a story about all of us.”28

The Lady with the Lap Dog “The Lady with the Lap Dog” is a story of a man and woman, Gurov and Anna, both married to other people, who meet on the coast in Yalta and have an affair, though the adultery isn’t the point of the story, which is more interested in exploring the inner lives and desires of the two—or really just the desires of Gurov since the narration is from his point of view. Gurov had had many affairs, been “constantly unfaithful” to his wife,29 until he met Anna, walking on the pier with her pet dog. Depicting Gurov’s initial thoughts about Anna, Ruhl lays them out on the page with line breaks, as in her own plays, which gives them the sense of a succession of thoughts and close observations of the particularities of human behavior, which in her plays tends to be a sign of love. GUROV She had such an awkward manner talking with a stranger— she asked questions in the most wonderful jerky manner— and she’d forget the next moment what she’d asked— 8

“What Aesthetic Form Might Consciousness Take?”

it was probably the first time in her life that she found herself alone, in a situation where men look at her with a secret purpose she could not fail to guess. She hasn’t seen much of life, probably. There’s something highly sympathetic about her. And sad, too. (13) The consummation of their relationship is suggested by the stage direction: “A gesture—a sound—of time passing, / while they have a passionate encounter. / Then, Anna sleeps. / Gurov watches her. He strokes her hair” (18). Ruhl gives Anna the narration of the famous scene when, after having made love for the first time, Gurov and Anna go to the sea and peer out silently onto the water. ANNA Anna thought about the sea’s indifference. It rumbled whether or not she heard it. She thought she’d found the secret to salvation— an unceasing, indifferent movement towards perfection. WOMAN 2 But to Gurov, she said only: ANNA It’s early. There’s dew on the grass. They walk, holding the leash of the little dog. (21–22) One of the most effective choices in Ruhl’s script is to divide Chekhov’s ambiguous ending among the two characters, giving each part of the thought that Gurov has in the short story. GUROV And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and glorious life would begin for them. ANNA It was clear to both of them that the end was still far off, and the hardest and most complicated part was only just beginning. (41)

Anna around the Neck “Anna around the Neck” is a less romantic, harsher, and funnier story of a young woman, Anna (eighteen), married off to a much older man, Modest (fifty-two). She is from an impoverished family with an alcoholic father, and married Modest for his money; he is ugly and boring and cheap, and Anna is starving for food and affection. Chekhov uses a third-person narration again 9

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

in this story, but the voice stands outside of both Modest and Anna, presenting each with a gently clinical eye. Ruhl picks up on this, again delineating Chekhov’s prose to capture the succession of thoughts and feelings Anna experiences one evening when she notices that Artynov, “the very rich owner of the summer cottages,” is looking at her. ANNA And because her voice was beautiful, and because she heard music, and because the moon was reflected in a pool, and because Artynov, a notorious Don Juan and man of the world, was gazing at her eagerly, she suddenly felt a great rush of happiness! (64) Anna becomes enamored of her abilities to charm and the power in the marital relationship shifts to her as she becomes “convinced that her smiles and glances gave people only the greatest pleasure. She realized that she had been created exclusively for this noisy glittering existence, filled with music and admirers. Her former fear of a power swooping down on her seeming ridiculous: she was afraid of no one” (66). She spends Modest’s money freely, ignores her family, and lives life on her own terms. Whether we’re to applaud this, in either Chekhov or Ruhl, remains undetermined. There’s no moral lesson; we just watch it unfold.

Three Sisters For Chekhov’s Three Sisters Ruhl was commissioned to write a new translation, which left her “both terrified and happy. Terrified, because I don’t speak Russian and I love the play; happy, because I don’t speak Russian and I love the play” and now had an opportunity to learn Russian.30 She did not have time to learn it, though, since the theatre wanted a translation within six months, so she turned to her sister-in-law, a native Russian speaker, and had the good fortune to meet Elise Thoron, a Russian scholar, playwright, and director, who served as dramaturge for the premiere production. What Ruhl sought foremost to translate is what so often gets lost about Chekhov (and is a feature of Ruhl’s own playwriting): his “luminosity, transparency, and spareness” (4). Ruhl says she focused on getting to the root of the original Russian rather than putting her own “stamp” on it (5); some reviewers wished she’d put more of her stamp on it, lightened it even more, and reduced the playing time. Chekhov’s 10

“What Aesthetic Form Might Consciousness Take?”

work, we’re always hearing from those who know Russian, is filled with humor, but most English translations and productions feel heavy, tragic, and slow. Ruhl highlighted the “lament with humor” (5) that permeates his plays, a “what can you do but laugh” sense of forbearance of fate, which isn’t generally an American attitude, since Americans tend either to try to overcome fate or to complain about not being able to do so. And Three Sisters needs a lot of forbearance, since it unfolds over a number of years in which the characters grow older, succumb to or chafe against the pressures of conventionality, and watch as their idealization of moving from their dull village to Moscow grows ever more out of reach. It is always tempting for actors in Chekhov plays to anticipate the disappointments in the end and let those color the idealism of the beginning. The surges and rapid changes of feeling in characters can feel unmotivated. “I don’t think our emotions are easily bendable to dramaturgical reason,” Ruhl says; “emotions can come out of thin air in my work and it can be difficult for actors, especially if their training doesn’t allow that.”31 Irina, for instance, who moves from “Tell me why I’m so happy today! / I’m a ship with sails, full sails, / and the sky over me blue and wide, / and full of birds! / Big white birds! / Why do you think that is? / Why?” (19) to: You say: life is beautiful. But what if it only seems that way. For us, three sisters, life has not been beautiful— it chokes us, like weeds. Oh, tears—(She starts crying.) are not necessary— (41) The role needs an emotionally labile performer who can suddenly discover she is crying in that moment. Chekhov challenges performers to just be. As Tuzenbach, Irina’s suitor, says, “After we’re gone, people will most likely fly in balloons, / wear a different cut of coat and discover a sixth sense. / But life will essentially be the same. / It’s difficult, and happy, and full of mystery” (58). Yet, Masha insists, “There must be meaning” (59). Tuzenbach responds, “Meaning . . . Look, it’s snowing. What is the meaning of snow?” (60) What is perhaps most commented upon is Ruhl’s decision to translate Olga’s last line of the play as “To know, to know!” which gives the sisters a burst of defiance and of hope, a looking to the future, in contrast to the more common translation, “If only we knew, if only we knew” (6), which 11

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

is filled with regret. As Thomas Butler observes in his essay in Chapter 6, “The effect of Ruhl’s rendering of the line is to add lightness to the play’s ending. This lightness is not evasion or frivolity. Rather, by freeing the line of the past tense and of a specific pronoun, Ruhl breathes possibility into it.” Karen D’Souza, reviewing Les Waters’s production of Three Sisters at Berkeley Rep, writes that Ruhl “beautifully captures what happens when your dream dies but you must keep forging ahead anyway, as regret slowly erodes your soul.”32

Woolf’s Orlando Ruhl writes in at least two different places of the “primary human hope that identity might be in fact be fluid” and therefore “we might actually be free.”33 Orlando is, we might say, Woolf ’s dream of the same. Woolf ’s Orlando is a wonderfully hard-to-categorize creation: a fantastical narrative of a young nobleman in Elizabeth England who travels forward through the centuries (yet without visibly aging), encountering figures of English history. It has been called “the longest love letter in the history of English letters,” as Woolf wrote it for her lover and dear friend, the sexually androgynous Vita Sackville-West, and it was inspired by Sackville-West’s aristocratic family history and ancestral home. Woolf herself labeled it a biography. Orlando’s many adventures, as both man and woman with various male and female lovers, through five centuries and different locales, make for a highly theatrical text, though a challenging one to realize in an onstage production. Ruhl notes that the “design is purposely left open” and both scenic and costume design “need to depend heavily on transformation, metaphor, emptiness, and playfulness.”34 Similarly, she allows directors more than usual freedom in casting, both in number of actors needed and those actors’ gender. The play could have as few as five actors (playing Orlando, Sasha, and three Chorus members) or as many as ten, though Ruhl recommends casting Orlando and Sasha both as women, and three “gifted men” to play all of the other roles because “it’s the most economical and virtuosic, and performs gender seamlessly” (136). It was first staged at the Piven Theatre Workshop in 1998. In that initial production, the role of Orlando was split between two actors, one male and one female; since that time productions have cast just one woman as Orlando. Twelve years later, in 2010, Ruhl returned to the play and developed it with her frequent collaborator Rebecca Taichman as director for the New York premiere at 12

“What Aesthetic Form Might Consciousness Take?”

the Classic Stage Company; and the following year Jessica Thebus, another of Ruhl’s longtime collaborators, directed it at the Court Theatre in Chicago. It has enjoyed productions around the world from the Manchester Royal Exchange to the Sydney Theatre Company to the Conference on Virginia Woolf at Northern Illinois University. The original production included a circus artist and choreographer, with Ruhl instructing that the “non-literal language of dance should work in counter-point to Woolf ’s surfeit of language” (136). For the New York production she collaborated with choreographer Annie-B Parson, who created specific hand gestures for the cast and shaped stage pictures that mirrored the fluidity of gender. Charles Isherwood describes it this way in his review: On an elegant, minimal set by Allen Moyer dominated by a giant gilt mirror looming above the action, the play unfolds as a subtle blend of drama and dance, presumably inspired by the masque form that was all the rage at European courts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The melding of genres neatly echoes the blurring of the sexes, and for that matter the mixture of pseudo-history and fanciful fiction in the book. Ms. Parson contributes no discrete dance sequences, but the characters move throughout in delicately choreographed patterns, making for simple but appealing stage pictures, almost suggesting tableaux vivants.35 The script is divided into five acts, covering the five centuries—sixteenth to the twentieth—of Orlando’s romp, with an intermission between Acts Two and Three, right after Orlando has fallen asleep as a man, slept for a week, and awoken as a woman. Orlando is heavily narrated, a decision Ruhl made, she says, because “Woolf ’s language is so much better than any of her imitators could ever be; and all the narration in the piece is hers and hers alone” (138), though as with the Chekhov short story adaptations, Ruhl turns most of Woolf ’s prose narration into verse lines on the page. Ruhl struggles with making the narration come alive, Charles Isherwood thought, writing “Ms. Ruhl duly draws on Woolf ’s language to evoke the revelations and the questions reverberating in Orlando’s mind, but what feels intimate and profound in the book comes across onstage as brisk philosophical summary.”36 I personally find that Ruhl’s theatricalizing, the externalizing into dialogue of inner narration, freshens the tale and makes Orlando’s desire more palpable. Take this moment, for instance, when 13

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

Orlando first spies Sasha, the Russian princess, and falls in love with her. Woolf ’s narrative reads: Images, metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant twined and twisted in his mind. He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.37 Ruhl omits the explanation that Orlando is metaphorizing, which makes the dialogue charming: we watch him sensorily confused, overcome with desire: An androgynous, captivating figure—Sasha—skates by in slow motion, circling Orlando. SASHA (In a Russian accent) When a figure skated by him . . . CHORUS Orlando, upon seeing the figure, shouted in his own mind, ORLANDO (Shouting at the girl) melon, pineapple, olive tree, emerald, fox in the snow— CHORUS All in the space of three seconds. He did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together. (157) Ruhl’s frequent use of direct address to the audience, as well as the division of what was all interior monologue among a group of characters onstage, turns her Orlando into a communal celebration of gender fluidity, love, and desire, and an open airing and conversation on gender roles. At the top of Act Three, the eighteenth century, when Orlando is acclimating to having transformed into a woman and being pampered by men, she pops out of the scene to speak to us: ORLANDO (To the audience) How odd! When I was a young man, I insisted that women be obedient, chaste and scented. Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires. For women are not— CHORUS judging by her short experience of the sex— ORLANDO obedient, chaste and scented by nature. They can only attain those graces by tedious discipline. (191) 14

“What Aesthetic Form Might Consciousness Take?”

Similarly, near the end of the play when Orlando is wondering just who she is—“for she had a variety of selves to call upon” (230)—Ruhl brings back Queen Elizabeth to assure Orlando that being many things is delightful. Orlando tells her, “I would like, Your Highness, at the present moment, to feel as though I am only one thing.” “Poppycock!” the Queen responds. “Don’t be a bore, Orlando. You were never a bore in silk stockings” (231–32). Kerry Reid, reviewing the Court Theatre production in Chicago, finds that the greatest problem with Ruhl’s adaptation is that it gives short shrift to the other key element of Orlando’s nature—his/her apparent immortality. How does one cope when cut adrift from the normal sorrows and spans of human existence? How does one deal with the inevitable loneliness? Throughout the novel—whose first line of dialogue, tellingly, is “I am alone”—Orlando yearns to be a poet and carries a poem as a talisman. But Ruhl’s second act spends so much time focused on Woolf ’s mockery of conventional love and matrimony that we never fully sense the role of literature as both consolation and foil for Orlando’s long, lonely life. “It is a difficult business—this timekeeping,” Woolf observed, “nothing more quickly disorders it than contact with any of the arts.” Ruhl’s tidy script needs some disorder to put it in touch with the darker streaks in Orlando.38

Dear Elizabeth Ruhl’s most substantial adaptation to date is Dear Elizabeth, her staging of letters between poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. The notion that stage directions provide the emotional force of a play is most vital to Dear Elizabeth, since the only words in the play that are Ruhl’s own are the stage directions. While reading the letters (collected as Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell) she longed to see the images in their correspondence “made threedimensional, to somehow see the reach of their imagery.”39 A joy of working in a collaborative venture like the theatre is that she could take a line such as Bishop’s “Wishing I could start writing poetry all over again on another planet,” craft the stage direction “A planet comes down. She approaches it. She gets on her planet,” and hand it over to the production team to figure out how to make it work onstage. “I love that you can make an image actually 15

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

physically operate on a stage,” she has said. “With poetry, only language can make the image, but in playwriting, people do it; designers and actors actually create the image.”40 Ruhl slices selectively from the letters and occasionally decontextualizes them to create a more romantic narrative, but she determined not to invent dialogue, adhering to Bishop’s conviction of the “infinite mischief ” that can lie in “the mixing of fact and fiction” (61) when she reproached Lowell for incorporating, and revising, letters from his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick in his confessional work The Dolphin. Dear Elizabeth is a story about love but not a love story; it’s a play about friendship, whose arcs and contours we don’t have ready-made forms for, especially friendship between a man and a woman. “We don’t understand, in neat narrative fashion how friendship begins, how it endures,” Ruhl observes (xvi), and she loved “the dialectic between the interior poetic life and the pear-shaped, particular, sudden, ordinary life-as-it-is-lived” complexity of these poets’ friendship (xii). Transformation is Ruhl’s dramaturgical signature but in Dear Elizabeth a moment of averted transformation serves as the dramatic heart of the play. Ruhl seizes upon a couple of Lowell’s emotional letters and links them with other clues in earlier letters and in Lowell’s poem “Water” to theatricalize a road not taken that leads to nine years of what-if wondering and self-recrimination by Lowell and bewilderment by Bishop. In one of her most innovative moves to date, Ruhl employs stage directions to visualize the gaps in the story told by the letters—three interludes from letter writing over their thirty-year friendship during which Bishop and Lowell actually met face to face. Creating moments of being she labels, aptly, “Interludes,” she physicalizes in the present moment what gets described or alluded to later in the letters. The first interlude was when Lowell visited Bishop in Maine in July 1948, soon after he had divorced his first wife Jean Stafford and not long after he and Bishop had begun corresponding. The letters tell us that they spent the weekend together, and at one point “swimming, or rather standing, numb to the waist in the freezing cold water, but continuing to talk,” and Lowell thought about but did not propose marriage to Bishop. The second interlude was later that fall (1948) at Bard College, when Lowell was still waiting for the right time to propose to her and got so drunk his hands turned cold and Bishop held his hand; and the third, again in Maine but this time at Lowell’s house in 1957, was when Bishop and her now long-term partner, Brazilian architect Lota Soares, visited Lowell and his second wife Elizabeth Hardwick, and Lowell 16

“What Aesthetic Form Might Consciousness Take?”

behaved badly and Bishop and Lota left earlier than planned. “It’s impossible to reconstruct exactly what happened,” Ruhl writes in her preface (xiii), yet this is just what she sets out to do. The play is essentially constructed from two most enticing letters of Lowell’s that Ruhl “hungered” to hear read aloud: number 157, written about a week after Bishop and Lota’s visit to Maine, and number 161, written a week after that, still dwelling on that unpleasant visit and contextualizing it in his feelings during that treasured weekend in Maine nine years earlier. All three Interludes are placed in Act One. Dear Elizabeth is divided into two acts, hinged in the middle by Lowell’s most dramatic letter to Bishop (which closes Act One and opens Act Two) in which he confesses to having almost proposed to her nine years earlier and repressing a passion for her ever since. As their relationship does not follow a romantic arc, the second act shows what happens when a friendship survives such a confessional outburst and the friends learn to navigate the next steps with each other and their respective partners. The first Interlude sets up that memorable day: They see each other in Maine. Suddenly the stage is full of water and a rock. They stand waist high in cold water, holding hands, looking out. A silence. She turns to him. BISHOP When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived. She starts laughing at herself. Suddenly it’s not funny. He stops laughing and touches her face. A moment. A SUBTITLE FLASHES: He thinks the question: Will you marry me? She thinks: What did you say? The gulls, the sea, and a wave almost engulf them. They come up for air. The water dries rapidly. (18) Ruhl’s use of the subtitle is a moment of uncharacteristic unsubtlety that might have been left out, yet it sets up the crucial crossed wires, unspoken, 17

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

unacted-upon-desire moment that flashes back to both of them, particularly Lowell, over the years. We only know about Bishop’s statement about the epitaph because Lowell quotes it in a letter to her. Ruhl gives it to her as dialogue onstage. The second interlude, at Bard, is shorter, a dumb show: Bard. They see each other. They embrace. Music. They toast each other with whiskey. They dance. He is suddenly falling-down drunk. She covers him with a sheet. He grabs for her hand. She holds it for a moment. She takes her hand away. He grabs it again. He snores. She replaces her hand with a wrapped present and flees. (23–24) The third interlude is when they meet up again, this time with their respective loves. Lowell writes afterward with apologies, so Ruhl has to construct something that was plausibly inappropriate fitting with the letters. Music. They see each other. They embrace, friends. He tries to embrace her more fully. She looks at him, astonished. He looks wildly confused. They go to their separate spaces. A silence. (35) Consistent with Ruhl’s own dramaturgy and advice to actors, she doesn’t create a psychological backstory. The interludes emphasize physical action, keeping us in the present moment of what is happening, without 18

“What Aesthetic Form Might Consciousness Take?”

initially explaining it. Lowell’s “frenzied behavior during [Bishop’s] visit has a history,” he writes to her afterward, but as the play is unfolding Ruhl wants the audience to live in the present moment when it is confusing—for us as well as Bishop and Lowell. “I don’t want to smooth out the emotions to the point where you could interpret them totally rationally, so that they have a clear reference point to the past,” she says; “psychological realism makes emotions so rational, so explained, that they don’t feel like emotions to me.”41 In other words, we understand a moment in its aftermath. It is only then that we can explain it, as Lowell does in letters to Bishop. In the moment there’s just being. This is what Ruhl is staging. In his letter Lowell apologizes for having overstepped bounds but neither poet tells us exactly what happened. The editor of their correspondence, Thomas Travisano, notes that “during their visit, RL was hypomanic and suggested to EB that he visit her alone in New York, Boston, or Brazil. EB reported the Brazil suggestion to Elizabeth Hardwick. EB and Lota left Castine [Maine] sooner than they had planned.”42 Ruhl’s stage direction “He tries to embrace her more fully” doesn’t seem to indicate that this is what Ruhl thinks actually happened physically—in other words, that Lowell made a pass at Bishop—but instead what Lowell felt: that is, he tried emotionally to return to the intimate friendship of their conversation in the water, though it came out as an inappropriately intimate suggestion that he visit her alone, without her lover or his wife, next time. Ruhl is staging what happened emotionally—not only within Lowell but inside Bishop, who responds to Lowell’s affections and later confessions with polite indirection. It is after these interludes, the moment of being, that Ruhl stages the two primary letters. Lowell writes, a week after that interlude, Dearest Elizabeth, I see clearly now that for the last few days I have been living in a state of increasing mania—almost off the rails at the end. It almost seems as if I couldn’t be with you any length of time without acting with abysmal myopia and lack of consideration. My disease gives one (during its seizures) a headless heart. Also I want you to know you need never again fear my overstepping myself and stirring up confusion with you. There’s one bit of the past that I would like to get off my chest and then I think all will be easy with us. (36) 19

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

At this point the stage directions take us back to Lowell’s memory of their moment in the water, which we have already watched happen. “The lights become lights of a swimming and sunning day. / The stage fills with water and a rock. / He goes to her and speaks this letter directly to her. / They sit on a rock or the idea of a rock” (36). Lowell recalls to her that at the end of that day they spent in the water, “we were talking about this and that about ourselves and you said rather humorously yet it was truly meant”: BISHOP “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.” “At the time, . . . our relations seemed to have reached a new place. I assumed it would be just a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed you would accept. Yet I wanted it all to have the right build-up. Well, I didn't say anything then” (36–7). And later they were both at the poetry conference at Bard and “I was so drunk that my hands turned cold and I felt half-dying and held your hand” (37)—which the audience has already seen staged in the second Interlude but not yet had explained. Lowell continues, “And nothing was said, and like a loon that needs sixty feet, I believe, to take off from the water, I wanted time and space and went on assuming, and when I was to have joined you at Key West I was determined to ask you” (37). But in the meantime he met Elizabeth Hardwick and married her. But, he writes, and with this Ruhl builds emotional dramatic momentum toward the end of the act: Let us say this though and then leave the matter forever; I do think free will is sewn into everything we do; you can’t cross a street, light a cigarette, drop saccharine in your coffee without really doing it. Yet the possible alternatives that life allows us are very few, often there must be none. . . . [A]sking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had. It was that way for these nine years or so that intervened. (37–38) Implying that he’s thought, even obsessed, about this over the last nine years, while he’s been married to Hardwick and they’ve had a child together. “It was deeply buried,” he continues, and “this spring and summer it boiled to the surface” (38). The “deeply buried” sense of an alternative life in which 20

“What Aesthetic Form Might Consciousness Take?”

he married Bishop “boiled to the surface” when he sees her again in Maine after both of them had found partners: LOWELL Now it won’t happen again. It won’t happen, I’m really underneath utterly in love and sold on my Elizabeth [that is, Hardwick] and it’s a great solace to me that you are with Lota, and I am sure it is the will of the heavens that all is as it is. He hands her a record. P.S. The last part is too heatedly written with too many ands and so forth. The record is French Renaissance Vocal Music. She takes the record. She closes her eyes. Music. She opens her eyes. Love, Cal She looks out, not knowing what to say. Blackout. Intermission. (38) Ruhl uses the stage directions here to pace the scene and punctuate it with Lowell’s closing salutation, “Love, Cal,” with the French Renaissance music to end the act in a very moving manner. Act Two opens by recreating this last bit of the scene and therefore the mood with which the first act ended. We don’t know how Bishop really felt, for her response is not effusive. Because her letter is politely indirect, Ruhl again resists any temptation to create a psychological backstory and instead uses physical actions of reticence and indecision: “She puts the record on. / She picks up a pen. / She tries to write. / She stops and crumples the paper. / She tries again. ‘Dearest Cal, I wanted to answer your wonderful letter right away . . . but . . .’” (39–40). Throughout her reading of excerpts from her letter interspersed with repeated excerpts of his, as though she’s rereading it, we see Lowell climbing a ladder to grab the moon: BISHOP Dearest Cal, I wanted to answer your wonderful letter right away . . . but . . . She stops. Meanwhile he climbs a ladder. But we’ve been so busy . . . And I’m apt to be interrupted at any moment by my Brazilian friends returning from Bloomingdale’s. LOWELL Asking you is the might have been— 21

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

BISHOP I don’t know how Lota does it, really; I hate to shop so. A moon appears. LOWELL —the other life that might have been had— He reaches the top of the ladder and tries to grab the moon. The moon won’t budge. BISHOP New York is awful I think. LOWELL I am sure it is the will of the heavens— . . . BISHOP I do hope you’re feeling much, much better, Cal, and realize now that I may not have written a very cheering letter. She is not cheerful. With lots of love as always— Elizabeth She puts her head in her hands. He jumps off the ladder. Or appears to jump off a ladder. But maybe he just disappears into thin air. (40–41) The stage directions allow Bishop’s imagined responses to his behavior simultaneously with Lowell’s crazy behavior—now filled in with the history of how he was feeling, what had been simmering inside for nine years and boiled over in their meeting. It is only after this scene that we hear Lowell writing to her, “Gracelessly, like a standing child trying to sit down, like a cat or a coon coming down a tree, I’m getting down my ladder to the moon” (42). He means this figuratively, of course; Lowell had a long history of manic episodes, during which he was “overtaken by surges of larger-than-life emotion that ended up reflected in his poetry.”43 In other words, when the audience watches Lowell climbing to get the moon, we don’t yet know what he’s referring to. When he speaks the lines, noting that he is “at last in reverse,” having taken his anti-manic pills, then we realize we’ve witnessed a manic episode. The stage directions theatricalize this, helping us feel Lowell’s overreaching that made him write to Bishop to ask for forgiveness. In other words, the stage directions physicalize the inner lives of the poets. You might think these “impossible” stage directions would lead us to bizarre moments that take us away from the intimacy of the moment, that distract, but instead the stagecraft allows Ruhl’s scenes to feel real to interior life, revealing, intimate—not fantastical or absurd. It is an enchantment of attuning us, not of sweeping us away. And they make a play whose words are entirely those of other writers feel entirely like a Sarah Ruhl play. 22

“What Aesthetic Form Might Consciousness Take?”

Having initially set out to be a poet herself and thinking of her plays as “three-dimensional poems,”44 Ruhl writes in her preface to Dear Elizabeth, “I think we are starved for the sound of poetry” (xvi). In an interview she reflected, “Some of the most wonderful experiences I’ve had in the theater are when theater rises to that level of poetry, where there’s something invisible, something atmospheric hovering,” and mused aloud, “How much poetry can an audience bear?”45 She tests this by incorporating several poems into Dear Elizabeth: Lowell’s “Water” and Bishop’s “The Fish,” “The Armadillo,” “North Haven,” and most notably “One Art,” in which she gives Lowell the parenthetical line “Write it!” here reenvisioned as a note of encouragement for Bishop to dare to face the loss of Lota. In real life the friendship ended with Lowell’s death, but Ruhl allows him to linger onstage after death, like the fathers in Dog Play and For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, to listen to his old friend read “North Haven,” which she wrote to memorialize Lowell. Onstage we see the subtitle “Robert Lowell has a heart attack in a taxi” and “He dies” (66). The stage directions note that Bishop “looks up sharply. / She breathes in. / Then she stands up and reads the following poem. / While she reads, Robert Lowell casually rises from the dead. / He leans against a wall and listens to the poem” (67). “They un-age somehow” (68), and “thousands of letters pour down on them, slowly, as they took some time getting over various oceans” (68). This final image of the play, letters all over the stage, makes it feel “as though they have become their own words. / And so can remain in the same place” (69).

Coda If this book had a subtitle it might be “Moments of Being.” It may not be overstating Woolf ’s influence to say that without Virginia Woolf there would be no Sarah Ruhl. But, perhaps equally intriguing (and I’m quoting Paula Vogel here), “If Virginia Woolf became a playwright, she’d be someone like Sarah Ruhl.” (Were Woolf ’s only play, Freshwater, published anonymously today, it would be taken, I think, for a work by Ruhl. This “exuberantly nonlinear play” with “gossamer charm” and “mad, lyric language”46 conveys subjective experiences of desire for greater intimacy in marriage and the mutability of life with a “light, affectionate touch.”47) The most significant influence of Woolf, and of Chekhov and Maeterlinck, is not seen in Ruhl’s plays through direct borrowing or even in the adaptations of those writers’ work but in the encouragement they’ve lent Ruhl to write “about being”; in 23

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

each play we witness finely tuned moments of being in which the pace slows and we are subtly transported, tuned into connections between people or things. This happens in Snowless, for instance, when Maurice and the Woman kiss in the garden and their lovemaking begets the return of snow and of the ancient voices. And in Ruhl’s conclusion to The Lady with the Lap Dog, where she divides Chekhov’s mysterious last lines between the two characters, Gurov is sure that soon “a new and glorious life would begin for them,” Anna equally certain that “the hardest and most complicated part was only just beginning” while we hear conflicting sounds: “The sound of the sea” ongoing and everlasting, and “The sound of a simple melody played on the piano, far off, completed,” signifying an ending (41). Orlando is sensorily discombobulated by the sight of Sasha, not knowing “whether he had heard her, / tasted her, / seen her, or all three together” (157). And as I’ve detailed above, Dear Elizabeth is entirely structured around a series of moments of being that see into the life of the letters of Bishop and Lowell, imagining the actions behind their unspoken words, imagining the very singular love in their friendship, and bringing those to three-dimensional life on the stage. In a New York Times interview with Ruhl about what books and authors have most influenced her, she was asked, “What moves you most in a work of literature?” Her response: “What moves me is, I think, the trifecta of memory, love and the passage of time. The close observation of character, of the moment as it passes—suffused with love. The writer who says: Here I stood! I loved the world enough to write it all down.”48 Her open affection for such writers and generosity in thanking others for the influence they’ve had on her makes her seem refreshingly untroubled with the so-called anxiety of influence in which a writer struggles with his (or her, but this theory is focused on a lineage of male writers) predecessors and seeks to overcome them through the creation of his own original work. The result is that, reminiscent of Shakespeare, Ruhl takes joy in being inspired by other writers and then goes on to make these adaptations (and her original plays) her own through her signature uses of whispered-secret stage directions, verse-like dialogue, and a philosophical aesthetic of lightness, as we’ll explore in the next chapter.

24

CHAPTER 2 “I LIKE PLAYS THAT HAVE REVELATIONS IN THE MOMENT, WHERE EMOTIONS TRANSFORM ALMOST INEXPLICABLY”

100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write is Sarah Ruhl’s theory of theatre masquerading as a series of vignettes. The essays speak to the reader as moments of being where the playwright turns her attention to us to share a thought, air a concern, or pen a love note. In them, we learn about her preferred dramatic structure (not an Aristotelian or “well-made” arc), her aversion to subtext (it’s sociopathic), and her approach to stage directions (they’re love notes). Because the tone of 100 Essays is warm and intimate and the collection is interspersed with anecdotes about her children, the essays feel light, but as in Ruhl’s plays, the lightness is a deliberate choice and is often balanced with a gravitational pull, an emotional kicker, at the end. This is an ethic as well as an aesthetic: the real breaks into the world of our imaginings; relationships are vital; being attentive to others is the way to show them love. Aesthetic fabulation is Ruhl’s style; she is less interested in kitchensink realism than in “the interplay between the actual and the magical.”1 Ovid, the poet of transformation, is her structural guide. “If there can be said to be verisimilitude in Ovidian form,” she writes, “it is the sort that imitates dreams or the unconscious.”2 While Aristotle prescribes a causeand-effect plot that follows the shape of an arc, rising with dramatic conflict and falling with the resolution of said conflict (mirroring, Ruhl points out, the male orgasm3), in the metamorphoses of Ovid’s world, objects and people and the world itself have magical properties and transformative powers: “One thing becomes another thing and then another,” and the story moves episodically, taking “pleasure in change itself, as opposed to pleasure in moral improvement” or lessons learned.4 “I like plays that have revelations in the moment, where emotions transform almost inexplicably,”

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

she told John Lahr.5 In writing characters, too, Ruhl resists a mapped-out psychological journey, arguing that “clear steps seem more appropriate for a manual on how to put together furniture from another country” than for playwriting.6 Her work can pose a challenge for American actors who were trained to identify an action verb to describe what their characters want in every line of the play; Ruhl enjoys actors who can be in a “pure state of emotion, with no need of an action to justify the state. It’s a kind of ecstasy, a state of being, unqualified, unexplained.”7 (Director Sarah Rasmussen told me she often casts singers in her productions of Ruhl’s plays because “music is something that transforms and transcends without effort” and singers “know how to move from one emotional state to another very deftly” and “without a lot of baggage about ‘why did we go from here to here?’”8) Ruhl is adamant that actors in her plays not look for and play subtext, which is no small difficulty since we’ve come to understand modern drama as being all about subtext—that is, about characters speaking one thing and thinking another—and most training in textual analysis and acting preparation has been devoted to rooting out the subtext of the dialogue, inventing (since it goes unstated in the script) lines of silently felt dialogue that create the inner life of the character. Some playwrights have made subtext a hallmark of their work. Harold Pinter, for instance, in “Writing for the Theatre,” argues that we use language as a way of hiding what we want: “The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place. . . . One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.”9 This too is not only an aesthetic choice; it’s an ethical statement about being in the world, about human nature. Ruhl counters, “I think it is almost ontologically impossible to think one thing while saying another thing. It creates an acting muddle in the theater and a sociopath in life.”10 She beseeches actors in her plays not to “think of the language of the play as a cover or deception for your actual true feelings that you’ve felt compelled to invent for yourself . . . there is no deception or ulterior motive or ‘cover’ about the language.”11 As she told theatre critic John Lahr, who profiled her for the New Yorker, “I prefer an actor who says, ‘My character doesn’t have a backstory, so I won’t concoct one. I will live as fully in every moment as I can. I will let the language move me, as opposed to a secret backstory of my own.’”12 Her plays aren’t built around hidden secrets—a buried child, a past infidelity. “The secret that began before the play puts the audience in the position of being a detective,” she points out, “excavating the past, rather than experiencing the present. 26

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment . . .”

The mystery lies elsewhere,”13 whereas, in her plays, the mystery exists in the present moment. There is, of course, much in life that is unsayable— that we are unconscious of or long for and struggle to express—and Ruhl envisions this as “pools of silence and the unsayable to the left or the right or even above the language. The unsayable in an ideal world hovers above the language rather than below.”14 The distinction she’s making is critical to the aesthetic of lightness in her work. These unsayables are not buried and being tromped upon; they are floating, like figures in a Chagall painting, around the characters. Her characters occupy “the real world and also a suspended state.”15 Although actors are asked not to play the unsayable, it is to be allowed space, very much like white space on a page of poetry, for the actor and audience to experience. Ruhl frequently retells the story of the moment she was given permission to elevate the stage direction from functional paratext to love letter. Paula Vogel sat her playwriting class down and read to them the opening of a Tennessee Williams play, saying “these aren’t stage directions, these are a love letter from Tennessee Williams to his reader, over time.”16 (Playwright Kelly Younger told me in an email that he likes to create intimate stage directions that keep both the playwright and director “in love with the play.”17) Ruhl harkens back to the “golden age of stage directions” that reigned in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Egged on by Shaw’s revolutionist incitement,” Kevin Jackson tells us, the stage direction “suddenly declined to serve its traditional role as an anonymous, self-effacing flunkey of the play’s dialogue. It started to throw its weight around. It showed that it could dish out polemic as if it were a muckraking pamphlet” or “wax didactic like a lecturer” (recalling Shaw’s play-length prefaces), “rhapsodize over scenery like a nature poet” (à la Williams) or “anatomize character like a novelist” (as Eugene O’Neill famously did).18 When you read a Sarah Ruhl play you cannot even imagine crossing out the stage directions, as directors often ask actors to do at the first rehearsal. One look at the page and you’ll see that the stage directions and dialogue “spiral across [the page] with equal weight.”19 She doesn’t tuck her stage directions away in parentheses, for they aren’t parenthetical. “I think many more directors would begin to treat stage directions as visual speech rather than as filigree if they were not always hiding in parentheses,” she’s said.20 She lays out stage directions like lines of verse, which call readers to attend to them. It’s a signal to slow down; she’s not merely conveying information but giving time to get inside the moment. In this chapter we will enter those moments. We will focus largely on Ruhl’s experiments with dialogue and stage directions, examining how 27

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

she creates new forms in Eurydice and Demeter in the City, Melancholy Play, and Scenes from Court Life or the whipping boy and his prince.

Eurydice Eurydice “may just be the most moving exploration of the theme of loss that the American theater has produced since the events of September 11, 2001, although Ms. Ruhl began work on the play before that terrible day.”21 When Eurydice was produced at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2006, Ruhl had just won the MacArthur “Genius” grant, had been a Pulitzer finalist for The Clean House, had had numerous workshop productions across the country and full-scale productions of The Clean House at Yale Rep and Passion Play at Arena Stage in Washington, DC, and Theatre Communications Group was publishing Sarah Ruhl: The Clean House and other plays. Yet she still had not had a major production in New York; it would be 2009 before she made her Broadway debut with In the Next Room or the vibrator play. When he gave Yale Repertory Theatre’s Eurydice that rave review, then, Charles Isherwood also felt the need to “warn” audiences that “Ms. Ruhl’s offbeat style, which mixes colors and tones in ways that can be delightful but occasionally jarring, requires some re-education for audiences used to the contemporary theater’s steady diet of naturalism and relatively straightforward demarcations between comedy and drama.”22 (He would come to be one of her most consistent admirers; Michael Feingold at the Village Voice, one of her most consistent detractors.) What Isherwood observed would come to be the dividing line between Ruhl’s converts and disbelievers as her plays would repeatedly endure the application of two adjectives: “whimsical” and “quirky.” These were used by fans as well as those who found her work off-putting. In 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write she addresses her frustration in essay 61, “Why I hate the word whimsy. And why I hate the word quirky.” Whimsy, an etymologically feminine term from the sixteenth century connected to fluttering eyelids, is used to trivialize “a whole school of aesthetic fabulation,” while “the choice to have a perceptible aesthetic at all is often called a quirk.”23 To Thomas Butler, whose essay in Chapter 6 of this book examines the concept of lightness in Ruhl’s plays, “Anyone who has seen or read Ruhl has a sense of what the reviewers are trying to get at,” but “the dead-end categories whimsy and quirkiness cannot approach” the “depth and poignancy” and “hopefulness” of the plays.24 Pointing out the implied condescension in reviewers’ use, 28

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment . . .”

Ruhl remarks, “The word quirky suggests that in a homogenized culture, difference has to be immediately defined, sequestered, and formally quarantined while being gently patted on the head.”25 Eurydice, her first published play, is “transparently personal,” written to allow Ruhl “a few more conversations” with her father, who died when she was twenty. Her use of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth “was a way to negotiate that terrain” connecting the dead and the living.26 The original version, in one act, was written for Mac Wellman’s playwriting class while Ruhl was pursuing her MFA at Brown University. Hayley Finn, who directed the workshop production for Brown’s New Play Festival, was impressed with how Ruhl “was able to tie in a very deep, personal experience that was still relatively fresh at that time, with a very aesthetically polished, complicated, beautiful, rich story. I think that’s really hard to achieve at any age, but particularly when you’re really at a younger age and at the beginning of your journey as a writer, and it was pretty spectacular.”27 Finn praises Wellman’s teaching for asserting “the value of Strangeness in the theatrical experience”; his encouragement to disregard tired stage conventions and write “impossible” stage directions are essential to the play’s imaginative vision and emotional weight.28 Ruhl noted about Wellman, “He extends the limits of what’s possible on stage, which was enormously helpful to me . . . . I remember he once had us draw the shape of our play, and said it could be any shape, a zig-zag, a jug, a circle, as opposed to an arc. I’ll never forget that.”29 Like Strindberg’s A Dream Play, Eurydice’s scenes unfold with the logic of dreams, moving between locations and shifting tones without warning from ecstasy to danger to longing. Its shape is musical: in three movements, each of which ends in a death and voyage to the Underworld, with fluid transitions between scenes and no intermission that might interrupt the flow and experience of the whole. In Ruhl’s early work most especially, language is foregrounded over character or plot, with poetic dialogue working, as Beckett said of his own work, on the nerves rather than the intellect of the audience, the literal sense of the words oft en less important than the sounds the words make and the images they evoke. As Ola Kraszpulska has observed, the stage directions indicating just how a moment should sound effectively amount to a scoring of the play; for instance, “musty dripping sounds” signal the Underworld, and Ruhl specifies a “ping” to signify the “small metallic sound of forgetfulness” when one is dipped in the river of Lethe, while we should hear a “ding” for the raining elevator’s doors.30 Music being a vehicle, perhaps the quickest delivery system to the nerves and soul, Ruhl often incorporates 29

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

musical cues during the composition of the work, as opposed to salting it in during production, and collaborates with composers, most notably Todd Almond, who share her vision. Appropriately for a play invoking the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, calls for music are infused throughout the stage directions, but in this version of the myth music and language operate in tension thematically: Orpheus the musician is always caught up in the sound playing in his head rather than the lover in front of him; Eurydice the writer and reader, lover of language, can’t hear his rhythm. (“I don’t need to know about rhythm. I have my books,” she tells him [338].)31 Their story has lingered with Ruhl “more than any other Greek myth” but rarely in the many retellings has she seen anyone look “at Eurydice’s experience. I always found that troubling—she’s the one who dies and takes a journey before Orpheus, but we don’t really see her experience.”32 Ruhl “had a notion about how Eurydice could be a more vocal player in that myth,”33 inspired by Rilke’s 1904 poem, “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.” In it, Ruhl says, “Rilke looks at Eurydice’s experience, at the fullness of her death when Orpheus arrives, with a kind of ambivalence. Rilke says she’s become fuller, rounder, in her death. Then this person arrives from her forgotten life.”34 In the poem Eurydice is described as “in herself,” focused within “like a woman near term” but at the same time “in a new virginity / and untouchable: her sex was closed / like a young flower at twilight, / and her hands had been weaned so far / from marriage that even the slight god’s / endlessly gentle touch, as he led, / hurt her like too great an intimacy.”35 Rilke’s gently explicit description of her sexuality reveals how Eurydice in the Underworld is no longer a bride; she is both beyond that and returned to an earlier daughter stage in which her primary love relationship is with her father. Ruhl instructs that Orpheus and Eurydice should seem “a little too young and a little too in love” (332), which means we see them as not really ready to be married, shifting the poignant weight of Eurydice to that father-daughter relationship. As the play opens they are costumed in “swimming outfits from the 1950s,” which lends them an innocence and a transcendence from the present time without rendering them “classical.” Orpheus, with sweeping gestures, offers Eurydice the world; it’s a moment filled with the exuberance of youth, ending with Eurydice rushing into Orpheus’s arms, the two of them falling over, her straddling him and kissing his eyes, and asking him what he’s thinking. The expected answer is that he loves her, that she’s beautiful. His actual answer is “music” (334). Orpheus is always thinking of music. While this establishes him as the musician we 30

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment . . .”

know from mythology it also indicates his immaturity, not yet thinking outside himself to consider others. Orpheus declares, “I’m going to make each strand of your hair into an instrument. Your hair will stand on end as it plays my music and become a hair orchestra. It will fly you up into the sky.” Eurydice responds, “I don’t know if I want to be an instrument” (339). He ties a string around the fourth finger on her left hand to remind her of his love. “That’s a very particular finger,” she tells him (341); she suggests, “Maybe you could also get me another ring—a gold one—to put over the string one. You know?” (342). The play follows Eurydice’s journey, alternating scenes with Orpheus and with A Nasty Interesting Man who transforms later into the Lord of the Underworld, with scenes in which her father is reaching out to communicate with her and in which they finally, if briefly, reconnect. When we first see the Father he is writing a letter to his daughter with advice for her wedding day; some of it, including “continue to give yourself to others because that’s the ultimate satisfaction in life—to love, accept, honor and help others” (344), was actual advice from Ruhl’s own father. The stage directions instruct that wedding music plays and the Father walks as though he is accompanying his daughter down the aisle: “He looks at his imaginary daughter; he looks straight ahead; he acknowledges the guests at the wedding; he gets choked-up; he looks at his daughter and smiles an embarrassed smile for getting chokedup” (344). In direct address Eurydice tells us “a wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and a daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day” (345). Miffed at Orpheus for taking a shower just as guests arrive, and then bored at her own wedding, Eurydice escapes and runs into A Nasty Interesting Man, who lures her to his high-rise apartment with the promise of giving her a letter from her dead father. (“I knew he’d send something!” Eurydice exclaims [350].) When he tries to seduce her, she tricks him, grabs the letter, and runs out, only to trip and fall down his six hundred steps (indicated by a sound cue: “A clatter. Strange sounds— xylophones, brass bands, sounds of falling, sounds of vertigo” [356]), causing her to die and wake up in the Underworld, where she meets her father. Two of Ruhl’s most inventive stagecraft choices for Eurydice have garnered lasting attention: a raining elevator and a room made of string. Eurydice’s arrival in the Underworld near the top of the Second Movement is announced like this: “The sound of an elevator ding. / An elevator door opens. / Inside the elevator, it is raining. / Eurydice gets rained on inside the elevator. / She carries a suitcase and an umbrella. / She is dressed in the kind of 31

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

1930s suit / that women wore when they eloped. / She looks bewildered” (359). The stage directions, laid out visually like lines of verse, in short rhythmic sentences that call us to read them like a poem, slow the reader down to experience this journey and underscore for the director and designers the centrality of this image onstage. Reflecting on this moment Ruhl has stated, I honestly don’t remember where the raining elevator came from. I remember seeing it clearly when I was first writing the play. I knew that Eurydice arrived in this raining elevator. I think it’s something about contemporary alienation: the experience of going to the underworld involves an alienation or unfamiliarity. Not in a devilish or horrible way, but in a contemporary way.36 Isherwood commented that “once she enters the Underworld, via an elevator in which it rains, the play acquires a gripping and sustained potency.”37 When Eurydice arrives she cannot speak the language of the Underworld; and she has been made to swim through the river of forgetfulness, so when she sees her father, he recognizes her but she thinks he is a hotel porter. Tired and grumpy and on the verge of tears when she hears there is no sleeping in the Underworld and no rooms in which to rest her suitcase and herself, Eurydice reverts to a childlike state. To soothe her, her father builds her a room of string. The stage directions read: “The Father creates a room out of string for Eurydice. / He makes four walls and a door out of string. / Time passes. / It takes time to build a room out of string” (367). As with the stage direction for the raining elevator, the lines are laid out like verse, in a series of short sentences that pull the reader into a slowed, observant state and signal to the director to allow this time onstage. Throughout this Second Movement are interspersed scenes of Orpheus seeking a way to get to Eurydice, but again the emotional scales are tipped toward those with Eurydice and the Father in the room made of string. He teaches her words—“ostracize,” “peripatetic,” “defunct”—that Ruhl has said came from her time with her own father, during Saturday morning breakfasts when he would introduce Ruhl and her sister to new words. When Orpheus sends a volume of Shakespeare to the Underworld, knowing Eurydice loves literature, the Father reads to her from King Lear, the famous and very moving passage when Lear says to Cordelia during their all-too-brief reunion before her death, “We two alone will sing like birds in the cage. / When thou dost ask my blessing, I’ll kneel down / And ask of thee forgiveness; so we’ll live, / And pray and sing” (377). The dream 32

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment . . .”

of being able to go back in time and have one last conversation is enacted here as Eurydice is able to reveal fears she has about her marriage—the kind of thing she might have confessed on the eve of her wedding, wondering whether to take that step the next day: “This is what it is to love an artist. The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful” (385). The play risks becoming too insular during moments when Eurydice listens to the Father sharing old stories. (These happen to be real stories her father told of his own father duck hunting; Ruhl first included them in Dog Play.) One critic of a 2016 Chicago production called these portions merely “playful and sentimental tangents of personal significance” that didn’t move the play along.38 However, the allusions to King Lear and the Greek mythological framework help pry open and generalize the situation for the audience to enter. Ruhl also offsets these heartrending (or emotionally indulgent) moments with the comic relief—in Isherwood’s words, comic impudence— of three Stones who guard the entrance to the Underworld, much like Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hades, and who, Ruhl instructs, behave like nasty children at a birthday party. The Third Movement opens with Orpheus’s successful arrival in the Underworld, making the Stones weep with his music as in the ancient myth. Having had the cherished reunion with her father, Eurydice, though still pulled emotionally, fearful that her father will be lonely, is ready to join her husband. Her father insists, “You should go to your husband” and “you should love your family until the grapes grow dust on their purple faces” (392). They walk as if down a church aisle together, the Father giving her away in marriage. On the threshold Eurydice freezes, crying “I want to go home! I want my father!” only to be told by the Loud Stone, “You’re all grown-up now. You have a husband” (395), a tension that will be repeated in Ruhl’s 2016 For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday. The surprise turn in the story is that when, on their voyage out of the Underworld, Orpheus turns back and looks at Eurydice, “the world falls away,” and the scene is presented as a relationship breakup, a revelation of the incompatibility the audience has seen from the beginning. Syncopated. ORPHEUS You always clapped your hands on the third beat

EURYDICE I could never spell the word rhythm— 33

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

you couldn’t wait for the fourth. Remember— I tried to teach you— you were always one step ahead of the music your sense of rhythm— it was—off—

it is such a difficult word to spell— r—y—no, there’s an H in it— somewhere—a breath— rhy—rhy— rhy— (397)

Orpheus reaches out to her but Eurydice is pulled back into the Underworld— not by the forces of the Underworld, but by her own sense that she belongs back there, that that is her home. The stage directions tell us, “They begin walking away from each other / on extensive unseen boardwalks, / their figures long shadows, / looking straight ahead” (398). Yet she won’t be able to return to those earlier moments with her father. After her departure he takes apart the room of string and prepares to dip himself in the river of forgetfulness to relieve the terrible pain of his love for his daughter. As in the earlier stage direction instructing the creation of the string room Ruhl notes that time should be allotted for the action of taking it down, letting the audience be present in this moment of sorrowful removing of the magical space, as they were in the joyful making of it. “He dismantles the string room, / matterof-fact. / There’s nothing else to do. / This can take time. / It takes time to dismantle a room made of string. / Music. / He sits down in what used to be the string room” (401). When Eurydice returns she is distraught, overcome with grief and anger at never again having an opportunity to talk with her father. As though they’re addressing Ruhl herself the Stones scold Eurydice: LOUD STONE Didn’t you already mourn for your father, young lady? LITTLE STONE Some things should be left well enough alone. BIG STONE To mourn twice is excessive. LITTLE STONE To mourn three times a sin. (406) In the end it is her father she chooses over her husband. Writing a letter addressed “To My Husband’s Next Wife,” Eurydice tutors this future wife in the very particular ways to love Orpheus—a pattern of attentiveness we see across Ruhl’s work on love. “Be sure to comb his hair when it’s wet,” she 34

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment . . .”

instructs. “Do not fail to notice / that his face flushes pink / like a bride / when you kiss him” (410). She dips herself in the river of forgetfulness and lies down next to her father, “as though asleep” (although, as Miriam Chirico points out in her review for Theatre Journal, earlier in the play we’re told there’s no sleeping in the Underworld39). In the final image of the play Orpheus returns to the Underworld in the raining elevator only to find Eurydice and her father lying together and a letter on the ground that he cannot read. Is it a tragic image, Eurydice and her father finally and completely dead, forgotten to one another? Chirico argues that since we know this was a play written as a tribute for Ruhl's father, she could not possibly have intended it to be as psychologically dark and disturbing as it can seem.40 Dangers lie in reading Eurydice through a Freudian lens, as Christina Dokou points out in her essay in Chapter 6. Ruhl has pointed out numerous times that she considers her plays “pre-Freudian” in that, like the ancient Greek dramatists and Shakespeare, her plays are “low on exposition and psychology” and bathe audiences in the “great, horrible opera inside” everyone rather than explain (and therefore explain away) the contradictory impulses we all have.41 Because of its young leading roles, Greek mythological framework, and scope for imagination in young designers, Eurydice has been a popular choice for university theatre programs. That mythological framework also lends it a sense of universalism, allowing actors from a variety of ethnic backgrounds to be cast. At the Young Vic in London in a production directed by Bijan Sheibani, Eurydice was played by Ony Uhiara and Orpheus by Osi Okerafor; at Ten Thousand Things Theater in Minneapolis, African American actress Sonja Parks played the role of Eurydice. “I am not interested in writing plays that are specifically about white people,” Ruhl has written, “and yet to cast nonwhite people, you often have to specify that a character is a particular race, and then suddenly you have a play about race.”42 She blames the conventions of naturalism, which aim to hold the mirror up to nature, for actually holding a mirror up just to “upper-middleclass Scandinavians.”43

Demeter in the City Demeter in the City is highly reminiscent of Eurydice, were Eurydice taken to the streets of Los Angeles. When Ruhl was commissioned to develop a play with Cornerstone Theater, she reached again for a mythological framework 35

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

to facilitate stories about others than upper-middle-class Scandinavians (her script calls for at least eight actors of color and two white actors), this time taking the myth of Demeter and Persephone to explore the separation of child from the mother that she discovered when interviewing young mothers in the Shields Healthy Start program in Compton. Ruhl writes in her program notes, “These women were full of courage, regret, and hope.”44 One of the women told her, “The first biggest day of my life was the day I had my daughter. The second biggest day was the day she was taken away from me” (4). The woman identified with Demeter, who loses her daughter Persephone to Hades, lord of the Underworld. When Demeter’s grief is so all-consuming that the world goes into hibernation, a deal is struck that she can have Persephone back for half of the year (what becomes the season of spring) but her daughter will have to spend the other half with Hades (during which the earth will experience winter). Ruhl writes that the women “identified with Demeter’s bottomless grief, and with her anger, her sense of powerlessness before fate and before the judging eyes of Zeus” (4). Following the Cornerstone community-driven method of creating theatre, Ruhl asked the women to write scenes from their own lives, using the story of Demeter to structure them. She also observed a family court in Los Angeles, spoke with members of the Young Republicans at UCLA, with social workers, and with young people recently emerged from foster care programs, and worked with students in high school and university classrooms around Los Angeles, gathering stories and language to craft a play about twenty-yearolds in 2006 Los Angeles, which was staged at REDCAT (the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) and directed by Shishir Kurup. She discovered that “the one unifying concern that emerged (among people with widely divergent life stories and politics) was separation—the inevitable separation between parents and children, and the search to find identity while leaving one’s home behind” (4). The first act focuses on Demeter, who loses her baby Persephone to a social worker when heroin needles are found in her apartment. Before Demeter loses Persephone there are no seasons—they live in Los Angeles, where the weather never varies—but when the social worker takes her baby away, “Demeter’s sadness infected the city” (19), wreaking havoc with the traffic lights and drying up the city gardens. Ruhl strives to present fairly each of the characters in a complicated system. The social worker who takes Demeter’s baby away tells the audience, “If you ever go to court, you’ll see that it looks like a plantation. . . . If you look at statistics it’s 80% children of color. . . . The other day I passed someone in the office, she said, why 36

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment . . .”

are you so angry? And I didn’t say anything. I just thought: because you’re not” (19). Her scene of the family court trial begins with the bailiff chewing gum, everyone eating Chinese food out of takeout paper boxes, and the judge asking if anyone has a good joke to tell. Upon the banging of his gavel, the court is transformed into “a scary place of authority, / no longer a place of jokes and eating” (34) but now an impersonal place where oncehuman people make determinations about others’ lives based on efficiency rather than love. Demeter loses Persephone and is given eighteen months to recover from her heroin addiction. The Chorus sings a “mother’s song to lost children” about a river of forgetfulness—the foster care system— followed by a countermelody, “a song of lost children to their mothers” that ends with the line, “I miss having your hand to hold” (43–44). Then, in sharp contrast to these moving moments, the judge steps out to address the audience with his own difficult perspective (which sounds as though it must have come from an interview Ruhl conducted or a statement she overheard in court), which ends Act One: “Look—don’t let yourself get sentimental about this. . . . I have to think of the child and what’s best for the child. Last month we returned a child—a two year old—from foster care to her aunt and uncle. The child was murdered within two weeks, beaten so hard that her internal organs were perforated. Please, please, don’t get sentimental about this” (44). The second act takes place twenty years later and focuses primarily on Persephone, who has grown up in foster care but is now “emancipated” from the system and attending UCLA. She encounters a young white man, a member of the university’s Young Republicans club, who is selling cupcakes, charging “a dollar fifty for a white male, / one dollar for a white female, / fifty cents for a black male, / twenty five cents for a black female— / twenty cents for a Hispanic male—” (47) to protest the “absurdity in the diversity campaign” at the school. Persephone argues with his logic that it is harder for a white male to get into UCLA than for her, a black female. He is mesmerized by her and invites her to dinner, where they debate perspectives on diversity and he offers her a pomegranate for dessert to seduce her. Turns out, the Young Republican is Hades, and he has dragged Persephone into Hell. Meanwhile, Demeter, recovered from addiction and on a years-long hunt to reclaim her daughter, discovers her divinity, which, the Chorus tells us, “has nothing to do with crowns. / It’s simple as speaking the truth to power. / And people in power, leaning forward like flowers on a stalk, / to listen” (103). She tells the judge, “Never got to say my story. Never got to say: here are the facts of the case as I see them. Here’s what 37

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

it’s like when I get up in the morning. Here’s what it’s like when I go to sleep at night. Here is the shape of my life—try it on” (102). The judge, who discovers his own divinity as Zeus, rules (following the myth) that since Persephone ate only half a pomegranate she will split her time between her husband, Hades, in the Underworld, and her mother, Demeter, on earth. In a line that could have been an alternative ending to Eurydice he orders, “Persephone is a woman. She is no longer a little girl. She will split her time between her husband and her mother. That is the natural order” (107). A thoughtful review recognizes that “Cornerstone does too much research to spout easy answers, even though we in the audience may hunger for them.”45 The myth allows for some critical distance from the immediate situation, so that the play becomes larger than just the social services and justice system in LA, and Ruhl ends it with a hopeful scene of Demeter and Persephone enjoying life together in their half of the year, when the world is verdant and peaceful. However, Demeter in the City—which Ruhl considers an unfinished play; it has never had subsequent productions or been published—tests the limits of Ruhl’s signature dramaturgy of lightness. It is harder to get off the ground when you are not only existentially pained by the loss of your child or parent, but also dealing with heroin addiction and poverty or making your way through the foster care system.

Melancholy Play Subtitled “a contemporary farce,” Melancholy Play is Ruhl’s exploration of the emotional state of melancholy and harkens back to earlier aspirations for theatre, when the stage wasn’t freighted with mimetic realism. It is an experiential, sensory play: melancholy smells like the ocean, sounds like a cello, comes on strongest in the certain slants of light of late afternoon. Her melancholy isn’t, however, brooding and introverted but “Bold, Outward, Sassy, Sexy and Unashamed” (229).46 “I feel we are losing a whole category of emotion thanks to the language of depression that surrounds us,” Ruhl worries. When she did readings of Melancholy Play with undergraduates “the idea that melancholy could be good or delicious was so alien to them. They’re the Prozac generation, they grew up on Ritalin; for them, depression is just something to be excised like a tumor. I’m interested in how that will affect our culture.”47 In our rush to label all sad stirrings as “depression” and to banish them from our range of acceptable feelings we miss the generative, creative possibilities of melancholy. For instance, that it can be “communal: 38

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment . . .”

like when you discuss the past with other people, or the afternoon before twilight. Depression is isolating; it’s all about the individual.”48 As might be expected from its title, Melancholy Play is atmospheric, focused on mood or state of being more than plot or story. Ruhl combines several genre conventions: it’s a farce that uses “Jacobean direct address” as well as nineteenth-century-style tableaux; we shouldn’t be afraid of “sincere melodrama” in performing it. This “tonal strangeness” is created through style shifts, from more presentational to “a description of internal states and relationships—and then you get Frank longing for his lost Scandinavian sister.”49 As with Eurydice, the setting is “less about scenic illusion” than providing a clear, fluid space for seamless transitions from one moment to the next: “The actors enact the transformation, rather than the furniture.”50 Windows and doors on the set are “often used to frame actors but also serve as a metaphor for the melancholic attitude—the act of gazing through windows at the outside world allows the distance to view that world thoughtfully, maybe even wistfully.”51 Music is central to creating this atmosphere, so vital that the entire play is scored and works like “another character in the play, scoring transitions, underscoring dialogue, moving the actors into song, and creating an entire world” and should be treated “with the utmost musical, theatrical, and mathematical sensitivity” and “integrated early and often” rather than just frosted on the play at the end (228). It is played by an onstage cellist given the character name Julian, who is visible to the audience the entire time but not acknowledged by the characters until the final scene. Ruhl’s vision of Julian is also essential to the melancholy atmosphere: “It would be nice,” she writes in opening instructions, “if the actor who plays Julian were from a country other than the United States. And he or she should be a very good cello player. And handsome, and brooding. If possible, Julian is a man. If not, women cello players are extremely acceptable” (228). (In 2012, for her playwrights’ collective 13P Ruhl created a chamber musical version of the play with a score by composer Todd Almond, which called for a string quartet rather than a single cellist and had the dialogue sung-through rather than spoken. It was billed as “an irrational play with a highly rational string quartet.”52 In the New York Times Ruhl published a long justification of keeping critics away from this production, explaining that “at times as a writer one has the impulse to exist outside that cycle and burrow; to burrow in the dark, or in Brooklyn, and make something quiet and simple, and offer it without any fanfare to the audience.”53) 39

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

Melancholy Play opens as though we’re at a lecture, with the character Frank in a spotlight directly addressing the audience with four propositions toward “a defense of melancholy”: Proposition 1: That melancholy is a necessary bodily humor— . . . Proposition 2: That melancholy is a disappearing emotion— there is no place for it in the afternoon— out the window—to observe the passage of time— we are depressed— but are we melancholy? Are we capable of melancholy? Which leads me to: Proposition 3: If disavowed— the repressed melancholia may lead to other disturbances of the mind— . . . Proposition 4: That we must anatomize melancholy. . . (233–34) Recalling Calvino’s observation that lightness is “precision” rather than flightiness, Ruhl conjures finely subtle gradations of melancholy by reaching to other languages: “There’s a word in Japanese for being sad in the springtime” (240), “there’s a word in Portuguese” that means “you are full of longing for someone who is away” (248), “there’s a word in Russian” that means “to love someone but also to pity them” (260). Melancholy Play then draws back the curtain, as it were, to anatomize melancholy in its characters. We follow Tilly, who is being treated for melancholy by Lorenzo the Unfeeling, whose lust and anger are “bridled or not at all” and whose sadness has “a cap on it, so it cannot get out” (235). Although Lorenzo was born in an “unspecified European country” he didn’t suffer like a European; he smiled and was happy, so he moved to Illinois. (Where Ruhl is from; the American Midwest, Illinois in particular, often comes in for humorous 40

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment . . .”

nods, signifying a place of politeness, blandness, passive aggression.) Tilly, a bank teller, has been sent for treatment by her employer because the bankers “don’t like their employees to be melancholic”; Tilly isn’t suited to employment in a bank, anyway, but would rather “open a shop. Perfume. Or hats” (238). She tells Lorenzo that she’s feeling melancholy, which feels like this: “I would like to die and be reborn as a mushroom. / I would like to stay warm and slightly damp. / I will release spores now and again when it suits my mood” (237). Lorenzo chastises Tilly for being “proud,” even “a little vain” of her melancholy; “It is my professional opinion,” he tells her, “that you feed your melancholy little sweetmeats, that you comb it, groom it, keep it as a pet dog” (237–38). Despite his chidings, Lorenzo falls in love with Tilly. He says: I want to tell you all the sad things and then you will know me better than other people know me and that means we are reserved for one another. Because we made a reservation like at a restaurant like at a grand hotel and we made this reservation with a certain foreign currency made of secret sad information we told each other in private rooms. (240–41) Falling in love with Tilly also turns Lorenzo from happy to melancholic. This happens to everyone who comes into contact with Tilly; she has an “omnisexual sadness,” one reviewer notes,54 but she is also a presence filled with love, which permeates others. “Do you ever have the feeling, when you wake up in the morning, that you’re in love but you don’t know with what?” she asks Frances and Joan: It’s this feeling that you want to love strangers, that you want to kiss the man at the post office, or the woman at the dry cleaners—you want to wrap your arms around life, life itself, but you can’t, and this feeling wells up in you, and there is nowhere to put this great happiness— and you’re floating—and then you fall down and become unbearably sad. And then you have to go lie down on the couch. (274–75) The ways that people fall in love with Tilly and desire to become accountable to others mirrors the workings of theatre. Tilly gives a public speech that sounds like a playwriting manifesto: I’m not particularly smart. I’m not particularly beautiful. 41

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

But I suffer so well, and so often. A stranger sees me cry— and they see a river they haven’t swum in— a river in a foreign country— so they take off their trousers and jump in the water. They take pictures with a waterproof camera, they dry themselves in the sun. They’re all dry and I’m still wet. (276) The audience has a vicarious experience; the playwright feels it all. They fall in love with the play, with the actors, with the experience they’ve had, like people fall in love with Tilly. Ruhl has said, “I don’t set out to write about characters who are alienated, but my characters do have a distance from normal that allows them a different kind of perception.”55 Reminiscent of Dead Man’s Cell Phone’s Jean, who is also unassuming, observant, and attentive, Tilly’s perception leads her to practice an ethic of care. At the bank she’s attentive to each person’s everyday transactions and, more, she notices their sadness, even when they don’t notice it themselves. (“Like God,” she says, who “thinks about us all the time, / he keeps us alive, just by thinking about us— / well, that’s like me! / I THINK ABOUT MY CUSTOMERS ALL THE TIME” [248].) Humans crave the social contract of interaction, the gentle but purposeful touch of someone caring for you. Frank and Frances, twins separated at birth, speak to the audience simultaneously, in harmony, about choosing their professions—tailor and hairdresser, respectively—precisely because “even when I was a child / I liked it / when strangers touched me / with clinical purpose— / people I was not related to” (242). Originally employed as an accountant (Frank) and a physicist (Frances), they fled those positions and found themselves sitting in public places where FRANK I pretended

FRANCES that I was accountable

to the other people in the room 42

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment . . .”

and that furthermore they were accountable to me. (241) Lorenzo, Frank, Frances, and Joan all fall in love with Tilly, and all become melancholy. The play argues that melancholy people are hotter than happy people, quips Chris Jones, reviewing the chamber musical version of Melancholy Play for the Chicago Tribune: “The hotness, if I take this piece correctly, comes from this logic. When you love a happy person, or even desire a happy person, your love must bounce off a daunting wall of radiated happiness. But when you love a melancholy person—such as Tilly, the heroine of this piece—you land somewhere with real, squishy depth.”56 Demonstrating this principle, when the others become melancholy, Tilly transforms into a happy person, to the irritation and despair of the others. “I feel your happiness coming on like a great big storm,” Frank tells Tilly (290). She is no longer attentive: “Your eyes aren’t looking at me. They’re looking at a great big storm of happiness. On the horizon” (290). Frances concludes, “She’s not happy. She’s monstrous” (294). She becomes selfabsorbed: “Everyone around me seems so sad / and I just can’t relate. / I feel like a little red sports car,” she says (310). Joan, Frances, Frank, and Lorenzo sing a song lamenting the loss of the melancholy Tilly: “We loved her when she had / The capacity for pity!. . . Life used to be so slow / Life used to be so sweet / Life used to be banisters / And rain-drenched cobbled streets. . . . Life used to be balconies / And paintings by Magritte!” (305–6). At the end of the song we’re told that Frances “does something melancholy, slow and theatrical. / Full of longing, mysterious, simple, riveting. / She slows down time for us. / She makes us wonder” (306). This slowing down of time, making the audience wonder, is the secret to Ruhl’s playwriting: her skill with pacing, slowing time, having us sit with the moment, witness the moment, have time to experience it. Yet being so deeply melancholy that one turns into an almond is also undesirable. In a “rousing speech” that feels cast out beyond the world of the play, Tilly proclaims: When someone in your social circle becomes so melancholic that they stop moving, it is your duty as a human being to go find them. It is not enough to seek medical attention. It is not enough to ask them how they are feeling. You must go where they are and get them. It is 43

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

up to all of us to save Frances. It is part of the social contract. (319; italics in original) Putting Frances (still in almond form) in the middle of a circle, each of the characters drinks from the vial of Tilly’s tears, holds hands, and shuts their eyes while the lights fade to blackness “for the first and only time in the play” (319), which also allows the actor playing Frances to slip unnoticed onstage and into the circle of friends. They begin chanting in the dark, intoning something in the range “between a madrigal and a liturgical,” a list of things melancholy, including “cellos and the color blue,” “memories of an unseen lighthouse,” and “hallways with a particular smell / which you will never revisit” (319–20). When the lights come up, Frances is standing in the middle of the circle; they have successfully conjured her back from her almond state. The play is studded thematically with almonds, which at first might seem a merely quirky grace note, as when Tilly approaches Frank near the top of the play and asks him, with no context, “Why are you like an almond?” An epigraph from A. Jaruwat, M.D. informs us that the amygdala, an essential organ of emotion in the brain (“people lacking amygdalae cannot make emotional inferences about their experiences in the world” [231]), is shaped like an almond and that seizures “can involve the amygdala and cause unusual emotional and sensory experiences—for example, a feeling of sadness or fear. Or: the smell of bitter almonds” (231). When Lorenzo falls into melancholy his experience of time is that it’s all become one long afternoon, and that “the afternoon is shaped like an almond. / Every day I think I will step into the almond like a boat / and ride it into evening” (250). When Frances turns into an almond Tilly makes a public service announcement: If you are experiencing any form of melancholy: stay in your home. I repeat: STAY IN YOUR HOME. Occupy your mind. Occupy your hands. Do not look out the window in the afternoon dreaming of the past or far-off things or absent people or dead people or the sea. People experiencing melancholy have been turning into almonds on the street. (312) We then see Lorenzo walking down the street, stepping on almonds, crushing them under his shoe. What would our streets look like, the play seems to be asking, if melancholy people were so easily identifiable? Would the streets be filled? For all that melancholy, the play ends on an unexpectedly happy 44

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment . . .”

note, with everyone paired off (Tilly and Frank, Frances and Joan, and Lorenzo with the cellist Julian) and waltzing to the sound of a victrola.

Scenes from Court Life or the whipping boy and his prince Scenes from Court Life is an American epic told through an intimate family narrative, using Stuart court masque, that most highly artificial of theatre forms, to strip away the artifice of the American presidency and sibling rivalry and the damage both have done to the United States. The play pulls back the curtain to reveal the hollow performances of ordinary people not ontologically different from their subjects, who simply happen to have been granted power: in Britain the Stuarts, Charles I and Charles II, and in the United States the Bushes, George Sr., George W., and Jeb. It humanizes Jeb Bush in particular, garnering sympathy for his position in family squabbles. The New Haven Register wrote that “Ruhl’s naked, unfettered look at these characters during their most vulnerable episodes compels audience empathy without solicitation. These scenes of human honesty surely pierce the armor of antipathy worn by even their staunchest detractors.”57 In an interview with Christopher Arnott, Ruhl said she started the play assuming Jeb Bush would be the Republican nominee for president and the nation would be facing candidates from two dynasties, Bush and Clinton. She began writing “‘from a point of trauma,’ alarmed at the idea of a third Bush in the White House” but knew that “when you write characters, you start feeling empathy or why bother?”58 When Jeb Bush eventually dropped out of the race and the whole election became “far more scary” than she had anticipated, Jeb Bush “became a tragic figure for me.”59 The play was commissioned by Yale Repertory Theatre and its premiere production was directed by longtime Ruhl collaborator Mark WingDavey, who invited Ruhl to develop the play with his graduate students at New York University, working in the Joint Stock method, as done in the Joint Stock Theatre Company, founded in London in 1974 by playwright David Hare, director Max Stafford-Clark, and producer David Aukin, and today perhaps most closely associated with the playwriting of Caryl Churchill, whose works such as Cloud Nine, Top Girls, and Serious Money were developed through this method. Actors immerse themselves in research and then come back to the company to present their findings in an “acting form,” having taken the research into their bodies and minds and already begun the process of character-forming. “It serves as a kind of 45

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

fertilizer, a mulch, for the playwright to go away and write a play for those actors,” Wing-Davey explains; “the play itself doesn’t even have to reflect the workshop. You don’t know how it’s going to work through the writer’s imagination.”60 Both the Bushes and the Stuarts loved playing tennis and our “modern conception of a proscenium theater is actually based on the dimensions of a tennis court,” Ruhl discovered,61 which, Wing-Davey points out, “also makes a terribly interesting, linking metaphor.”62 The character Karl Rove states at one point: “Politics is essentially a tennis match; someone has to win and someone has to lose; that’s the game” (38). The historical context is piercingly accurate, making the parallels between the families all the more uncanny, and Ruhl gets more mileage out of these parallels by double-casting most of the actors: quite naturally, the actor who plays Charles I also plays George H.W. Bush (“George Sr.” in the script) and the one who plays Charles II plays George W. Bush (“George Jr.”). The character of political adviser Karl Rove in the present is tripled in the past to include both Groom of the Stool (a nod to the nickname George W. Bush gave him, “Turd Blossom”) and, alluding to his ruthless political actions, an executioner. Jeb Bush is doubled as Barnaby, “the whipping boy” to Charles II, a metaphorical role he plays to George W. Bush. “I’d heard this apocryphal story about whipping boys and was so fascinated by the ethical implications,” Ruhl said, adding, “so we started with those ideas and, as they grew, I became interested in political dynasties. The NYU students researched a bunch of political dynasties and I think we found that the Bushes were the most interesting for our purpose.”63 Cultivating compassion for the Bush family members not only brings genuine heart to her play, it makes it about something more universal than a passing political event. “I think I had an earlier draft that had a more satirical tone and I purposely went in another direction,” she said. “Probably because my hope is that the play is something larger—politics and family— than just the Bushes. If it were just a satire, it would reflect one particular moment in history.”64 The focus on family reveals Scenes from Court Life to be a story about sons trying to win the love of their father, very much like Biff and Happy Loman trying to win the love of their father, Willy Loman, in Death of a Salesman. Jeb, like Happy, is constantly saying the equivalent of “Look, Pop!” while George Jr., like Biff , is trying to make his own life out west, always longing for but never getting the full attention and intimacy of his father, never knowing his father. The play is prefaced with two epigraphs. The first, by Thornton Wilder, uses metaphors of theatre to describe the work it takes to maintain the 46

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment . . .”

illusion that royalty are “mysteriously different” from other people; it requires “audiences, levees, and processions for its maintenance” and has drawn the attention of satirists, who delight “in showing how the prerogatives of royalty become absurd when the crowd is not present to extend to them the enhancement of an imaginative awe.”65 The second epigraph is from William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, who points out the contradictory desires citizens of the United States have for their presidents to have absolute power and then turn it over to another: “We elect a king for four years.” The play opens and closes with dance numbers that establish the doubling of Restoration England and the contemporary United States and the theatrical illusion that holds up both. The prologue is a baroque dance with “A prince at the center of it. / A secret is being told.” The prince emerges from the dance, bows and the dance “turns into a Texas line dance” (4). At the end of it, the prince, George W. Bush, now retired, steps out to directly address the audience, who are imagined to have gathered for an art exhibition at Bush’s Presidential library. This is true to life; after his presidency Bush surprised many by taking up painting. “I love to paint. / Paint every day,” Ruhl has him say, mimicking his signature short sentences. “I started out by painting my dogs. / Dogs are actually very hard to paint. Harder than people. Don’t know why. Something about a dog’s essential humanity. And their fur” (4). The first time we see George Jr., then, it’s the softened image of him recognizing the humanity of others, speaking with a warmth and wisdom that was not generally a part of his public persona during his presidency. Showing a painting he did of the Dalai Lama, and then of Vladimir Putin, Bush tells the audience, “A democracy is the only political system where former rulers can go into private retirement and not kill each other just because they are no longer affecting the world stage” (5). When George Sr. enters in tennis whites, George Jr. announces to the audience, “Now we are going back in time, to a game of doubles we played in 1993, shortly after Jeb announced that he was running for governor of Florida” (5). As the play develops and the audience has acclimated to this shifting back and forth between timeframes, the indications become more subtle and then disappear altogether. George Sr., Barbara Bush, and Jeb, who was captain of the tennis team at Andover, are all skilled, competitive tennis players. George Jr. was, by his own admission, “never much of an athlete. So I was a cheerleader at Yale” (6). He was, in other words, always a bit on the outside in the Bush family. Laura Bush is always one step removed, reading in the shade. The use of the tennis court onstage visualizes the fierce competitiveness within political families, which prepares them for public 47

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

life. George Sr. describes finally beating his own mother, “a rattling good tennis player,” in a “brutal match” when he was sixteen. “It doesn’t sound too sporting, Dad,” is Jeb’s response (7). Jeb never displays the cutthroat aggression of the rest of the family, which is perhaps most palpable in Barbara Bush, calling to mind her infamously casual indifference to the plight of victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.66 When George Sr. calls out the score, “Love, 30,” she asks, “Why do they call it love? Does having nothing constitute love? Ha ha!” (8). George Jr. is not a skilled player and throws his racket and pouts when he misses a ball. George Sr. remarks, “Used to be a pretty rough game, you know—royal tennis—they called it the Sport of Kings—you could get killed playing it—” (9). Jeb is agreeable throughout: the most sportsmanlike, dependable for a steady rally but not sneaky power play, willing to drink water instead of beer when George Jr. reminds everyone that he no longer drinks alcohol. The play’s dramatic action is incited by George Jr.’s surprise announcement that he is running for governor of Texas. Barbara Bush, with her assumption of Bush family entitlement to public office in turns, responds, “But George, you can’t, Jebbie’s running this year, it’s his turn” (12). But George Jr., who hadn’t been told about Jeb’s plans, has been making his own plans, working with Karl Rove to unseat the current governor of Texas, Ann Richards, by creating a rumor that she is a lesbian. “That’s not ethical, George,” Jeb replies (13), and worse, “If we both run at the same time, we’ll look like a frigging dynasty. Like a joke” (14). George Jr. won’t be persuaded to wait; “It’s my time,” he insists (14). When Barbara asks, “What does Laura think?” Ruhl presents us with an “out of time” moment that steps out, like a cinematic flashback: Laura is reading a book in the shade. Out of time: LAURA I love Emily Bronte. What George? GEORGE JR. I’m going to run for governor of Texas. LAURA Don’t you think there’s a better way for you to get attention from your father, George? Back in time. (15)

48

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment . . .”

The sibling rivalry fires up when Jeb warns that people will compare Jeb and George Jr., sometimes to George Jr.’s detriment. But George Jr., angry, stops it all by saying, “Look, I didn’t mean to have a conversation about it. I meant to tell you my plans” (16). Getting back to their tennis game, Jeb “serves hard at George. George misses” and proceeds to lose the game. Stage directions indicate “A shift in time” during which we hear baroque music and “George Jr. transforms into Charles 2” (17). The dialogue transforms into a lineated prose—a heightened language that signals royalty, Englishness, and the past. Charles 2 (George Jr.), age twelve, tells Barnaby, his whipping boy (Jeb), “Let us leave off our Latin studies / and play royal tennis instead” (18). Barnaby, who has no proper clothes for tennis, is persuaded by Charles 2 to wear the special tennis socks of his father. When asked, “How feel your feet in the socks of a king?” Barnaby responds, “My feet feel as they always do—serviceable” (19). Echoing George Sr.’s remark from the earlier scene, Charles 2 tells Barnaby, “My father told me that / in royal tennis you might kill a man, / but politely— you need not be rude before you do” (19). “Then why are we playing??” Barnaby wonders. “For sport!” Charles 2 responds. “Now play me hard but do not beat me, I am / your prince, you, my whipping boy!” (20) When the two are discovered by the tutor, we see the duties and purpose of a whipping boy: the tutor “cannot whip the royal body,” so he whips Barnaby in front of Charles 2, instructing, “Let this excite your empathy, young prince. / And thus (he whips) and thus (he whips)—improve / your restraint” (21). When Charles 2 expresses his sympathy Barnaby tells him, “‘Tis an honor to be whippèd for your sins” (22). Barnaby is Charles 2’s only intimate friend: “I have grooms o’th’ stool to wipe my royal arse / and grooms o’th’ privy chamber to bathe me— / but friends—true friends—I have not” (23). Immediately afterward, though, Charles 2 wants Barnaby to prove his love. Barnaby asks, “Did I not just now prove my love with my arse?” to which Charles 2 replies, “There’s more than one way to prove your love with your arse” (23). This is, of course, alluding to Charles II’s homoerotic relationships with his favorites at court while lightly throwing shade on George W. Bush’s he-man presidential persona. Barnaby swiftly dodges with “your jokes about buggery make me laugh” (24). Instead, they make a blood pact by pricking their fingers and mingling their blood: Barnaby pledges love to Charles 2 and loyalty to come with him when Charles 2 flees the country if his father is tried for treason. They become blood brothers.

49

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

The lights change and we are back in the present, with Jeb and George Jr. announcing their candidacies for governor of Florida and Texas. These lines Ruhl takes straight from the historical record: JEB (to the camera) “I am running for governor. Not because I am George and Barbara Bush’s son, but because I’m George P’s father.” GEORGE JR. (to the camera) “I am running for Governor of Texas, not because I’m George Bush’s son, but because I’m Jenna and Barbara’s father.” (26) Jeb accuses George Jr. of copying him; we learn that Karl Rove stole the line. This leads to one of several times in the play when we see a standoff between George Jr. and Jeb that inspires the recollection of a memory of a primal, emblematic event from their childhood in which George Jr. punched Jeb and knocked the wind out of him. Jeb couldn’t breathe for a minute and remembers George Jr. standing over him “alternately saying, ‘Breathe, breathe,’ and ‘don’t tell Mom’” (29). Ruhl’s original idea for the play was to explore the idea of dynasty, specifically the Bush dynasty, in American presidential politics; she quotes the Bushes’ own words to reveal their awareness and dismissal of it. Stated to a Reporter character: JEB “I want to be able to look my father in the eye and say, I continued the legacy.” GEORGE JR. “Dynasty means something inherited. Both Jeb and I know you don’t inherit a vote. You have to win a vote.” (30) These two build up to George Sr.’s laugh line: “D and L—those words, dynasty and legacy—irritate me. We don’t feel entitled to anything” (30). When George Jr. wins the governorship of Texas while Jeb loses his race in Florida, Ruhl quotes George H.W. Bush: “The joy is in Texas but our hearts are in Florida” (41). The time shifts back to the seventeenth century, where Charles 1 is worried about losing his head and wants Charles 2 to flee, but Charles 2 pledges his loyalty to the king: “I will not leave thee. My father and my king, / Our England sees your crown and calls you king; / to me you are father first and then a king” (48). The time shifts back to 1992, when 50

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment . . .”

George Sr. loses the presidential election to Bill Clinton. George Jr. echoes the loyalty, reaching out to his father: GEORGE JR. Love you, Dad. GEORGE SR. I know son. (49) Time shifts again and the castle doors are being broken down. Charles 2 and Barnaby, the whipping boy, flee while Charles 1 is charged by a Roundhead with guilt of “the blood of many thousands” and told it is time he shows ethical accountability. “No longer shall you blame your sins on your advisers—giving pardon rather than asking it” another Roundhead states. Charles 1 goes with dignity to the scaffold at Whitehall. “There is nothing more contemptible than a despised prince,” he says (54). After the death of Charles 1, his son declares: And now the time for weeping is over. And I swear to the one God who’s holy, when I grow up I shall punish the enemies of my father. And I will return as king. I will dig up the corpses of his enemies, have their heads sever’d from their bodies And throw them into unmark’d graves. (54) This language echoes George W. Bush’s determination to have the US military invade Iraq after the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, which was seen by many as a form of revenge for an alleged plot by Iraqi intelligence to assassinate his father in 1993. Ruhl arouses this historical memory by shifting the time back to the present, following Charles 2’s lines when I grow up I shall punish the enemies of my father . . . Blood from the beheading [of Charles 1] runs down the stage. Suddenly, George Bush and Laura Bush are sitting in chairs that are too small for them on a floor with pooling blood. Blood continues to seep onto the floor. Laura is holding a book called The Pet Goat. (54) 51

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

Laura’s book will immediately remind those who lived through the event of how Bush was not in Washington or New York during the attacks, but was far away in a kindergarten classroom in Florida listening to children read from The Pet Goat. Ruhl creates “an extended slow motion moment” in which Laura Bush, the spokesperson in the play for rationality and love, speaks to the audience, calling “cynical, cowardly, and mean-spirited” those who mocked George W. Bush for staying in the classroom and listening to the reading after hearing the news that the nation was under attack. She says, “What should he have done, shouted ‘fire’ in a crowded theater? No. He listened to the end of the story. And that was the right thing to do. To calm the children” (55). She goes on: I have a little theory about human evil—I call it my Judas theory. I figure that approximately one twelfth of the world—and of the disciples—are like Judas— they want to destroy each other. And one twelfth or so wants to save other people. But the rest of us 10 out of 12 just wants to get by and tuck our children in at night. And these people with their bombs and their anger and their—Well. Things you can do when you feel like chopping off someone else’s head: Take a deep breath. Paint. Dance. Read. Plant a garden. Call your mom. (56) The first act ends with the powerful image of Laura Bush, later joined by the Chorus, mopping up the blood spilled by her husband. It calls to mind Alan Bennett’s The History Boys in which the history teacher Mrs. Lintott, bemoaning, “How dispiriting it is to teach five centuries of masculine ineptitude,” asks the boys, “what is history?” and answers, “History is women following behind with the bucket.”67 “I’m going to mop up this blood,” Laura Bush announces. As she starts, “The chorus starts to mop the blood in a ritualized fashion, / some might wear hazmat 52

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment . . .”

suits, some might still be in Baroque clothing” and she turns to talk to the audience: Did you know that when women first agitated for the vote, back in England, what they wanted to do with it once they got it? They wanted to outlaw war! They thought, if women got the vote, we’d always vote against war, because we don’t want our children dying in wars, and because women are the majority, no more wars! (56) But that didn’t happen. So, she concludes, “I just mop up the blood. / Do you know how many miscarriages my mother had before she had me? Three. / . . . / Every month women practice for this—casual loss as a regular thing. / Women bleed in private like animals, / Men bleed in public like kings”68 (56). When the second acts opens, the tennis court has been transformed to a theatre, Charles 2 takes the throne and, with orb and scepter in hand, sets the scene: “I now proclaim, the Restoration!” (58). Blending the references to the Interregnum and Restoration with the contested election results in 2000 that ended with the Supreme Court determining that George W. Bush had won the US presidency, Charles 2 crows, You wanted the glamour and certainty of kings! Votes! Democracy! Hanging chads! Tedious! You want to see us in paintings, in ermine and fur! . . . How was your national literature in the Interregnum years I ask you? A fucking bore! That’s what it was. . . . And how was your theater? Closed! Democracy, a fucking bore, I tell you! . . . Monarchies demand illusion and illusions demand kings! (59) So he declares that the theatres be reopened, and when told that all the theatres had been torn down he decides the tennis courts will be made into theatres. Appointing his privy councilors, all loyal friends to his father the king, Prince Rupert of the Rhine and Marmaduke Langdale, groom of the stool, are combined with the present-day names of Dick Cheney and Karl 53

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

Rove. The parallels continue in a far more direct way than has been typical for Ruhl’s plays: Charles 2 commands The Groom of the Stool to “dig up the corpses of / my father’s enemies and cut off their heads!” and with the slightest shift of time, George Jr. declares to Karl Rove (played by the same actor who was The Groom of the Stool), “We are going to fucking obliterate Saddam Hussein. I want you to head up a special task force on Iraq and meet weekly in the White House to discuss a plan” (61–62). Laura Bush protests, “You gotta stop listening to that man,” and George Jr. responds, “I owe him the Presidency, Laura. / He’s a genius” (62–63). In what is surely an applause line, Laura Bush retorts, “I am so sick and tired of political operatives being called genius. Emily Bronte is a genius. George Eliot is a genius. Political operatives are good at what they do. Which is being bad” (63). The next scene retells the election recount, which centered on votes in the state of Florida, Jeb Bush’s possible involvement, and George W. Bush’s taking of the oath, phrased in the stage directions as “A presidential coronation” (67). Ruhl follows this with George Jr. at the podium, his statements to reporters direct quotations from George W. Bush, whose malapropisms are funnier and more disturbing than anything a playwright might concoct, from “I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well” to “In my line a work you gotta keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda” (69). Meanwhile, Ruhl gives Barnaby the whipping boy and Jeb Bush the parallel love stories of the play. By telling the story of Jeb’s courtship of his wife Columba alongside Barnaby’s secret love for Catherine of Braganza, she pulls the audience sympathetically toward Jeb and Columba. In Scenes from Court Life, Charles 2’s handlers have warned him that his “diversions” are affecting the public: “If you wish to continue having more than one mistress, you need a wife,” they tell him (72). He promptly sends Barnaby to Portugal to woo Catherine of Braganza; he shows her a miniature portrait of Charles 2 and tells her “you could come to love him” (73). Catherine is aware that she will be traded, that she is a pawn with no voice of her own. She speaks the truth: “You speak to me of love. / But love fills no coffers. Love stirs no armies. / My marriage will be a transaction / in a chess game I cannot divine. / Plotted, moving diagonally across oceans, / According to my mother’s wishes. / I am not free to love” (73). Upon learning that Barnaby was the king’s whipping boy, Catherine asks to see the marks the whip made on Barnaby’s body. In a scene reminiscent of the finale of In the Next Room or the vibrator play, the male disrobes 54

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment . . .”

and stands vulnerable, undressed onstage, while the female gazes at and touches his body. It is a highly intimate, erotically charged, and very tender moment. Catherine weeps and wipes her tears on Barnaby’s body, and they kiss and fall in love instantly. Although officially Barnaby cannot marry Catherine, they concoct a plan: the king had said Barnaby might secure Catherine by marrying her “by proxy” in Portugal before bringing her to England. Catherine asks, “So if we were to marry by proxy—could we then—(consummate the marriage?)” Barnaby responds, in a wonderfully comic reversal, “I have borne his sins upon my person / too many times to count; now will I bear his pleasure” (78). Onstage, Barnaby and Catherine of Braganza kneel before a priest for a secret marriage by proxy; time then shifts to transform them into Jeb and Columba Bush kneeling and gazing at one another in a chapel in Austin, Texas. Barbara Bush, none too happy that her son had “found a bride in Mexico,” confides in us that she knew not to oppose him: “I’ve read Shakespeare. I know that kind of thing ends badly” (81). Catherine insists on a private Catholic marriage ceremony and we see a priest putting communion wafers in their mouths; this is true to the historical record, as Catherine of Braganza and Charles II did have a secret Catholic marriage ceremony in Portsmouth when she arrived in England, which was followed later by a public Anglican wedding. In another time shift we’re back with Jeb and Columba, when she is begging him not to run for governor. “I married you because I loved you,” she tells him. “I didn’t ask for politics, for fame. I loved (in Spanish) this, and this, and this (she kisses his forehead, his ear, his lips) give me my life back again. (In English) Give me you again” (87). (Ruhl is fond of showing the minute particulars of love, the concrete things we notice about another. We see this in The Clean House and In the Next Room or the vibrator play as well.) Jeb promises, “I will become Catholic if you let me run for governor again” (88). The next scene we see is of cameras flashing, both George Jr. and Jeb having won the elections in their states. Ruhl pulls from historical record for Barbara Bush’s line “I’m so pleased that now 1 in every 8 Americans is being governed by one of my boys” (89). The competition continues, though, as both Bushes eye their chances for the White House. Barbara, speaking to the audience, takes us back to the fateful day George Jr. and Jeb referred to earlier, when they had an especially violent fight. We’re shown Jeb and George Jr. as twelve-year-olds in “An absurd and incredible fight. / Pushing, kicking, hitting, biting, etc.” (92) over George Jr.’s accusation that Jeb rearranged and stole one of his army guys. “You’re kicked out of Georgeville!” he yells. Jeb responds, “You’re kicked out of 55

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

Jebville!” Barbara Bush comes in to break up the fight, taking Jeb’s side because he’s the one who’s crying. When she leaves, George Jr. says, “I wish I never had a brother. I wish mom had strangled you in her womb” (95). When Jeb yells out to tell his mother, George Jr. covers Jeb’s mouth to shut him up and then “punches Jeb in the stomach. / Suddenly Jeb can’t breathe” (95). George Jr. asks Jeb to forgive him and they come to a reckoning, with George Jr. allowing Jeb to play with any of the army guys he wants, so long as he doesn’t tell their mother what happened. “She’s sad now,” George Jr. tells Jeb. “Don’t make her any sadder” (97). We discover that Barbara Bush is sad because she lost a daughter at age three to leukemia. “Oh there no shortages of tragedies, big and small,” she tells the audience. “I don’t know how many civilians or children were killed in the wars my husband and son waged on the other side of the world. I purposely don’t know” (98). Intercut with this speech is George Jr. talking to the cameras, tearing up, assuring families of American troops who’ve died in the wars, “I want the families of the fallen to know that we pray with them, we honor them, they died for a just cause, for defending freedom, and they will not have died in vain” (98). Barbara continues to tell us that later in life she had a miscarriage and that George Sr. was in Washington so George Jr. took her to the hospital; she took with her the fetus in a jar to show the doctor. “Look at my skin,” she tells us. “It’s tough, it’s thick. My husband cries at Disney movies. Not me. I haven’t cried in the longest time. Sometimes I long to cry for all the pain in this world, and then I think, what’s wrong with you Bar. And I take a long walk” (98). Ruhl creates a fantasy conversation between George Jr. and Laura Bush in which George Jr. comes home and tells her, “There were no weapons of mass destruction” (99). “What did I do, Laura!” he cries, “I fought this fucking war for my father and he doesn’t say a fucking word. There’s blood on my hands, Laura” (100). Echoing the words of Charles 1 earlier, he bemoans, “There is nothing more contemptible than a despised prince” (101). Just as the audience begins possibly to feel sympathy and relief for the confession, Laura reveals, “That is only what happened in my imagination. / The day the world found out there were no weapons of mass destruction, / he came home, he slammed the door. Then he went to the gym” (101). The weapons of mass destruction illusion that had been built and foisted upon the American people, against widespread protest, is here brought into a staging of perspective: artistic perspective in painting, trompe l’oeil, a “trick of the eye,” as George Jr.’s painting instructor tells him (101). In a shift in time we are back in the seventeenth century with Inigo 56

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment . . .”

Jones telling Charles 2 to stand in the center of Jones’s trompe l’oeil scenery because “the illusion only works if you stand in the center!” (102) Charles 2 and George Jr. are melded, the actor “dressed half in his painting apron and half as a king” (102). Inigo Jones tells him, “Your body represents the cosmic order, / The divine right of kings!” “But I didn’t win the popular vote,” George Jr. says. “Exactly! Who gives a flying fuck!” Inigo Jones responds. In a brilliant turn, Ruhl transforms the action into a masque, the theatre loved by royalty. The stage directions read, “Mercury crowns George W. king. / A banner unfurls that reads: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.” The Chorus enters reciting or singing lines from Dryden’s opera Albion and Albanius, an Arthurian allegory about the Stuart dynasty written as a tribute to Charles II, “Freedom is a bait alluring! / Them betraying, us securing! / While to sovereign power we soar!” (103).69 The stage directions also mirror those of Albion and Albanius: “Clouds part to reveal the king. / A peacock appears. / The chorus holds their hands up to the king” and then the time shifts and George Jr., post-presidency, still dressed half as king, half in his painting apron, tells us, “I do not wish to change anything anymore. Only to illuminate and preserve what is already there. Painting fixes a moment. It says: I was there. I did that. Painting is beyond winners and losers, it’s beyond political theatre. It’s the preservation of a moment” (103). Ruhl has said in interviews that she was revising the play while watching the unfolding of the Republican primaries, when Jeb Bush fell from his frontrunner and presumed presidential candidate status as meaner candidates and eventually Donald Trump surged forward. Scenes from Court Life quotes from a campaign speech given in New Hampshire on January 27, 2016, that has become famous, and after the election, deeply ironic. George Sr. and George Jr. listen to Jeb: “I won’t trash talk. I won’t be out there blowharding, talking a big game. The next president needs to be a lot quieter, to get back in the business of creating a more peaceful world. (pause) Please clap” (105). In a compression of time, George Sr., Barbara Bush, Laura Bush, and George Jr. listen to Jeb Bush on the radio debating Donald Trump and getting trounced. While Trump attacks, pinpointing the war in Iraq and George W. Bush’s mistakes, Jeb defends his family more than himself: I am sick and tired of him going after my family. . . . My dad is the greatest man alive in my mind. And while Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to 57

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

keep us safe. . . . He has had the gall to go after my mother. . . . Look, I won the lottery when I was born 63 years ago, looked up, and I saw my mom. My mom is the strongest woman I know. (109) The Bushes look dismayed at the fall of their dynasty; like the Stuarts, they see only vulgarity ahead. Barbara says, “The people, they like it, they like it. . . . All civility gone, gone . . .” (110). “They want blood,” George Jr. responds, “and Jeb, God love him, is a turnip. You cut him and it bleeds white” (110). No, Barbara Bush says, and this is a quotation from historical record: “This country has had enough of our family. There are other families. We’ve had enough Bushes. Jeb got all of our enemies, and half of our friends” (111). In the shift in time, Catherine of Braganza has had her third stillborn child; she will not produce an heir for Charles II and the Stuart line. Charles 2 asks Barnaby, “Is it true that Parliament wishes to pass an Exclusion Bill to ensure that my brother James does not succeed me if I do not have an heir?” It is true, Barnaby tells him. “They do not wish a Catholic king” (114). Even though the American voters haven’t made any fuss about Jeb Bush’s Catholicism, the line becomes doubly layered between the thought of James II’s and Jeb Bush’s Catholicism on top of a de facto Exclusion Bill that the nation, as Barbara Bush states, is tired of Bushes. Charles 2 sends Barnaby to France to get the support of Louis XIV to dissolve Parliament, but tells him to do so quickly so that he might return as soon as possible: “Without you I feel in halves. / My virtue and my vices are written on your body” (117), a beautifully layered line of metaphor and reality, Charles II’s homosocial love for his favorites and George Jr. and Jeb’s sibling relationship. “I always admired virtue, but I could never imitate it,” Charles 2 says, but we hear George Jr.’s voice. Barnaby asks leave to visit Catherine of Braganza, who appears to be dying, and confesses that he loves her. As Barnaby approaches Catherine, he becomes Jeb and she Columba. “Why don’t they like me?” he asks. “It’s always George! It’s like I don’t exist. / He got us into a war he shouldn’t have; still, they like him better. Why? I’m responsible, I’m smart. / I’m taller than him, but I’m always in his shadow” (117). Columba pulls him in by recalling their love, how they met: We were far from your family. We met in a language your family did not speak. I saw you. I saw you as tall, strong. Tall in relationship to trees. Not in relationship to your brother. When will you give over, my love? You know why they call it “running for office”? Because you are always running away. 58

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment . . .”

He kisses her hand. Forget your big family. Remember your little family, Jeb. (117) Laura Bush steps out on stage to address the audience again. In a voice that sounds like that of the playwright, who also has twin children, she tells us, “It is a singular thing to live through, giving birth to twins. Women who have twins always talk on the playground together, immediately, as though they are long lost family, or war buddies. A little like going into battle—you face death, and your body is—well—it’s transformed” (117– 18). “I remember sometimes rocking one twin in the middle of the night to the rhythm of the other one crying, then switching them and worried that they’d be screwed up for life. Feeding one, listening to the other one cry. Everyone always hungry. No one ever full. Are siblings ever full? Do they always feel half empty?” (118). She worries that the twins fight, think of themselves as only children, the other child an obstacle to intimacy with the mother, as we’ve already seen onstage with George Jr. and Jeb. The time shifts back once again to that moment, when George Sr. has come home from Washington and confronts the boys. “You know my father used to whip me with a belt,” he tells George Jr. “I’m kinder, and gentler, than my father. / I won’t use a belt” (119). But he sends George Jr. to a back room to await his punishment while George Sr. has dinner. The scenic world changes to a Baroque masque, and Jeb, now Barnaby, tells Charles 2, “My liege, I will take your punishment upon my body. . . . We became blood brothers in a tree. / I shall take your whipping upon me.” George Jr., as Charles 2, states, “No. Infidels behead Christians, roundheads behead kings— / One day I shall be king. With my body— / I must learn how a man feels punishment” (120). Jeb/Barnaby replies, “No, my lord. ‘Tis not your knowledge to bear” (120). The tutor enters to administer the punishment, replaying the scene we saw in Act One. Charles 2 insists, “It was I who purloined the socks of the king, / I who neglected my Latin, I who started a war, / whip me, whip me, / whip not my blood brother Barnaby!” (121). The tutor protests but Charles 2 commands him, and the tutor “begins caning him, gently.” “Do not go gentle!” Charles 2 roars. “Someone must punish a future king! / PUNISH ME! PUNISH ME!” (121). In Ruhl’s imaginative vision, George W. Bush acknowledges that his brother Jeb has been punished for George’s own sins, and wishes he could take the punishment he deserves. As the play draws to a close it becomes fantastical, bursting into a musical number that is the most explicitly political moment of the play. The stage 59

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

directions call for a court masque. “Everyone wears half masques, some with their actual political characters painted on them” (121). The Chorus begins: Oh who shall be whipped for the prince’s sins? The whipping boy! JEB Oh who shall be whipped for the whipping boy’s sins? ALL The country! JEB Oh who shall be whipped for the country’s sins? ALL Another country! Another country further away! Where there is no sin, there is no whipping Where there is no whipping, there is no sin Let the new country begin Let the new country begin. (122) Addressing the audience, Jeb sings, “And who are you? / Are you a whipping boy too? / Why is it that you do what you do? / Is it because someone did that to you?” (123). A Chorus of Women sing, “Let the mothers hold their children close / Let the wars come to an end / Let all the voters vote. . . . Let the whipping and the torture end,” and the play closes with all singing, “Oh let us all pretend— / Please oh Lord / If there be a Lord / Let the killing end” (123). Concluding with a musical number recalls the direction of Max Stafford-Clark of the Joint Stock Theatre, who used the Brechtian technique of song to conclude many of his productions, rousing the audience into metatheatrical alertness. Scenes from Court Life is one of Ruhl’s most fantastically imaginative and her most directly political play, its epic scope and intrepid boldness resonant with Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.

Coda Taken together, these four plays—Eurydice and Demeter in the City, Melancholy Play, and Scenes from Court Life or the whipping boy and his prince—demonstrate Ruhl’s ethical and inventive formulations in drama that constitute her distinctive aesthetic. In 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, Ruhl explains why she hates the words that have most often been attached to her work by critics: “whimsical” and “quirky.” Whimsy is etymologically connected to the action of fluttering eyelids and is, then, “a way of making 60

“I Like Plays That Have Revelations in the Moment . . .”

feminine and therefore trivial a whole school of aesthetic fabulation .  .  . the choice to have a perceptible aesthetic at all is often called a quirk,” and the word quirky “suggests that in a homogenized culture, difference has to be immediately defined, sequestered, and formally quarantined while being gently patted on the head.”70 Her linguistic and stagecraft choices, in other words, are just that: aesthetic choices to work within a tradition of fabulation that muddles distinctions between the tragic and comic, what is logical or illogical, realistic or nonrealistic, defamiliarizing the world in order to imagine new possibilities. In Ruhl’s works, space and time are mutable. Two worlds (the Underworld and the world of the living in Eurydice) simultaneously exist, facilitating connection—permitting one last conversation with the dead—but also creating obstacles—why venture into the uncertainties of marriage when you can cocoon with your father, who nurtures you with attentive love that your husband hasn’t yet matured into? Two time periods (Stuart Britain and Bush-era United States in Scenes from Court Life) are superimposed on one another, laying bare the assumptions of privilege and the frailties in political dynasties that trickle down to their citizenry. In the interplay of the actual and magical, a space for staging new possibilities, Ruhl imagines a situation in which a US president acknowledges his wrongdoings and asks for punishment; where time slows down, the world makes room for wonder, and sees no need to medicate melancholy or run roughshod over contemplation; and where an inner-city Demeter and Persephone can spend half their year together in a verdant world safe from the system of Hades that comes between mother and child. Eurydice, Demeter in the City, Melancholy Play, and Scenes from Court Life or the whipping boy and his prince: these plays are not “whimsical” or “quirky.” They are philosophical comedies that plumb depths with a light touch, that operate by indirections to find directions out. Ruhl takes a poetic distance in order to get close, as we will see in the next chapter, where we will explore her plays on intimacy and love.

61

CHAPTER 3 “GETTING IN THE SAME ROOM IS KIND OF THE DREAM”

University of Chicago professor Lisa Ruddick has observed a malaise among her most reflective, intuitive students and colleagues who fear their “souls have gone into hiding.” These individuals, she remarks, tend to be the “teacher-healers” in academia, people with “a special affinity for the inwardness of the literary text and the soul work of the human being.”1 Alienated by the “academic cool” in literary criticism that “disdains interpersonal kindness, I-thou connection, and the line separating the self from the outer world and the engulfing collective,” they seek a community that values “loving attachments” both to literature and to other beings.2 Ruddick’s point: literary critics want new modes of engagement. Instead of interrogating literary objects with suspicion, what Eve Sedgwick famously called “paranoid reading,”3 instead of “examining a text with a sober and clinical eye,” as Rita Felski puts it, what if we were “pulled irresistibly into [the text’s] orbit”?4 Let us explore, these critics are saying, other ways of attending to the text, of being in relationship with it, and allowing ourselves to be enchanted and even wounded, to be transformed. If this sounds like falling in love, that’s because it kind of is. Like these scholars, Sarah Ruhl seeks new modes of engagement for the stage. In an article for Theatre Topics she praises Maria Irene Fornes’s fierce resistance to the American theatrical emphasis on intention and wanting. “American actors are taught to have objectives—what does your character want from the other character”; Fornes protested, “That is business. When I deal with other people, I don’t want something from them; I want a rapport.”5 Fornes draws a distinction between hungering “for contemplation” of the love versus “eating” the love—a distinction that, Ruhl argues, “is the essence of the dramaturgical divide between wanting something from someone and desire as attentiveness.”6 The desire in Ruhl’s plays is not a “wanting” but a “heightened quasi-theological state of longing”:7 that is, attuning oneself to the other, allowing the other to be him or herself. Ruhl’s plays are often about love and intimacy (they’re also about technology, art, mourning,

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

healing, friendship, illusion, oxytocin, and the theatre itself) but love-assubject-matter is less the point than dramatizing the problem of getting close to another; or, as she says about In the Next Room or the vibrator play, “getting in the same room.” She aims to bring audiences continually into attentiveness themselves by bringing them into the present moment, closely reading, as it were, themselves and their intimate other. Yet, while her plays are marked by her “clear-eyed hope,” as Thomas Butler puts it in his essay in Chapter 6, Ruhl’s plays about love are not sentimental love stories. “I believe in true love—I think,” Ruhl said in an interview. “But there’s not much use in writing about it. Then we’d just be jealous of the people on stage.”8 As Butler has insightfully observed elsewhere, her plays present a complex understanding of love in which “love demands an acknowledgment, not of the unity of two individuals, but of their separateness.”9 Ruhl eschews both the bickering and power games typically depicted onstage, as well as the sweeping and ultimately unsatisfying platitudes of stage love. Her attunement to “the humble and the small and invisible,”10 to whatever is “small, tender, and worthy of protection and cultivation,”11 and to the singularities of love creates a theatre for adults that models how to grow up and get close, which we’ll explore in The Clean House, Late: A Cowboy Song, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, In the Next Room or the vibrator play, and Stage Kiss.

The Clean House The genesis of The Clean House was an overheard remark at a party: “I did not go to medical school to clean my own house.” Ruhl listened to a doctor tell friends how upset she was that her Brazilian cleaning lady was depressed and wouldn’t clean; the doctor went so far as to prescribe Prozac for the cleaning lady but it didn’t work. “Politically it freaked me out,” Ruhl said of this remark, as did “the assumptions about race and gender . . . and class. . . . Does class get us beyond the obligation to clean for ourselves, to care for our own dirt in a daily way? Does medical school supersede our gender? As women are we supposed to clean up after other people?”12 The Clean House was Ruhl’s first major commercial success. She received the 2004 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for it, as well as her first Pulitzer Prize nomination. Although the play continues to feature her signature elements of aesthetic fabulation that animated earlier works such as Eurydice, Orlando, and Melancholy Play, Ruhl had matured emotionally as 64

“Getting in the Same Room is Kind of the Dream”

a playwright; she had grown to care about depicting real people onstage. In an interview with playwright Lila Rose Kaplan for the Brooklyn Rail, Ruhl reveals this change in her playwriting: One thing I remember saying to an actor when I was just out of college—I was doing Orlando, my first production outside of a university—and I remember saying something pompous like, “Well, you know, I’m not really interested in real people on stage, you see.” And in my mind it made sense. I was interested in language and I was interested in the actors being very alive on stage with the language and with the story, but not necessarily being real bodied people with a past. I continue to think of character differently than a traditional naturalistic model, but I have to say I am much more interested in real people onstage, in a sense. The people Clean House explores are real people. Maybe an absurd thing is happening to a person who is real or maybe there’s a very absurd person in a very real circumstance. But, I don’t feel as much of this pompous need to take a poetic distance from the reality of human behavior and history.13 The Clean House also established a theme for Ruhl that struck a chord with her audiences: she is a playwright who knows how to explore the contours of adult love and marriage. She is a playwright who cares about intimacy. The play is divided into two acts, each of which contains a series of “moments of being” scenes, whether monologues in direct address to the audience or dialogues between characters. In what has become a characteristic pattern for Ruhl, the first act is more realistic than the second, where the set itself opens up as the characters do. Yet, while the setting may present itself as a very naturalistic living room, the first words of the play are not ones we’re expecting: stage directions that indicate Matilde tells a long joke in Portuguese to the audience. The joke is not translated, meaning most of the audience will not understand it, though we’ll understand from its rhythms that it is a joke, and will know we’re not getting it. This is a prime example of what’s often labeled as Ruhl’s “whimsical” effect, but, as Leslie Atkins Durham argues, we should see it as a defamiliarizing technique (in Viktor Shklovsky’s sense rather than Brecht’s) of attuning us to the wonder of the thing.14 The play centers on Lane, a fifty-ish doctor married to another doctor, Charles. Lane likes order, and she is frustrated because her house is out of order, because her cleaning lady, Matilde, is too depressed to clean. 65

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

Matilde would rather dream up the perfect joke: “The perfect joke makes you forget about your life . . . the perfect joke makes you remember about your life” (24).15 She has recently left Brazil because her parents, the funniest people in the country, died, and there was no one left to laugh at her jokes. Lane’s sister, Virginia, would love to clean Lane’s house. She too loves order. She asks, “If you do not clean: how do you know if you’ve made any progress in life?” (10). Virginia’s obsession with cleanliness sets up plenty of laugh lines in the play but the thematic undercurrents connecting cleaning and cleanliness with the fear of losing control run beneath the play, and Virginia’s self-perception is moving. In a moment of candor she tells Matilde, “Since I was twenty-two, my life has gone downhill, and not only have I not done what I wanted to do but I have lost the qualities and temperament that would help me reverse the downward spiral—and now I am a completely different person” (22). Virginia is also perceptive about her sister; if Lane doesn’t do her husband’s laundry she won’t know “if he’s sleeping with a prostitute because she does not smell his dirty underwear” (10). As it turns out, it’s far worse than a mere affair: Lane’s husband Charles has fallen in love. Genuinely in love, the women recognize, because instead of reenacting the cliché of running off with a hot young nurse, Charles has fallen for his 67-year-old mastectomy patient, Ana. She is his bashert, he decides, the Jewish word for soul mate, and as he learned from a public radio show, according to Jewish law he is “obligated” to end his relationship with his wife. “There’s something—metaphysically—objective about it,” he tells Lane. “You’re not Jewish,” she responds (61). Both Charles and Ana keep reverting to the word “objective” to describe the feeling of destiny that brought them together: Charles Something very objective happened to me. It’s as though I suddenly tested positive for a genetic disease that I’ve had all along. Ana has been in my genetic code. Ana Yes. It’s so strange. We didn’t feel guilty because it was so objective. (62) Oblivious to Lane’s feelings, Charles thinks he’s reaching out to her as he says, “I’m sorry that it happened to you, Lane,” announcing, “there are things—big invisible things—that come unannounced—they walk in, and we have to give way” (63). 66

“Getting in the Same Room is Kind of the Dream”

Charles’s impetuous outbursts might be off-putting (his love is childish, like Orpheus in Eurydice, or like Crick in Late: A Cowboy Song) had Ruhl not already given the audience scenes that built affection for Charles and Ana. First, her notes for the play state that the actors playing Charles and Ana should be double-cast as Matilde’s parents, who are spirited, funny, and deeply in love when we first see them in Act One. When Charles and Ana arrive at Lane’s house, ready to announce their love at the end of Act One, the act closes before we meet them. The top of Act Two is a flashback, rendered in a dreamlike way, in which, as the subtitles tell us, Charles Performs Surgery on the Woman He Loves (51). This scene without dialogue presents the surgery on Ana as “an act of love” and the stage directions request that “If the actor who plays Charles is a good singer, / it would nice if he could sing / an ethereal medieval love song in Latin / about being medically cured by love / as he does the surgery” (51). Similarly, Ruhl suggests, “If the actress who plays Ana is a good singer, / it would be nice if she recovered from the surgery / and slowly sat up and sang a contrapuntal melody” (51). This is followed by scenes in which first Ana and then Charles directly address the audience and therefore build a relationship with them. Ana confides, “I think Charles left his soul inside me. Into the missing place” where her tumor had been (52). Charles recounts a sympathetic story of an American surgeon who loved his wife so much he invented rubber gloves to help heal her chapped hands. “It is one of the great love stories of medicine,” he tells us. “The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love” (53). That’s how he knew Ana was the one: “I loved her to the point of invention” (53). The scenes where Charles and Ana fall in love also tug on us emotionally because earlier, in Act One, Ruhl has given us a scene that pulls us close to Lane’s pain. In an image that will be echoed in In the Next Room or the vibrator play, Lane imagines the tender precision of love, how Charles undoes the gown of Ana (“Is it a hospital gown or a ball gown?” the stage directions ask, calling on us to imagine a beautiful combination). Lane, envisioning this, narrates: He kisses her right breast. Charles kisses Ana’s right breast. He kisses the side of it. He kisses the shadow. He kisses her left torso. He kisses her left torso. He kisses the scar, He kisses the scar. 67

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

the one he made. It’s a good scar. He’s a good surgeon. He kisses her mouth. He kisses her forehead. It’s a sacred ritual, and I hate him. (46)16 Charles Isherwood has written that The Clean House is “concerned primarily with the complex intimacies among women”17 and indeed the most moving relationships in the play are between the women—between sisters Lane and Virginia; between Matilde and Ana, who reminds her so vividly of her mother; and perhaps most of all between Lane and Ana. It is Lane who takes care of Ana because Charles has gallantly yet foolheartedly gone on an expedition to Alaska to chop down a yew tree to create medicine to slow the growth of Ana’s cancer. Virginia finds this beautiful but Lane counters, “It’s not beautiful, Virginia. There is a woman, dying, alone, while Charles chops down a fucking tree. / How heroic” (87). Yet caring for her husband’s soul mate fills Lane with mixed emotions. Ana is radiant with love and life, even while she’s dying. Lane Oh God! I’m not going to cry in front of you. Ana It’s okay. You can cry. You must hate me. Lane I don’t hate you. Ana Why are you crying? Lane Okay! I hate you! You—glow—with some kind of—thing—I can’t acquire that—this— thing—sort of—glows off you—like a veil—in reverse—you’re like anyone’s soul mate—because you have that—thing—you have a balcony—I don’t have a balcony—Charles looks at you—he glows, too—you’re like two glowworms—he never looked at me like that. Ana Lane. Lane I looked at our wedding pictures to see—maybe—he looked at me that way—back then—and no—he didn’t—he looked at me with admiration—I didn’t know there was another way to be looked at—how could I know—I didn’t know his face was capable of doing that—the way he looked at you—in my living room. (90–91) 68

“Getting in the Same Room is Kind of the Dream”

The dashes in the speech are reminiscent of Emily Dickinson. Ruhl loves Dickinson’s dashes, “in which awful meanings reside.”18 The awful meanings here include the tremendous pain of looking back at a memory that you thought was very different from what it really was, and the realization that you don’t know the person you have been sharing your life with. Ana apologizes but Lane dismisses her, stating the reality of such situations: “No you’re not. If you were really sorry, you wouldn’t have done it. We do as we please, and then we say we’re sorry. But we’re not sorry. We’re just—uncomfortable—watching other people in pain” (91–92). As the second act unfolds, the worlds of Ana and Lane merge. In the set design, Ana’s balcony projects over Lane’s living room, and in one scene, Matilde (who now works for both Ana and Lane) and Ana take bites of apples and toss them into the ocean—Lane’s living room, which gets progressively messier and dirtier the more it fills up with life and love. Lane has Ana move in with her so that she can monitor her health. Ana rejects the impersonal medical language Lane often uses, and the idea of having a “relationship” with her cancer. “As long as I live I want to retain my own language,” she declares. “I don’t want a relationship with a disease. I want to have a relationship with death. That’s important. But to have a relationship with a disease—that’s some kind of bourgeois invention. And I hate it” (96). Marta Fernández-Morales, countering critics who don’t find Ruhl’s work political enough, argues that “through her focus on Ana’s rejection of the stereotypical ‘sick role’ and her establishment of an all-female web of relationships that, through humor and sisterhood, contests the patriarchal system and serves as a safety net for women of different classes and cultures, Ruhl politicizes the personal.”19 Ruhl’s political touch is generally light, though, and Charles remains a figure of affection rather than criticism, occasionally appearing in his parka to report in from Alaska. Meanwhile, the women guide Ana into a peaceful death. Lane, still filled with mixed emotions, watches Ana sleep; capturing her wariness the stage directions instruct that “She guards her the way a dog would guard a rival dog, / if her rival were sick” (103). Ana decides she wants Matilde to kill her with a joke, like Matilde’s father killed her mother with a joke, and that she wants to die standing up, so when she says goodbye to everyone, Lane and Virginia leave the room (so as not to die from the joke as well), and Matilde whispers it into Ana’s ear. We don’t hear the joke; “We hear sublime music instead,” according to the stage directions (107). Ana laughs and laughs and then collapses. 69

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

As the women tend to her, washing the body, closing her eyes, Charles “walks in carrying an enormous tree. / He is sweating and breathing heavily. / He has carried his tree great distances” (107). The final moments of the play present us with a resurrection of sorts, as we see the actors playing Charles and Ana return to playing Matilde’s parents in Matilde’s imagination and she experiences “a moment of completion with them” (109). As in Shakespearean comedies, where the merriment of joy is countered by the sorrow of the one left out of the circle, Lane stands holding Charles’s tree.

Late: A Cowboy Song Late: A Cowboy Song, dedicated to “all the lady cowboys of heart and mind / who ride outside the city limits of convention,”20 with special thanks to Paula Vogel and Anne Fausto-Sterling, might be said to be a gift to these women who have played such an important role in Ruhl’s life and that of her husband, psychiatrist Tony Charuvastra. Vogel was Ruhl’s professor and mentor at Brown University; Charuvastra was a student of Fausto-Sterling’s, also at Brown, and the two women later served as officiants at their wedding. It is a play that presents a Vogel-like character who is both a true original and deeply kind and compassionate toward others, and takes up the issue of sexual construction surgery for babies born intersexual, drawing upon Fausto-Sterling’s research. Visually the play moves between the stultifying materiality of the kitchen and the beckoning illusory landscape of the cowboy who is free to roam, and we’re told “the hyperrealism of a messy kitchen should float up against the sensation of a deep, abstracted landscape—horizon lines, empty space. Reds, blues, greens—think of Rothko. Think of Crick’s obsession with modernism, up against Mary’s obsession with open land” (121–22). It was first staged in New York City as part of the Springworks 2003 series by Clubbed Thumb, a company with a mission for commissioning, developing, and producing “funny, provocative, and strange new plays by living American writers.”21 Because this was a workshop production and Clubbed Thumb considers the plays they produce “not complete things but rather blueprints or equations for potential results,”22 Ruhl may feel the play has never really been finished, despite its publication in The Clean House and Other Plays.

70

“Getting in the Same Room is Kind of the Dream”

Late: A Cowboy Song was written before The Clean House and its young heterosexual couple, Mary and Crick, feel stuck in an adolescent stage of love; they rankle rather than charm. The character descriptions for each are suggestive: Crick is “charming, fragile and childlike”; Mary “keeps her journal locked.” As for Red, their high school classmate, “she’s no cowgirl, she’s a cowboy” (121). Ruhl instructs on the rhythm of the speakers— “Red talks slow. Crick talks fast. Mary’s somewhere in the middle”—but leaves casting issues open beyond that, noting that the characters “need not be any particular race or ethnicity” (121). The play is divided into four “parts,” with intermission between Parts 1 and 2 optional. Parts 1, 2, and 4 are more naturalistic. Part 3 is staged in a series of ten short scenes, increasing in speed, becoming more and more unrealistic, each celebrating a holiday—birthdays, St. Patrick’s Day, Christmas, Groundhog Day, Mary and Crick’s anniversary, etc.—out of chronological sequence, to show the passing of the year, till Mary explodes at the end that she’s sick of holidays: Mary (To herself ) I’m sick of holidays. (To God) I’m sick of holidays! (To the world) I’M SICK OF FUCKING HOLIDAYS!!!!!!! She sits down, surprised at herself. She breathes. (200) She’s experiencing time as rushing far too fast and filled with holidays, days of obligation, rather than ordinary days of being. Although tonally far removed, the disposition is reminiscent of Johan’s in Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, in which his most impassioned complaint about his marriage is the constant need to have life organized around dinners and holiday celebrations, that is, around others. “Lateness” becomes a theme in the play as Mary is constantly late for dinner and then discovers one day that her period is late, signaling her pregnancy. The idea of whether a thing or person is “late” is of course bound up in our notions of time; different cultures and individuals run on different (or no) internal clocks, so who’s to say whether you’re late or not? Crick and Mary can never get into the same timeframe; even when they are physically at home together they’re never, to quote Ruhl on another play, “in the same room.” At the end of the play, Mary asks Red, “Do you think

71

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

it’s possible for two people to experience time at the exact same speed?” “Yes, I do,” Red answers, demonstrating to Mary by dancing with her (213). When Mary worries about getting back home to Crick, saying “I’m late,” Red responds, There’s no such thing as late. Slow down. They dance. Mary Are we in horse time now? Red Yeah. Mary No one’s late in horse time, are they? Red No. They dance, cheek to cheek. (213–14) Ruhl’s character description informs us that Crick is to be charming, but the charm combined with his possessiveness, his propensity to make Mary cry, and his physical actions—he makes a fist, throws things (a pot, a loaf of bread, a Christmas present) against the wall, and meets her at the door brandishing a baseball bat when she’s late—gives him the profile of a domestic abuser. His jealousy is aroused from the opening lines where Mary tells him of her reunion with Red, who’s become a cowboy where they live, in Pittsburgh. When Mary speaks of Red, her language becomes more poetic. Red sings horses lullabies, Mary tells Crick, and “says it’s beautiful, when a horse falls asleep. She says it’s like if God fell asleep. Because God would sleep standing up—just in case he had to wake up—to take care of anything” (130). Crick feels like a Sam Shepard character dropped into a Sarah Ruhl play—Jake, for instance, from A Lie of the Mind, violent yet sensitive. Crick tells Mary, “I want to be able to imagine your day—every moment—like a beautiful detailed painting—the sort a Russian might paint on a hollow egg” (125). When planning their wedding, he wants a small wedding because “it’s all about our love”; organized weddings tend to have “a lot of poetry and music and flowers” but “love isn’t pretty like that. They try to make it pretty. Like a funeral. Cover up what’s really going on. With people in uniforms running around arranging things. And meat cooked all wrong. Love is between two people. It’s not about acquaintances throwing up in the bathroom” (136). With his artistic sensibility, Crick gets a job as a guard at an art museum. He wins the job by revealing his desire to look, really look, at art: “Because how could you really look at a painting and love it and understand it if 72

“Getting in the Same Room is Kind of the Dream”

you see it for five minutes—you’ve got to look at it the whole day long. Maybe for your whole life long” (140–41). When Crick takes Mary to the art museum he appears far more cultured than she does; he tries to explain medieval art’s two-dimensionality but she just comments on the flatness: “Like someone ran over the Virgin Mary with the great big machine they use to clean ice at a skating rink” (159). Crick later gets fired for touching a painting that appears to be a Rothko. Unlike the museum patrons who “look at the painting and they are unmoved. It’s like they have plastic flowers for souls” Crick sees the artistry of the colors and movement, “Just the color red and white. Red on top and white on the bottom. You look at it and you just want to cry your eyes out—you don’t know why” (177). The paint was so thick (“an inch thick”) that it begged to be touched, and “it was worth it,” he concludes, “to touch the paint,” even though he was fired (177). Ruhl also gives Crick the romantic lines—the lines that a Ruhlian hero or heroine would typically speak—in praise of the invisible. When Mary dismisses the painting he bought he urges, “You have to believe in invisible things, Mary, like investments. . . . Imagine—the value of a painting can grow—invisibly. It’s like a marriage, just sitting there, every year, growing in value, the longer you keep it. Until one day, you have a golden anniversary” (169). By contrast, Mary seems like an empty space at the middle of the play; she’s not bright, she’s not particularly interesting, she seems—very much unlike a Ruhl heroine—to have little inner life. However, she begins to come to life around Red. She first identifies with a horse, being “a flight animal,” having been broken (“Every time they come back, they’re more tame” [180]), but then Red teaches Mary to ride a horse and awakens that inner life, as the stage directions indicate: “Mary comes home from riding a horse. / She gets out her journal. / She writes in her journal, / something secret and beautiful. / She makes up a metaphor. / She looks around to see if anyone’s / overheard her metaphor” (173). When Crick walks in earlier than expected, she covers the journal with a magazine. Later, when she is gone, he finds and reads the journal, and then watches Mary ride up to the front door on a horse. Though she is coming home, she is gone. Red seems to exist as both fantasy and reality. She embodies the mythology of the cowboy, up to and including riding off into the sunset at the end of Act One: “A horse walks across the stage. / Red gets on the horse and rides off. / A real horse would be nice. / An abstract approximation of the horse will do” (164). James Al-Shamma points out that “the Marlboro Man was fashioned to sell a product previously intended for women.”23 The image of that masculine cowboy was an object of desire for women, as Red is an 73

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

object of desire for Mary. Mary’s desire for Red is bound up in her desire to be like Red, not just with Red—to have Red’s ease with herself. Although Ruhl seems to be clear that Red is female, she is also clear that “[Red’s] no cowgirl, she’s a cowboy” (121). Maggie Nelson’s description of queer theorist Eve Sedgwick seems fitting for Red: “She exuded a sexuality and charisma that was much more powerful, particular, and compelling than the poles of masculinity and femininity could ever allow.”24 Ruhl stages the fluidity of desire rather than strong-arming a message about Mary’s movement from a static opposite-sex to static same-sex love. As Nelson writes in The Argonauts, what’s annoying about “hearing the refrain ‘same-sex marriage’” is that she doesn’t know any “queers who think of their desire’s main feature as being ‘same-sex’. . . . Whatever sameness I’ve noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy.”25 Crick and Mary’s baby, Blue, is born intersexual. “Something weird happened at the hospital,” Mary tells her mother. “We aren’t sure if the baby’s a boy or a girl.” The doctors told her, “It’s sort of like a boy and a girl too” and they did “a little surgery . . . . So I guess it’s a girl now. I don’t know why they couldn’t have left well enough alone” (163–64). Ruhl mines Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body for information and wisdom on this subject, and in fact, Mary and Crick’s experience in the hospital feels drawn from the anecdote that opens Chapter 3 of Sexing the Body: A child is born in a large metropolitan hospital in the United States or Western Europe. The attending physician, realizing that the newborn’s genitals are either/or, neither/both, consults a pediatric endocrinologist (children’s hormone specialist) and a surgeon. They declare a state of medical emergency. According to current treatment standards, there is no time to waste in quiet reflection or open-ended consultations with the parents. No time for the new parents to consult those who have previously given birth to mixed-sex babies or to talk with adult intersexuals. Before twenty-four hours pass, the child must leave the hospital “as a sex,” and the parents must feel certain of the decision.26 Fausto-Sterling quotes earlier studies that considered an intersexual baby “tragic” and doomed for “freakhood” (47) but, as Al-Shamma puts it elegantly, “Ruhl advances Blue’s androgyny as a state of creative opportunity rather than confusion.”27 74

“Getting in the Same Room is Kind of the Dream”

Mary, who wants the daughter to be “a real individual-type person” (147), like Red, says she’ll call her Blue. Crick, who would have preferred a more conventional name for himself than Crick, wants her to be called Jill. Mary argues, “She won’t feel like herself if we call her Jill—she’ll feel—off— she’ll search and search for her real intended name—and then one day— I’ll tell her—your real name is Blue—but by then she’ll be disfunctioned. Because everyone is named Jill. And she’s not like everyone” (167). She later composes a letter to Blue, which she reads aloud: “I wanted you to know, Blue, if you grow up to be a woman, and one day you start feeling kind of funny—like maybe you’re a woman, but maybe you’re not, I want you to know that you’re not crazy. You’re smart. And it’s hard to grow up. Nature is—mysterious” (202). As their daughter grows Mary feuds with Crick over Christmas presents. Crick has gotten Jill/Blue dolls and dresses but Mary thinks they should get her some “in-between presents” such as paints or building blocks (204). Mary wants to know “why does she have to be one thing or another?” and Crick answers, “Because sometimes in life, Mary, you have to choose. You can’t live on a fence. I won’t have my daughter living on a fence” (205). So Mary finally does choose, leaving the increasingly unstable Crick, taking Blue with her. She and Red close the play pushing the baby stroller, both wearing cowboy hats, singing together: “Oh, find me a child / Who grows into a girl / Who rides like a man— / With a mask” (219). In 2005, Joe Leydon, writing for Variety, pegged Late: A Cowboy Song as a work in progress. In a review of the production at Houston’s Stages Repertory Theater he describes it as “at once tediously predictable and fuzzily focused” and concludes, It’s difficult to shake the impression that, despite Ruhl’s feints in this or that direction, Late is nothing more than an irony-steeped, gay-themed melodrama about a “mannish” cowgirl who woos a discontent woman away from her weakling husband. And while it’s possible, even probable, that an intriguing and challenging play could be developed from such a premise, Late isn’t it.28 There have been fewer productions of Late than of other Ruhl plays, although it has occasioned another look in recent years, when Ruhl’s popularity has led theatre companies to dig deeper into her repertoire for new material to stage, and when gay marriage and intersexual individuals have been discussed in the public sphere. With the advantage of retrospect 75

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

and a larger, more accomplished body of Ruhl’s work to compare it with, Nelson Pressley of the Washington Post called it “a skinny rough draft” of In the Next Room.29 We witness the movement between the heavily naturalistic “women’s spaces” of the kitchen in Late: A Cowboy Song and the Victorian home in In the Next Room weighing the women down, in contrast to the “deep, abstracted landscape” of Late and the winter garden of In the Next Room. We also see a more nuanced exploration of the currents of desire.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone We are all currently subjects in a large-scale experiment in altering human nature. The cell phone, more specifically the eerily named “smartphone,” may turn out to be the technology that most transforms humans in the early twenty-first century. It is transfiguring our relationships, including to ourselves, threatening to banish solitude, reflection, boredom, and ultimately intimacy from our lives. Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other and Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, has spent her career monitoring and analyzing our relationships with technology. The developments that concern her most involve our diminishing abilities to be present to another human being. We have less patience for the gaps in a real-time conversation, more anxiety about speaking extemporaneously. “We are lonely but fearful of intimacy,” she declares.30 The best kind of conversation, what we often have in therapy but arguably experience also in theatre, “doesn’t give ‘advice’ but helps people discover what they have hidden from themselves so that they can find their inner compass.”31 Yet Turkle discovered through interviews that many people find conversation “‘hard work,’ with many invitations, often treacherous, to imperfection, loss of control, and boredom.”32 Real people, face-to-face conversations, liveness itself, are too unpredictable. Given these concerns, which predominate in our culture even as we dive further into our phones, you might think Dead Man’s Cell Phone is an “issues play,” a lecture, as it were, on disconnection in our modern world. It is a play about loneliness and intimacy. Yet the cell phone in its title serves as a repository of memory, a way of keeping its owner, the dead man, Gordon, alive just a bit longer. The cell phone, in other words, is what connects rather than disconnects people in this play. Ruhl’s “cell phone ballet” near the end is a paean to the language and conversations, and the people speaking, 76

“Getting in the Same Room is Kind of the Dream”

who surround us, invisible though they may be. Dead Man’s Cell Phone is ultimately an acknowledgment, sometimes a celebration, of the mystery of other people. Ruhl’s epigraph from A Tale of Two Cities (echoed twice in the body of the play) establishes that theme: “A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.”33 The stagecraft created to convey those mysteries in Dead Man’s Cell Phone includes transportation through a spiritual pipeline to the afterlife, the aforementioned cell phone ballet, and a shower of embossed-paper houses. For some critics this was too much. To Michael Feingold, reviewing the Playwrights Horizons production directed by Anne Bogart and starring Mary-Louise Parker, Ruhl is “a child who’s been told how clever she is and now keeps trying to prove it.”34 Charles Isherwood, probably her most consistently admiring reviewer, admitted he found some scenes “cloying” and too high “on the cuteness scale” for his taste, but he also saw that Ruhl’s affection for the unexpected phrase, the kooky observation, the unlikely juxtaposition is essential to her central belief that the smallest and most trivial things in life—a bowl of lobster bisque, in Gordon’s case—can be charged with meaning. And her characters’ quirkiness is in keeping, too, with the play’s doleful central theme, that each human being is a book full of surprises even to intimates, and one that is destined to be left unfinished.35 The plot unfolds in a familiar Ruhl style, from the more naturalistic to the fantastical. Her notes indicate that “Transitions are fluid. Space is fluid. . . . There is not a lot of stuff on the stage” (104). Instead, the inner transformations are indicated through light, sound, and a shower of paper. The play opens in an almost empty café, occupied just by Jean, who “has an insular quality, / as though she doesn’t want to take up space” (7) and Gordon, the dead man, whose back is to the audience—which is to say, we, and Jean, don’t yet know that he is dead. Edward Hopper lends the play its “internal weather” of “longing and solitude.”36 At various moments when Jean is alone, Ruhl indicates an Edward Hopper moment (e.g., “An Edward Hopper painting, for five seconds”) where the actor finds “one simple gesture—Jean looks toward a window—and suspends—and the lights imperceptibly shift. They are about the solitary figure inside the landscape or architecture. They are about being alone inside of or in relation to the modern” (103). When Gordon’s cell phone rings and he makes no move to answer, Jean gets up 77

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

and does so; when she discovers he is dead she tells him, “I’ll stay with you. / Gordon. / For as long as you need me” (12), and holds on to his cell phone. Jean has never had a cell phone of her own (“I didn’t want to always be there,” she says later. “Sometimes I like to disappear” [52]), but that commitment leads to many conversations through which she recreates Gordon, reconnects him to the people in his life, and in the end, heals her own loneliness.37 Jean attends Gordon’s funeral mass, where she prays, “Help me to comfort his loved ones. / Help me to help the memory of Gordon/ live on in the minds and hearts of his loved ones” (14). Her, that is, Gordon’s, cell phone rings during the service, causing Gordon’s mother, Mrs. Gottlieb, from the pulpit where she’s giving the eulogy, to rail against the invasion of the last vestiges of private, sacred space by cell phones: Could someone please turn their fucking cell phone off. There are only one or two sacred places left in the world today. Where there is no ringing. The theater, the church, and the toilet. But some people actually answer their phones in the shitter these days. Some people really do. How many of you do? Raise your hand if you’ve answered your cell phone while you were quietly urinating. Yes, I thought so. My God. (15) Jean meets each of Gordon’s family members (his wife, his brother, and his mother) and The Other Woman, Gordon’s lover. Listening attentively to what each person seems to need, she reconstructs a fantasy Gordon who cared for each of them, in stark contrast to his actions while living. To The Other Woman, she says Gordon told her that “other women seemed like clocks compared to you—other women just—measured time—broke the day up—but that you—you stopped time. He said you—stopped time—just by walking into a room” (22). To Gordon’s wife, Hermia, she tells a tale of Gordon writing a last note to her on a napkin; the waiter must have thrown it out, Jean says, enjoying her storytelling, she remembers one of the drafts, which read (she’s paraphrasing), “Dear Hermia. I know we haven’t always connected, every second of the day. Husbands and wives seldom do. The joy between husband and wife is elusive, but it is strong. It endures countless moments of silent betrayal, navigates complicated labyrinths of emotional retreats” (72). Having listened to Hermia relate her fantasies of having been elsewhere when they make love, Jean slips in a note that Gordon was aware, 78

“Getting in the Same Room is Kind of the Dream”

and concerned, that both of them did this, but that “in those moments of climax, when the darkness descended, and our fantasies dissolved into the air under quickening heat of our desire—then, then, we were in that room together. And that is all that matters” (72). Both women are moved by Jean’s depictions. “He said that?” The Other Woman asks. “Oh, Gordon” (22). As for Hermia, “Years of her marriage come back to her with a new light shining on them” (72). Memories, false or true, and the act of remembering, run thematically throughout the play. Jean works in the Holocaust Museum, a “sad job,” but “it’s good—you know—to remember,” she tells Gordon’s brother, Dwight. She wants to remember everything, “even other people’s memories” (47). “No one wants to remember,” Dwight counters, citing digital cameras with their “informational bits—flying through the air. . . . People say I love you—on cell phones—and where does it go? No paper. Remembering requires paper” (47). Dwight likes “real things” such as paper, and works in a stationery store. He takes Jean to the shop, where they touch embossed invitations with their eyes closed, the better to feel the sensation of the thick, creamy paper. (“I think heaven must be like an embossed invitation,” Jean tells Dwight [48].) Finding a favorite invitation, she says, “I’d like to live in a little house made of this one” (51), and when they kiss, Ruhl’s stage directions indicate that the designers are to create an experience of what it’s like to fall in love: Embossed stationery moves through the air slowly. like a snow parade. Lanterns made of embossed paper, houses made of embossed paper, light falling on paper, falling on Jean and Dwight, who are also falling. (56) When we meet Gordon in the second act, we discover that he’s a bit of a jerk, wholly unlike the Gordon of Jean’s creation; he was more likeable when he remained a mystery. He’s used to getting what he wants, engages in organ-trafficking, and has a pragmatic sense of ethics about his line of work. “Is it my job to stop executions in China?” he asks. “I don’t have that power. What I can do, however is make sure that these miserable fucks who die for no good reason have a reason—I make sure their organs go 79

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

to someone who needs them” (59). When he is dying in the café, however, he realizes he has not a single person in his life he could call for a moment of deathbed kindness. It is Jean, sitting across the room, finishing the last bowl of lobster bisque, which Gordon had wanted, who transfigures him. In a last-breath gasp of goodwill he thinks, “good—good—I’m glad she had the last bite—I’m glad” (61) and dies with a peaceful face. Jean and Gordon meet up again in the café, now in the afterlife, in a dream sequence after Jean is knocked unconscious in Johannesburg, where she’s gone on a kidney mission, having taken up Gordon’s line of work to continue the connection to him. He explains the “spiritual pipeline” to her, a complex algorithm that connects us on planets with those we love best. Gordon is funny, arrogant, irritating; he loved himself best in life and has no regrets for his actions, which has landed him in a hell “reserved for people who sell organs on the black market and the people who loved them” (80). However, Jean discovers that while this hell is lonely, “the air remembers all,” and she can still listen to invisible conversations taking place on cell phones everywhere—“the music of the spheres”—represented onstage by “A cell phone ballet. / Beautiful music. / People moving through the rain / with umbrellas, talking into their cell phones, / fragments of lost conversations float up” (87). (In Ruhl’s notes she gives free rein to the sound designer and director, though warns that “one thing I learned is that if the movement is complex, the music and voices should be simple; if the voices are complex, the movement should be simple. I wish I could tell you there is one definitive way to crack this oyster but it’s up to your collective imagination” [102].) In a leap of time, when Jean returns to Dwight and the family, months have gone by, though to Jean it’s been just one day. Having experienced what she fears is an afterlife on a planet with Gordon, her love for Dwight intensifies, and the play closes with what Ruhl has called “a hymn to love.”38 Jean vows, Let’s start loving each other right now, Dwight— not a mediocre love, but the strongest love in the world, absolutely requited. I want to be selfish with you. I want to love you because of and not in spite of your accidental charms. I want to love you when you burn the toast and when your shoes are awful and when you say the wrong thing 80

“Getting in the Same Room is Kind of the Dream”

so that we know and all the omniscient things of heaven know too—let’s love each other absolutely. (98) In Theatre, Intimacy, and Engagement, Alan Read provocatively calls theatre “the last human venue.” He narrates a parable of life in the “recent past”—that is, our own era—told from the not-too-distant future, in which humans increase their “appetite for affect in the screen-world of virtuality.”39 They resee theatre as a venue from the past that had “provided the playful mechanism of the measure of human value” and was the “final venue for the assertion of human being.”40 But not because it was polished and perfect; just the opposite. The “mark of human nature at work in this venue” was one of “old-fashioned, pre-bionic, underachievement, and it was this falling short, this remedial quality, not exemplary excesses that marked it out as peculiarly human, and peculiarly alienated.”41 Ruhl’s similar desire for theatre as a space for experiencing the singularity and imperfection and therefore full humanity of love will be echoed in In the Next Room or the vibrator play and Stage Kiss.

In the Next Room or the vibrator play In the Next Room or the vibrator play, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Tony Award nominee for Best Play, is Ruhl’s most dramaturgically traditional (that is, linear) work to date. It feels to the reader of dramatic literature, and especially to those critics who find Ruhl’s plays often merely a “pretext” for performance, her most finished play. Heidi Schmidt, reviewing the Lincoln Center production for Theatre Journal, notes that Ruhl fans may be “surprised at the play’s realist leanings: actors never address the audience directly, there are no raining elevators, and the primary source of magic is electric lighting—magical indeed, given the time period.”42 Ruhl steeps the play in historical knowledge—of wet-nursing practices, the history of the vibrator, early attitudes toward electricity—but retains her core concern for manifesting inner life onstage.43 Paula Vogel has called In the Next Room Ruhl’s “most Chekhovian play” and Ruhl agrees that she was “thinking of Chekhov and Ibsen and the notion of the nineteenth-century interior; both the interiors of rooms and the interior of personhood and femininity.”44 It does appear upon the rising of the curtain that we are in a work by Chekhov or Ibsen. Unlike Dead Man’s Cell Phone’s uncluttered stage in 81

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

which scenes and locations fluidly transform from one to another, the setting of In the Next Room is a well-appointed Victorian home furnished with a piano, birdcage, chaise, bassinet, rocking chair, “sumptuous rugs, sumptuous wallpaper” and “many electrical lamps” (4). Solid reality, in other words. The action is divided between two rooms: the living room, and “the next room,” an operating theatre for Dr. Givings, man of science and man of the house. He is a gynecologist who specializes in hysterical disorders and has become enamored at the prospects for improved health to be achieved with the use of a new electrical device, the vibrator, which was considered at the time a medical tool rather than a sex toy, and was used to stimulate “paroxysms” (the word “orgasm” is never used in the play) in women to cure them of “hysteria” (i.e., of sexual desire that made them troublesome). His young wife, Mrs. Givings, is nervous and jumpy—she’s starving for physical exercise, anxious that she’s unable to nurse her baby, and wondering just what is going on behind the door in the next room that leaves female patients glowing and relaxed. Dr. Givings pontificates to Leo (one of his rare male hysteria patients, a young artist, and his foil onstage for modeling male behavior) on “What men do not observe because their intellect prevents them from seeing would fill many books” (68), while failing to see how obvious it is that his own wife could use his remedy. Mrs. Givings signals this herself when she says, referring to the piano in the living room, “The poor thing is languishing without a human touch. It is like a piece of dead wood without being played” (35; emphasis in original). Mr. and Mrs. Daldry arrive seeking help for their marriage because, as Mr. Daldry states to Dr. Givings, “I am afraid there is very little sympathy between us” (12). Dr. Givings diagnoses hysteria in Mrs. Daldry, applies the vibrator, and she has a paroxysm and relaxes. Ruhl’s gently insistent stage directions indicate that the sensation should look new to us. She writes, “Now remember that these are the days / before digital pornography. / There is no cliché of how women are supposed to orgasm, /no idea in their heads of how they are supposed to sound when they /climax” (21). Whatever sound emanates from Mrs. Daldry, “It should not be a cliché, a camp version / of how we expect all women sound when they orgasm. / It is simply clear that she has had some kind of release” (21). 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—a “raw emotional intimacy,” which is “far more radical than physical intimacy or selling sex, which we see on every block,” as Ruhl has said.45 That in itself may be scarier to an audience. Sexuality, and 82

“Getting in the Same Room is Kind of the Dream”

even more, intimacy with another, is terribly difficult for us to talk about, at least in the United States. A male student at Miami University of Ohio wrote a review of a production of In the Next Room on his campus, noting that before attending the performance he had read and analyzed the play for a class, where my classmates and I frequently discussed the darkness of the play, and the hope that the actors could bring a sense of humor to lighten the overall mood of the play. The use of vibrators as treatment could be very traumatic for Dr. Givings’ patients, and equally as traumatic for the audience to witness.46 I find this curious that the students found the play dark, let alone traumatic, when I and the audiences I’ve been a part of find it funny and emotionally moving. If one read the play as though it were Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and Dr. Givings a tyrannical husband rather than a gently obtuse one, it would indeed be darker and more serious, and certainly the actual historical context about the medical establishment diagnosing hysteria in women is all too true and harrowing, but Ruhl’s playwriting hand is light and the arc of the play comic. I have written elsewhere that In the Next Room gives us a sort of sex education, which the American public sorely needs but dances lightly around because we associate educating ourselves about sexuality with awkward conversations, embarrassment, and shame.47 In an NPR interview with Michel Martin, Ruhl observed that we think of ourselves as so savvy about sexuality because it’s so ever present. But, I think in terms of the true integration of one’s emotional life with one’s physical life, I think in a way we’ve gone round the bend the other way, that a certain kind of conversation about sexuality is so prevalent and in your face that we lose the delicacy of how to marry an emotional life to a physical life.48 Instead of distrusting emotion and maintaining an ironic distance, or crassly exploiting rom-com style, Ruhl is a playwright who takes emotion seriously, recognizing, for instance, that “the emotions, when they are interesting, usually do not have an aim that we can point to and rationally understand.”49 Following Ruhl’s “habitual tightrope” of marrying the comic to the sorrowful, what probably gets the biggest laugh in the play (it certainly did when I saw Sarah Rasmussen’s production at the Jungle Theater in 83

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

Minneapolis in November 2012) sets up one of the most wistful moments as well. Midway through the second act, Mrs. Daldry and Mrs. Givings, both of whom have now experienced paroxysms with the vibrator (they experiment on one another at the close of Act One), compare their experiences, which have been strikingly different: Mrs. Daldry sees patterns of light under her eyelids, while Mrs. Givings’s feet get intensely hot. They ask Elizabeth, who is serving as housekeeper to the Daldrys and wet nurse to the Givings’ baby, if she has ever had such sensations: Elizabeth I do not know—the sensations are so contradictory. Does anything unite them? Mrs. Givings Many of them are—down below. Elizabeth Oh—I see. Well, the things you describe, some of them seem to be sensations that an invalid would have, or someone with a horrible fever—but others— sound like sensations that women might have when they are having relations with their husbands. A pause. Elizabeth I’m sorry. Perhaps you were joking. Perhaps—I shouldn’t have said— Mrs. Givings With their husbands? Mrs. Daldry How interesting. Elizabeth Those sensations you are describing—they are not from having relations with your husbands? Mrs. Daldry Good heavens, no! Mrs. Givings No! Good God. They laugh. (115–16) As does the audience. But then, Mrs. Daldry, catching the audience as the laughter dies down, follows this up with a comment that, while veering on the edge of Victorian cliché, captures the heart of the problem: “I don’t know what I should do if I felt those things in the presence of my husband—I’d be so embarrassed I would leave the room immediately” (116). This, Ruhl reveals, is what we shy away from, even as we want it—opening yourself up to such powerful sensations, making yourself vulnerable to the deepest pleasures, in the presence of another, is hard, and risky. Opening yourself up to another human being, being truly intimate with another being, is one of the hardest things we will ever be called upon to do. 84

“Getting in the Same Room is Kind of the Dream”

Much of the weight of the play, its melancholy undercurrent and reminder of real life, is expressed through Elizabeth. She is the character most attuned to and articulate about her emotions, most grounded in her body and self. Unlike Mrs. Givings and Mrs. Daldry, she knows sexual pleasure with her husband, and without apology she mourns the death of her baby Henry Douglas and voices her anger at God for taking him away. She also has the most moving speech in the play. When quitting her job wet-nursing for the Givingses (the artist Leo has declared his love for her, which motivates her to keep her distance, and the baby Lotty has grown healthy enough to leave her), she tells Mrs. Givings, “My mother told me to pray each day since I was a little girl, to pray that you borrow everything, everyone you love, from God. That way your heart doesn’t break when you have to give your son, or your mother, or your husband, back to God” (133). But her child “felt like mine not like God’s he felt like mine more mine than anything,” she continues, the lack of punctuation in the line conveying her pain, and the more healthy Mrs. Givings’s baby got, “the more dead my baby became” (134). As she leaves their employ she urges, “I hope every day you keep her—you keep her close to you—and you remember the blood that her milk was made from. The blood of my son, my Henry” (134). That Elizabeth is African American, and one of the few roles for a person of color in Ruhl’s plays, aside from the Brazilian Matilde in The Clean House and the Tibetan Father and monks in The Oldest Boy, makes her stand out among Ruhl’s characters. In casual conversation with other scholars I’ve heard critiques of the “affective work” Ruhl gives Elizabeth, which is common in American popular culture, the black character whose job it is to hold the wisdom the white characters lack. Ruhl makes it clear in Late: A Cowboy Song that Crick, Mary, and Red need not be any particular race or ethnicity, and most of the other characters in her plays could easily be played by nonwhite actors, but the role of Elizabeth is unique for her. Elizabeth’s existence as African American is realistic to the historical setting, her language is poetic rather than represented in dialect, and Ruhl draws her with dignity and beauty. As we’ve already seen in The Clean House and Late: A Cowboy Song, the most intimate relationship depicted in In the Next Room is between women. However effective the vibrator is as an aid, what Mrs. Daldry longs for is the sensual pleasures of human touch, and she finds this with Dr. Givings’s nurse, Annie. When the vibrator fails to work at one point, Annie applies the manual technique, which results in Mrs. Daldry having a much deeper and more powerful orgasm; later she refuses the vibrator, 85

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

saying “I don’t—want—a machine” (54), insisting upon touch, and when she climaxes she cries out for Annie. With their relationship Ruhl models how intimacy gets built from small actions of attention: Annie is attentive to Mrs. Daldry’s body; Mrs. Daldry is attentive to Annie’s knowledge of Greek philosophy; they take walks together. Post-climax, Mrs. Daldry plays the Givings’ piano “full of longing” while Annie and Mrs. Givings listen (129). Afterward, Mrs. Daldry and Annie, caught up in the moment, spontaneously kiss—in the most instinctual and mutual expression of affection and desire in the play—yet, not knowing what to do with these feelings, how to assimilate them into her existing world, Mrs. Daldry suggests, “I had better not see you ever again.” Annie responds, “I suppose not” (130) and they part, leaving the audience to feel a lingering loss of what might have been. The play is set in an age “hovering at the dawn of electricity” (5) and however much characters are delighted by the innovations that electricity brings—the lightbulb, the vibrator—there’s a fear of losing mystery in their lives. Mrs. Givings contemplates life in which one would never again carry a candle, would lose the solemnity of walking carefully in the dark, or the power of extinguishing the light with “one’s own breath.” “Do you think our children’s children will be less solemn?” she asks Mrs. Daldry. “A flick of the finger—and all is lit! A flick of the finger, and all is dark! On, off, on off ! We could change our minds a dozen times a second! On, off, on off ! We shall be like gods!” Mrs. Daldry replies in accord: “I’m afraid so” (61). Michial Farmer, digging into one of Ruhl’s source texts, Tom McNichol’s AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War, discovered that McNichol tends to discuss electricity in rather mystical terms. For example, he describes his own experience of being electrocuted by saying, vaguely pantheistically, that “The electricity was entering my body through my hand, but it didn’t feel like the current had any particular location. It was everywhere. It was me” and that “electricity, like the face of the Creator, is normally hidden from view”; as far as the masses were concerned, electricity never lost its quasi-religious quality. 50 As in Dead Man’s Cell Phone, the human connection is what’s most essential; the sparks-between-two-people variety of electricity is what is deeply craved, and Ruhl gets a lot of metaphorical mileage out of this. Edison’s lightbulb was proclaimed “a light without flame, without danger!” (77) But 86

“Getting in the Same Room is Kind of the Dream”

to artist Leo, “a light without flame isn’t divine.” It is “like having relations with a prostitute. No flame of love or desire, only the outer trappings of— the act. And without love—without the mental quickening—the eyes— the blood—without the heart—or intellect—bodies are meat. Meat and bone and levers and technicalities” (77–78). Electrical current stands in for human connection when Mrs. Givings, trying to get through to her Edison-admiring husband, tells him that between alternating or direct current she prefers “Direct. From here to here. / She gestures from his heart to her heart” (124). However, the most discomforting scene of In the Next Room is one in which facing marital difficulties directly results in humiliation and a scurrying-away. Ruhl’s dramaturgy of indirection does not simply convey a story but models a way toward the resolving the conflict. At this point midway through the second act, Mrs. Givings has finally managed to talk Dr. Givings into treating her with the device, but she does not want him to stand clinically aside as he does with his patients; she wants him to use it as a tool for intimacy, as a way of growing closer together by giving his wife pleasure. “Kiss me now,” she pleads. “Kiss me and hold the instrument there, just there, at the same time” (95). The stage directions tell us “She kisses him passionately / and puts the vibrator back on her private parts.” Dr. Givings hesitates, expressing fear that this will result in “some perverse kind of onanism” (95). “Kiss me, kiss me now!” Mrs. Givings insists: He kisses her politely. Mrs. Givings This is inadequate! You are inadequate! Oh, God! She has not yet had a paroxysm. He takes the vibrator away from her. (96) Frustrated and emotionally exposed, initially she tries to express in rational language that she’s upset because he hasn’t been noticing her—not now, and not then, years earlier, when she was first in love with him and wrote her name in the snow outside his office window in an effort to catch his attention. Her language sounds clunky and wooden, as it would if you were trying to directly, earnestly explain what you want from your mate, as many therapists would advise you to do. “Uuugh—how ridiculous I sound” (98), Mrs. Givings fumes before storming out the door to walk in the snow. When Dr. Givings can finally express in his own vernacular the “very particular and individual” way in which he loves Mrs. Givings, their 87

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

relationship begins to heal. Giving his wife tender kisses all over her face, he blesses each precise spot with its scientific name: I bless thee: temporomandibular joint I bless thee: buccal artery and nerve I bless thee: depressor anguli oris I bless thee: zygomatic arch I bless thee: temporalis fascia. I bless thee, Catherine. Mrs. Givings cries, it is so intimate. (141)51 “Open me,” Mrs. Givings responds. Dr. Givings expresses his misgivings: “Here?” She goes on: Mrs. Givings Away from the machine. In the garden. Undress me there. Dr. Givings You wish to undress in the garden in December? Mrs. Givings Yes, and please, do not call me impractical. Our whole future happiness depends upon it. (141–42) The new openness in their relationship transforms the scene around them. As they kiss, suddenly the house disappears and “we are in a sweet small winter garden. Snow covers trees that in the spring flower with pink flowers” (142). As John Lahr puts it, “The set, with all its bourgeois trappings, falls away, and the play moves from comedy of manners to vision: in a surreal and exquisite encounter, which plays as a ‘mad pilgrimage of the flesh,’ to borrow Tennessee Williams’s phrase, Dr. Givings and his wife face each other in their snowy garden.”52 Dr. Givings partially undresses Mrs. Givings. She undresses him completely, and “we see the moon glowing off his skin, / off his back and shoulders. / . . . / She has never seen him naked before— / she has only seen him under the covers” (143). Heidi Schmidt reads this moment as a Brechtian verfremdung, effectively highlighting the constructedness of the staging. Ruhl presents us with a familiar illustration: a scene of heterosexual intimacy in which one partner is naked. She 88

“Getting in the Same Room is Kind of the Dream”

de-familiarizes it, however, by showing us the unexpected male body, not the female. The verfremdung disrupts the narrative, and for a brief moment reminds us that we are watching a play, that it has been constructed for us, that the presence of either male or female nudity is a choice, and that it is always a choice in representation.53 “Lie down and make a snow angel,” Mrs. Givings tells her husband when he confesses he’s embarrassed by his nakedness (143). As “It snows on them” and “Outside, on the street corners, the gas lamps go on, one by one, flickering, insubstantial,” she lies on top of him and they make a snow angel together (143). Dr. Givings speaks her name, “Catherine,” and we hear her words of intimate pleasure, “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God” (144). In the fullest sense of Woolf ’s “moments of being,” this is a moment that is not an argument, not a conclusive statement, not even, in this conclusion to the play, a resolution. Although it’s a happy ending, Ruhl resists sentimentality by not allowing the play to be talked out and tied up. As Lahr writes, “All we can know of Heaven, Ruhl seems to be saying, is the joy we make for one another here on earth.”54

Stage Kiss Ruhl has called Stage Kiss, a commission by the Goodman Theater in Chicago, an experiment to explore “the phenomenon of actors kissing on stage. I think it’s so wonderful and so weird, to kiss in front of people for a job.”55 The play is easily dismissed as a confection (Ruhl herself calls it a “soufflé”; Charles Isherwood called it her “fluffiest, most accessible play”), a stylistic playground for fooling around in farce and 1930s-era melodrama, but it also takes seriously our paradoxical longings for both stability and unpredictability in marriage. In Ruhl’s words, “the indefinable slipping point between the actuality of the kiss and the illusion of the kiss” onstage reminds me of the actuality of love and the stories we tell ourselves about love. The ordinariness of a long and stable relationship is nonnarrative by nature, whereas the combustible romance (and I think the word “romance” almost implies an ending) has extraordinary narrative power over us. Our imaginations want a romance, our practical natures want a marriage. So what to do? How to live?56 89

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

She prefaces Stage Kiss with an epigraph from Iris Murdoch: “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” This tension between self and other, reality and illusion, permeates the play on two levels, for Stage Kiss is both about fantasies and realities in love, and a love letter to the space in our culture where we get to play this out—that is, the theatre. It not only enacts clichés of the theatre, such as scene partners who fall in love and actors who struggle to separate reality from fantasy, but also pinpoints the great satisfaction found in doing (and seeing) theatre—the vicarious experience of being fully alive and living out your desires. Ruhl instructs that the setting be designed for three modes that can “easily transform”: 1. A raw theater space (emptiness, the thing itself). 2. A 1930s stage set (artifice happy to be artifice; think: gorgeous painted drops and flats). 3. A naturalistically messy East Village apartment, as real as possible (artifice ashamed of its own artifice; think: an installation).57 The play moves progressively from the space that is most real—the theatre, stripped down for audition and rehearsal—to most artificial—a stage set for a contemporary naturalistic play, while the main characters, named just She and He, get drawn gradually from the reality of acting in a play together to the fantasy that they, like their characters, are in love with one another. Back in love with one another, that is, since they were lovers twenty years ago. She is now married, He is in a relationship, but their old desire is rekindled in rehearsal. Although their autobiographical memories recall their irritations (her cheating, his immaturity), their bodies are cued by somatic markers (arousal, excitement, they remember where their hands fit on this person) and take over. In a brilliant split scene, Ruhl dramatizes their inner lives and the confusing hate-love they still feel. She and He have been rehearsing and as soon as a break is called they retreat into their cell phones but, as the music and lights signal an emotional shift into another mode of being, we hear what’s actually going on in their minds: They look at each other. She I’ve dreamed of you most nights for the last twenty 90

He I’ve dreamed of you most nights for the last twenty years.

“Getting in the Same Room is Kind of the Dream”

years. I dream I introduce you to my child.

I dream that you introduce me to your lover and I clasp her hand and I like her.

I dream you want to kill me and that you’re trying to climb through my windows. I’m frightened.

I dream that you introduce me to your lover and I hate him. And then I kill her. I dream that you’re married. I dream that you’re dead. I dream that you introduce me to your child and she looks like me and we play quietly by the sea. I dream that you teach me how to play an instrument and it is calm. I dream that I steal your quilt, your childhood quilt. And it’s a terrible act of betrayal.

I dream that I steal your quilt, your childhood quilt. And it’s a terrible act of betrayal.

Lights back to normal. They stare at each other. Nothing was really spoken just now. (26–27) What is it that makes actors fall in love with their costars? Does kissing onstage cause us chemically to fall in love? Harrison, She’s husband, explains to He’s girlfriend Laurie that “She always falls in love with whoever she’s in a play with.” Turning to his wife and her scene partner he calculates, “You and—Johnny here—have kissed each other—let’s see—nine times a night, eight shows a week, four-week run, two hundred and eighty-eight times. That’s not love. That’s oxytocin” (90). Stage Kiss also investigates the phenomenon of the audience’s watching all that kissing. The character She asks, “Why do you think people enjoy watching other people kiss on stage, anyway?” The character He tells her that people “don't enjoy it”; they merely “tolerate it because it signifies

91

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

resolution which people like to see on stage but they don’t really like to see the act of kissing on stage. That’s why actors have to be good looking because it’s about an idea, an idea of beauty completing itself. You don’t like to see people do more than kiss on stage, it’s repulsive” (65). But why, then, “do we want to see people have sex in the movies,” She asks. He responds, That’s because you can be alone in your own mind when you watch a movie and it’s like masturbation but you can’t be alone when you watch a play because there’s always someone next to you. That’s why it’s uncomfortable to watch people have sex on stage but pleasant to watch them have sex in movies. And that’s why porn stars don’t have to be as good looking as actors because we’re not watching the idea of sex but sex itself which can be ugly. And that’s why the theater is superior to film, because it’s less like masturbation. (65) When the play closes, She wants that play-life to continue; it now “feels like my real life,” she says. “I don’t want to be me. I want to be Ada Wilcox” (81). But He doesn’t want Ada Wilcox; he wants the real She. They kiss—A real kiss, the stage directions indicate. How would this look different onstage? They seem to be confused themselves. She asks, “When I kissed you just now did it feel like an actor kissing an actor or a person kissing a person because I’ve kissed you so many times over the last few weeks I’m starting not to know the difference.” He assures her, “It felt like a person” (81). But now that the play is over, no one will tell them “how it will end” or “when to stop” (82). Act Two opens on a hyper-real East Village apartment—He’s apartment— where the now-lovers are lounging, hungover, still in costume, in the real world, the world of bad reviews and street traffic. Real life collides with character in the figures of He’s girlfriend, Laurie, and She’s husband, Harrison, who show up along with She and Harrison’s daughter, Angela. But this real-life collision bursts into the most over-the-top theatrical moment in the show, where suddenly He begins singing “Some Enchanted Evening,” and one by one the others join in, singing “in perfect harmony” but “through some strange choreography, / He and She are now paired. Laurie and Harrison are now paired. / Laurie and Harrison kiss”(97). And then the stage blacks out. Although critics have complained about the mishmash of styles (Isherwood thought “the more farcical bits in Stage Kiss sometimes feel forced, and Ms. Ruhl’s voice is so distinctively her own that pastiche 92

“Getting in the Same Room is Kind of the Dream”

doesn’t come quite naturally to her”58), it is clear Ruhl is reveling in the pleasures of the artifice of theatre. Reminiscent of Shakespeare’s parodies of artificial stage language in “Pyramus and Thisbe” within A Midsummer Night’s Dream and “The Murder of Gonzago” within Hamlet, Ruhl’s playswithin-the play—the 1932 melodrama The Last Kiss and the contemporary play I loved you before I killed you, or: Blurry—are made up of dialogue that sounds “like a play,” in contrast to the “real” language of Stage Kiss. She as Ada Wilcox in The Last Kiss says of her lover, “he was like champagne, champagne, but you can’t live on champagne your whole life, eventually you want bread, my husband is like bread—oh the smell of toast in the morning!” (17). In Blurry, He says, “It hurts me to hear and I want to hurt” (117). Although Stage Kiss is farcical and bubbly, it also delivers some of Ruhl’s most serious considerations of marriage and intimacy. In the middle of performing I loved you before I killed you, or: Blurry, She spots her daughter in the audience and has a realization, saying on stage, but as herself, “I miss my husband” (134). Soon afterward we discover that Harrison financed and commissioned the play, “a play about a whore and an asshole” (141) for She and He to act in, to remind his wife of what she has at home, in her real life. Resonant with In the Next Room, he reminds her, “Marriage is about repetition. Every night the sun goes down and the moon comes up and you have another chance to be good. Romance is not about repetition” (142). He too has a recognition, though, that for their marriage to continue happily it will need a bit of the theatre, some infusion of fantasy. Harrison tells her, “I want you to take me to a theater and kiss me once a week, and pretend I’m someone else” (143). So, is this “a how-to guide about bringing fantasy back into a marriage”? No, Ruhl says, but “I think the husband is throwing down the gauntlet, and making an offer to his wife, a request, that they merge worlds. That their worlds are not so separate, the quotidian world of marriage and this beautiful world of fantasy. That they actually come together.”59

Coda “Virtually no one knows how to do intimacy,” Lauren Berlant writes.60 Of all the challenges we face in our lives, opening up to another person and becoming truly intimate is surely one of the hardest. We watch countless people fail at it, in the public sphere and in our private circles. Where do we 93

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

learn how to be intimate? Could the theatre—based as it is upon a premise of liveness, of presence, of being present to others—be a space in our culture in which to learn intimacy? A number of theatre artists have certainly thought so. A recurrent desire that emerges from generation to generation is for a space in which we can shed our daily masks, watch others shed theirs, and witness the unfolding of another’s self in vulnerable relation to our own. Like Ruhl they have sought to dramatize consciousness. This stretches back as least as far as the late eighteenth century in London, when Romantic playwright Joanna Baillie sought intimacy through a transformed performance space. She longed for small venues (hers was an era of 3,000seat theatres) where faces could be watched intently, body language read, voices heard at a conversational or even a whispered level. Such spaces would be perfectly suited for her dramatic innovations that isolated individual “passions”—emotions such as love, hate, fear, envy, remorse, and hope—and traced them in their “rise and progress through the heart.”61 Closely observing these passions was intended to provoke our “sympathetic curiosity” to know how other people are feeling and to lead us into a deeper connection with and understanding of them.62 About a century later in Stockholm, August Strindberg likewise found the theatre a promising space for developing intimacy. He established the Intimate Theatre and created a series of “Chamber Plays” featuring nonrealistic dramaturgy that would capture the inexplicability and complexity of human behavior, calling for an acting style that would include mumbling by the characters because “they are ashamed of being human.”63 Given Strindberg’s famous “intimacy issues” (three marriages, three divorces, bitter, some say misogynous, portrayals of male-female relationships) you wouldn’t ordinarily associate him with Sarah Ruhl, but as a Strindberg enthusiast and lover of Ruhl’s work I see they share a vision of the theatre as a space in which to enact and model, and especially in Ruhl’s case actually create intimacy. One of my favorite definitions of intimacy comes from literary scholar Laura Zebuhr, who writes, “Intimacy is the site at which we allow the most important people in our lives the same freedom, ambiguity, and wild beauty that we allow literary texts.”64 It’s reminiscent of Fornes’s insistence, “When I deal with other people, I don’t want something from them; I want a rapport,”65 and her distinction between hungering “for contemplation” of the love versus “eating” the love, which Ruhl argues, “is the essence of the dramaturgical divide between wanting something from someone and desire as attentiveness.”66 As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, desire in Ruhl’s plays is not presented as an “eating” or “wanting” but as a 94

“Getting in the Same Room is Kind of the Dream”

“heightened quasi-theological state of longing”:67 that is, attuning oneself to the other, allowing the other his or her own freedom, ambiguity, and wild beauty. Charles in The Clean House and Dr. Givings in In the Next Room or the vibrator play express intimacy with the eyes of medical doctors, Charles kissing the scar on Ana’s breast after he performs a mastectomy on her, and Dr. Givings naming and kissing the bones and tissues in Mrs. Givings’s face. Annie and Mrs. Daldry attune themselves to the other’s needs. Mary in Late: A Cowboy Song longs for Red’s wild-pony freedom and the selfawakening their intimacy gives her. Jean and Dwight’s love grows from their mutual desire for remembrance, which requires embossed paper, the tangible artifacts you can touch and hold. In Stage Kiss, She’s husband Harrison commissions a play that will allow his wife to run wild in a fantasy world, trusting that she will realize where she is truly loved and known. Characters in Ruhl’s play don’t spout clichés of love; they build intimacy from their own singular ways of being attentive to the other. Attention, as Simone Weil famously said, “taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.”68 This thought guides us to our last chapter, which looks at Ruhl’s plays of transcendence and communion.

95

CHAPTER 4 “I’M INTERESTED IN THOSE MORE INVISIBLE TERRAINS”

Raised Catholic, now a Buddhist—she has described herself as “this strange syncretic wandering Catholic former atheist Thomas Merton admirer who just took Refuge”1—over the course of her career Sarah Ruhl has been investigating “what theater can do metaphysically with religiosity,”2 exploring the mysteries of transformation, devotion, and communion. In an interview with dramaturge Wendy Weckwerth, Ruhl reflected, I was influenced by the sense of ritual and staging the invisible that is done at a Catholic mass. I’m always interested in theater that explores that kind of territory. From Maeterlinck to Paula Vogel’s play The Long Christmas Ride Home there’s the sense that theater is a place where you can actually look at the invisible. . . . Stage space can be transformative, and there’s so much beyond the living room walls. I guess I’m interested in those more invisible terrains.3 Her language invokes the concept of Holy Theatre, or the Theatre of the Invisible-Made-Visible, theatre that attempts to capture “the invisible currents that rule our lives,” as Peter Brook put it in The Empty Space.4 “The notion that the stage is a place where the invisible can appear has a deep hold on our thoughts,” Brook observes; “Many audiences all over the world will answer positively from their own experience that they have seen the face of the invisible through an experience on the stage that transcended their experience in life.”5 We go to the theatre in search of what we’ve lost in daily life, he argues: “all sense of ritual and ceremony.”6 This feels as true for American theatre—and life—today as when Brook observed the European theatre scene in 1968. The characters in Ruhl’s How to Transcend a Happy Marriage voice the same longings for rituals that teach us how to live; those in For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday reach for appropriate rites of passage for the transition from living to dead and adolescence to adulthood. In

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

The Oldest Boy, Buddhist rituals give sanctuary to both exiled Tibetans and Americans mourning losses and celebrating new life. In Passion Play, the ritual of performing the Passion play connects the members of the community to something larger than themselves; “the stage is our house of worship,” explains one.7 Theatre, ideally, can provide audiences the kind of stillness, absorption, or soul-stirring charge that people seek from devotional practices or worship services. When we spend much of our waking life distracted from being in the present moment, live theatre remains one of the few spaces (one of the “sacred places left in the world today” as Mrs. Gottlieb says in Dead Man’s Cell Phone, “the church, and the toilet” being the other two8) where we can be freed of ringing interruptions and called into full attention. Calling us into attentiveness is central to Ruhl’s playwriting ethos. There’s a way she “acknowledges an audience and invites them in, that’s really singular to me,” says director Sarah Rasmussen, artistic director of the Jungle Theater in Minneapolis.9 Ruhl’s plays are designed to invite the audience into “an I/Thou relationship with the stage rather than an I/ It relationship with the stage,” for the audience to “exist in relation to the stage as opposed to watching the stage as object.”10 Martin Buber’s I and Thou argues that “in the beginning is the relation”;11 “there is no I as such but only the I of the basic word I-You and the I of the basic word I-It.”12 In other words, we always exist in relation to others, but we are not always in mutual relation, when both parties acknowledge their bondedness and are attentive to the other. How do we know when we’ve been “swept into a mutual relation at the theater”? Ruhl observes, “My knees always tremble from the effort; my knees know something that my brain does not.”13 Her description resonates with those in classic explorations such as Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy and William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience as an experience marked by “ineffable joy and exaltation,” which “leaves the listener conscious of nothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards and almost bursting with its own emotion.”14 This holy experience has nothing to do with sanctimony or doctrine. (As Peter Brook put it, “It is not the fault of the holy that it has become a middle-class weapon to keep children good.”15) Audiences rising from a Sarah Ruhl play don’t take a moral lesson from a sermon; they have had an experience of having their souls stirred. In 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write Ruhl aligns her work with medieval mystery plays; in contrast to the morality plays, which had a clear moral, the mystery plays “had an emotional effect harder to cognitively capture.”16 Arthur Miller and George Bernard Shaw are 98

“I’m Interested in Those More Invisible Terrains”

morality play writers; Tennessee Williams and Samuel Beckett are mystery play writers. While the distinction doesn’t always clearly hold (Ruhl names Tony Kushner’s Angels in America the “perfect American play” because of its “seamless equipoise between the morality play and the mystery play”) it’s useful for understanding where Ruhl situates herself.17 Her work is also something quite different from the plays about God and church and religion that have proliferated on mainstage American theatres over the past decade, from the Broadway hits The Book of Mormon and Hand to God to Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, Young Jean Lee’s Church and Lucas Hnath’s The Christians, or even the avant-garde works of a playwright close to Ruhl, Erik Ehn’s The Saint Plays and Soulographie,18 all of which directly take on religion as a topic or stage theological and moral issues. Ruhl’s plays, in contrast, are more indirect. Like Maeterlinck, she is trying, even in scenes of sorrow, “to reveal to us how truly wonderful is the mere acting of living, and to throw light upon the existence of the soul.”19 Ruhl’s characters may seek to transcend their bodies and everyday lives, but it is precisely there that the magic, the holiness, dwells, which we will explore in this chapter through Passion Play, The Oldest Boy, To Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, and How to Transcend a Happy Marriage.

Passion Play Passion Play is Ruhl’s most epic work to date, a three-play cycle depicting communities producing the Passion play in different eras and countries. Part One is set in 1575 in a village in northern England, at a time when Passion plays have been forbidden by Elizabeth I. “Not many towns dare in these dark days to play the Passion in England,” a Visiting Friar tells the actor playing Pontius Pilate (17). John the Fisherman, who plays Christ, tells the friar, “We are all Catholic in our private hearts though we have no public house of worship left. The stage is our house of worship” (19). Part Two takes place on the 300th anniversary of the Passion play, in 1934 in Oberammergau, Bavaria, during the rise of the Nazi Party; this community’s version of the play emphasizes the wickedness of the Jews in the killing of Christ. Part Three is the most capacious in time, moving from 1969 to the present, from the Vietnam War through the Reagan era to today, in Spearfish, South Dakota, where in the 1940s a German immigrant established the tradition of staging the Passion play. Ruhl’s play had a long and incremental gestation over fourteen years. Part One was her first 99

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

full-length play, written as her undergraduate thesis at Brown University, supervised by Paula Vogel, and premiered in the New Plays Festival at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence in 1997. At the American College Theater Festival at Kennedy Center, Passion Play (still existing just as Part One) was awarded the Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award, which meant it got a reading at Sundance Theater Laboratory in 2000.20 This is where Ruhl became acquainted with director Mark Wing-Davey, who would become one of her longtime collaborators. In 2002 Wing-Davey directed the first two parts of Passion Play in London, in a shoestring production at the experimental Tristan Bates Theatre. Part Three was commissioned by Molly Smith, artistic director of Arena Stage in Washington, DC, who directed the first production of the entire cycle in 2005. Ruhl continued to develop the play in three subsequent productions with Wing-Davey at the Goodman Theater in Chicago (2007), the Yale Repertory Theatre (2008), and with the Epic Theatre Ensemble at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn (2010), where it formed part of a festival intended to “bring together believers and nonbelievers to investigate the intersections of faith, ritual, belonging and performance.”21 The 100th essay in 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write shares Ruhl’s primary human hope that identity might indeed be fluid, that we are simultaneously ourselves and the beasts in the field, a donkey, a queen, a starlet, a lover—and that identity might be nothing more than dipping our Hericlitean feet in the river, moment to moment. And if identity is fluid, then we might actually be free. And furthermore, if identity is fluid, then we might actually be connected—in Whitman’s sense—if we can be the leaves of grass and also the masses on the Brooklyn Bridge, then we can leave the ego behind and be world for a moment.”22 Identity questions propelled the creation of Passion Play as Ruhl imagined the freedom to shift and transform ourselves and worried about the traps of being typecast. If you are ugly and misshapen and therefore always cast in the role of villain, does it make you villainous? Or might it make you more compassionate, able to see pain and suffering that more seemingly fortunate others are blind to? She wondered, “How would it shape or misshape a life to play a biblical role year after year? How are we scripted? Where is the line between authentic identity and performance? And is there, in fact, such a line?”23 Rereading a favorite childhood book, Betsy and the Great 100

“I’m Interested in Those More Invisible Terrains”

World, she was intrigued with the depiction of actors in the Passion play at Oberammergau: the man who played Christ was “actually so holy as to have become a living embodiment” and the woman who played Mary was “just as pure as the Virgin.”24 Rather than a representation of a Passion play itself, Ruhl’s Passion Play is a backstage drama exploring the experiences of acting in the biblical drama and the effects it can have on actors and communities. Like Stage Kiss, Passion Play is an exploration of reality and illusion or, as Charles Isherwood put it, “the intersection of belief and make-believe.”25 To Ruhl, Stage Kiss and Passion Play are Eastern and Western sides of the same questions of illusion; because Stage Kiss is “about love and whether or not love is an illusion, and whether or not our lives are a dream, what’s real . . . . These are, one might argue, Eastern questions” whereas Passion Play concerns “role playing and questions about scapegoats in the JudeoChristian tradition.”26 Passion Play, a “nexus of religion, politics, and the theater,”27 is ultimately about “how actors wring moments out of their private lives in order to bear witness in the community.”28 Ruhl encourages designers to “think in terms of metaphor, transformation, and empty space”29 and embrace the challenge of the three different settings of the cycle. Even though the play calls for giant fish puppets and instructs that at the end of the show a character “gets on an enormous boat” and “sails off into the distance” (235), a “poor theatre” concept works better than a big-budget realistic one for creating the feeling of being in a community theatre space.30 Ruhl has written fondly of Mark Wing-Davey’s production of Passion Play for Epic Theatre Company in the Lafayette Avenue church in Brooklyn when, in the first preview performance, a fire alarm went off in the middle of Part Three and all—actors and audience—were evacuated from the theatre space. What could have ended in disaster or just plain disappointment turned out to be a magical evening, as actors went on with the show outside, improvising props and sound cues as needed. As Ruhl describes it: Slowly the audience quieted and gathered round, and somehow one after another, the actors came up and performed their scenes with no blocking, no props, no nothing, in silent agreement. . . . I was so moved that telling the story was more important to them than the fear of exposure. I suppose that’s always the playwright’s hope—that telling the story outweighs the very real fear of total public humiliation; but often there are things for actors to hide behind: costume changes, sound cues, beautifully painted drops, props, and the like. But on the 101

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

steps of Lafayette Avenue church, they had nothing but each other, the audience, and the story.31 Jill Stevenson argues that productions “that have embraced an intimate, community theatre approach to production have been able to create a ritual space that inspires the kind of spiritual, existential reflection on past, present, and future often associated with sacred medieval drama.”32 While much of the dramatic action of Passion Play concerns offstage relationships, we see a few scenes of rehearsal for the Passion play itself, with stage conventions appropriate to each era. In Elizabethan England, for instance, where the Passion play hangs on as a kind of medieval anachronism in the Renaissance, Ruhl creates lines of heavily alliterative, Middle English-style verse, such as in the depiction of the Garden of Eden, where Eve says to the serpent tempting her to bite the apple, “Then will I to thy teaching trust, / And fang this fruit unto our food” (36). In Oberammergau the Last Supper is presented in nineteenth-century-style tableau, while in South Dakota a special effects guy has been hired to add firecrackers for spectacle and actors trained in the Method demand to know the motivation for their character. Much of the power of the play comes from the resonance that is built as we move from act to act. The roles are almost entirely triple-cast, with the actor who plays, for instance, Pontius Pilate playing that role throughout the three parts: Pontius the Fish Gutter in Part One, Foot Soldier in Part Two, and P in Part Three. The psychic weight he endures from playing the villainous tool of state power gets heavier as the play progresses, even though the action isn’t continuous and the actor isn’t playing the same person. Visual and aural echoes from one part to the next layer feeling and meaning. In Part One Pontius the Fish Gutter tells us he feels “the tingling in my head again—something pulling—like a string at the top—a puppet—up and down, string” (16); in Part Two the Foot Soldier distances himself, saying “Plays aren’t real. The soldier’s boot—that’s real” (89) and, as Pilate before the Crucifixion, “I have no share in this blood-guilt” (137). In Part Three, P returns from Vietnam with enormous guilt over killing civilians and now sees his role of Pilate as a real man, not merely a character, and wants to change his lines to “I, Pontius Pilate, an agent of the State, condemn this man to death. Not the Jews, not history. I will take responsibility” (201). Someone, he is saying, needs to assume the guilt of the state when the leaders will not take on the responsibility of having sent thousands of men to their deaths or mental illness. 102

“I’m Interested in Those More Invisible Terrains”

In ironic response to the notion that actors who played the holy characters onstage were holy in life, Ruhl’s community member-actors are often leading lives that are incongruous with their characters in both humorous and poignant ways. The character Mary 1, who plays the Virgin Mary, is lusty, earthy, never a virgin; the one who plays Pilate is the most intelligent and conscience-stricken, whereas the one who plays the role of Jesus forgets his lines or is egotistical. There’s always a tension between Jesus and Pilate: they’re cousins in Part One, potential lovers in Part Two, brothers in Part Three. The heartrending character in all three plays is the one not included in the plays: the figure of the outcast, scapegoat, artist. In Elizabethan England she is the Village Idiot; in Oberammergau she is an orphaned Jew from another country who is called Violet, or the Village Idiot, because the locals find it difficult to pronounce her given name; and in South Dakota she is also named Violet, a perceptive artist and the daughter of the actors who play Pilate and the Virgin Mary (or perhaps of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, since Pilate was away in the Vietnam War when she was born; she calls both men “Dad”). In Parts One and Two she is ostracized and excluded from the play; she is locked in a cage like the jack-in-the-box she plays with, kissing him and apologizing for shutting him “in that dark, dark box, your body all bent and twisted” (22). She recognizes that she is like Jack; there is no part in the play for either of them. “You just pop out of a box, don’t you, Jack? And I just wind you because things need to be wound.” When the Director ties her to a stump and takes away the jack-inthe-box she shouts, “JACK! SAVE ME! It is dark and I am in the box” (22). In each part she is also the character who has inner sight, who can see what the others don’t. “The Sky Turns Red” is a regular apocalyptic stage direction throughout Passion Play. It is the Village Idiot who makes the sky turn red. Passion Play opens with the evocation of a medieval mystery play, with a Chorus delivering a Prologue that sets us in time: “The Virgin Queen is on her throne / the Catholics are mostly done” (11) and asks the audience, recalling the prologue to Henry V, to “use your eyes, ears, / your most inward sight / for here is day (a painted sun) / and here is night (a painted moon)” (11). It then presents this visual: “A man on a cross. The sound of sawing. / At first we are not sure whether or not this is a real crucifixion” (13). This scene echoes the medieval play The Crucifixion, part of the traditional Passion cycle, in which the pinners’ guild, the manufacturers of nails, sponsored the scene of the crucifixion. The character Carpenter 2 tells us, “My father’s father was a carpenter. My father’s father’s father was a carpenter. We all have blisters and splinters in our fingers and all for the 103

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

glory of God” (15). The handsome John the Fisherman plays Christ while his cousin Pontius the Fish Gutter is stuck playing Pontius Pilate because Pontius the Fish Gutter is hunchbacked and smells of fish; his belly button was never properly sewed up after birth and therefore allows his guts to be aired. Pontius wants to play Christ, however. “If only, I thought, they put me on a cross, I would feel holy, I would walk upright” (16). He seethes with envy for his cousin and wants to kill him and simultaneously to be martyred like Christ: “I want to kill my cousin. No—I want—when he is on the cross—and if I left him on just the slightest bit too long—and if the pretend nails were real .  .  . then they would nail me to the cross, and I would follow him to glory” (16). As Leslie Atkins Durham puts it, “Pontius seeks the adulation that comes from playing history’s greatest leading role, but he also wants an internal and external transformation to go with it.”33 Passion Play is also a small-p passion play. Pontius is in love with Mary 1, who is in turn attracted to John the Fisherman; one night, frustrated that John the Fisherman has not responded to her, she makes love with Pontius and gets pregnant, which puts her role as the Virgin Mary in jeopardy. Pontius responds lovingly, begging her, “Run away with me, Mary. We’ll be a Trinity. You, me, the baby. You can nail me to a cross, Mary, I’m yours, yours forever. You can scourge me every night and still I’m yours forever” (51). Mary 1 wants to stay in town and keep her part, though; she’s wanted to play the Virgin Mary all her life. Mary 2, who plays Mary Magdalene, urges Mary 1 to tell the Visiting Friar that she has been blessed with a miracle: that like the Virgin Mary, God has impregnated her. When John the Fisherman hears, he echoes Pontius in his proposal, but out of a sense of nobility connected to his Christ role rather than out of romantic desire and love: “Marry me. Be my wife. We’ll raise the child together as Mary and Joseph did before us. I’ll never touch you, if that’s what you want. I’ll fish all day—I’ll feed us with fruit from the sea” (60). When villagers treat Mary 1’s pregnancy with suspicion, Mary 2 offers a third proposal, echoing the words of the men, “I love you, Mary. Let’s run off together. I’ll protect you. We’ll raise the child together as Mary and Joseph did before us. I’ll dress as a man . . . . I look enough like a man . . . we’ll go far away from here” (65). Mary 1, distraught and afraid of being found out, drowns herself. John the Fisherman finds her and carries her onto the stage. “Water pours out of her mouth onto the stage. / Water continues to pour out of her and off of her” (76).34 The act closes with Pontius next to the body of Mary, stabbing himself to die with her. “Drums. Big beautiful fish puppets surround him, lift 104

“I’m Interested in Those More Invisible Terrains”

him up, and carry him offstage” (78). The sky, which had been an apocalyptic red throughout, turns blue. Although the narrative arc of the Passion play remains the same over time—Creation to Judgment Day—the differing contexts of historical eras and geographical locations color the text in various ways. Part Two’s setting in 1934 Oberammergau (where the Passion play continues to be played every ten years) is heavily tinged with anti-Semitism. Ruhl writes in her playwright’s note that “many narratives describe Oberammergau as a living picture of the New Testament, ignoring the fact that, in 1934, the director of the Passion was already a member of the Nazi party” and that by 1947 “every actor in the play had at one time been a Nazi, with the exception of the men who played, ironically, Judas and Pontius Pilate” (x). This version of the play includes a specifically Jewish Chorus that sounds like Shylock crying, “My money, ah, my money!” desperately grabbing the gold coins in the vessel Jesus overturns in the temple (102), and Hitler comes onstage to praise the veracity of the production, “For never has the menace of the Jews been so convincingly portrayed as in this presentation of what happened in the times of the Romans. There one sees in Pontius Pilate a Roman racially and intellectually superior, there he stands out like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of the Jews” (138). (Ruhl uses Hitler’s own language from remarks on the Passion Play at Oberammergau.) To the always-in-tension relationship of Pontius Pilate and Christ Ruhl adds another pressure: romantic desire. A Foot Soldier playing Pilate is in love with Eric, who plays Christ. As gay men but also soldiers in the Nazi army they have a Nietzschean admiration of power yet are targets of the new regime. Eric feels the burden of playing Christ; he is only playing the role because his father did before him. “Very unpleasant, the nails, the whipping, the blood,” the Foot Soldier observes; “no one actually wants to be Christ, they only want to admire him from a distance” (91). When Eric’s father played the role he got a radiant glow on his face, but this feeling eludes Eric. He tells Mary 2, his sister in Part Two, “I mean—when you’re playing your part—or other times—have you ever felt—the grace of God pour into you like a fever? So you don’t have to—decide—I think this or I think that— suddenly you’re bigger than yourself—and you’re looking at the clouds— isn’t that how it’s supposed to feel?” (123) How, he continues, anything “big—important—love—or—or—art—or marching with hundreds of people” feels (124), equating love and art with the power of marching with the army and being a part of something much bigger than yourself. Part Two ends with a chilling reminder of the dangers of being swept up in a 105

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

regime’s bigger-than-yourself plan. Eric is sent to take Violet, the former Village Idiot, away because she is a Jew. “Jesus was a Jew,” she tells him; he responds, “Kind of. But not really” (144). She recalls his best self to him: earlier he dared to disobey directions and show kindness to her (he freed her from the cage the director locked her in). “I always liked you,” she says; “you don’t have a jolly fat face like the other villagers—you always looked a little bit sad” (145). Eric’s inner wrestling is indicated in the stage direction, “If the struggle against evil could be contained in one commonplace phrase, ‘thank you’ is the only one allowed to Eric for the moment” (145). Theatre is not life, Violet reminds him. “Wait,” she says. “Right now—it’s not like being in a play—no one’s watching—you could do something different” (146). But Eric cannot resist obeying the state power, and in a silent Epilogue to Part Two, which moves the play into intermission, The rest of the cast enters the stage. They look at Violet and Eric. They look at the audience. The sound of a train speeding across tracks. Eric gives Violet a final push forward, into the light. The lights change from red to grey. A terrible silence. (147) Prefacing Part Three is an epigraph from a 1970 official illustrated catalog of the Oberammergau Passion Play: “1970. Spiritual need as there never was before . . . is this the reason why scores of people flock to Oberammergau?”35 Ruhl started writing the last part of the cycle in 2004 and finished in 2007, feeling ever more frustrated with the American political climate. As she told Jill Stevenson, “It took me a long time to write it . . . . I was so angry during the years of the Bush presidency. I mean, I was just angry all the time, about politics anyway. And about how religious feeling was being made a travesty of in this country.” The sense of the United States as a country whose leaders keep it endlessly at war, dividing families and friends, permeates Part Three. It begins in 1969, when the Passion play has ended for the season and P is heading to Vietnam while his brother, J, is returning to college, where he’s studying philosophy, though P is actually the better student and is ahead of J in his reading. P and Mary 1 are lovers; he proposes to her on the evening before he deploys. When P comes home we immediately recognize his mental war wounds. He winces when Mary 1 touches him. He tells her, “I need you to remember me—to myself ” (188). He sleeps outside the door 106

“I’m Interested in Those More Invisible Terrains”

of the house so that he can listen for anyone who might be approaching. Violet, their daughter, born while he was away, is now three years old, and has a preternatural quality that her earlier characters, the Village Idiot and the Oberammergau Violet shared. When P was in the war, he tells Violet, he was the pilot of a ship and blew the wind himself to stay the ship’s course. Violet tells him, “when I was in the war, I was not a pilot” (192). What war? P wonders. “The war before,” Violet responds. “There is always a war before, and a war after” (193). Each tries to get the wars out of the other’s head: they pluck out the imaginary wars with their fingers, put them on the ground, hold hands and jump on them to stamp them out. While P was in Vietnam, the hometown Passion play changed: it now has slick new production values and a newly brought-in professional director, who was a conscientious objector in Canada and didn’t experience the reality of the war like P did, which sets the reality versus illusion theme on two levels. As in Stage Kiss, J is the annoying actor in training who wants everything to be dramatically realistic in order for it to feel real—he has been studying acting at the university and now is ashamed of the community theatre amateur aesthetics and conventions, which no longer feel authentic to him. Mary 1 complains that J is “acting” whereas her father, who played in the Passion play for years, “never acted—he just told the story. There was no—effort. There was no—acting” (182). The director breaks their fight with the exclamation, “If we can’t get along in a theater when the world is falling apart then how can you expect anyone to get along in this world? There’s a war on. Why don’t you do it again. And think about that” (183). In a rehearsal with J, P and J argue about what’s real: J wants the acting style to get toned down and TV-style realistic—for an amphitheater that seats 6,000 people—and P challenges him, “What the fuck do you know about real? You want real?” Picking up a nail and a hammer that sit onstage by the cross, P tells J, “this nail is real,” “this wood is real,” and “my hand is real” and goes on, “You want to know about real sacrifice? / It’s in the body,” after which he puts his left hand on the cross and hammers a nail into it (212). The next scene opens ten years later, with P’s left hand limp (visually echoing Pontius the Fish Gutter from Part One) as he meets with a psychiatrist at the VA hospital. It is now 1984. Ronald Reagan, former actor, is now President. P and Mary 1 have divorced and P has spent the last decade wandering around the country, living in ten different cities. The psychiatrist is no help for his real struggles, which are spiritual. P is suffering from moral injury, we would recognize today. His soul is in anguish.36 P laments, “Is this all we’ve got now? A bunch of white coats? 107

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

No priests to say yes, son, your suffering meant something, no kings on the battlefield to say yes, soldier, your suffering meant something. Just give me a pill, a God-shaped pill, please” (216). How Pontius Pilate should really be played is “like a hung-over politician in a God-forsaken province who took stupid orders on a really fucking bad day” (217). P has so taken on the guilt of Pilate that he thinks of himself as Pilate. He shows up at Mary 1’s house to get a shower and shave because Pilate was a clean-shaven Roman. When he’s told that a professional actor has been hired to play Pilate he asks, “Can he show what it’s like to give orders to kill a man? Unless he’s been there and seen what it’s like up close—” (219). “I killed people—for that / man—and no one wants / to give me a fucking bar of soap!” (220) Even though the president who sent him to Vietnam (Nixon) is different from the current president (Reagan) it feels all the same to him. “What man would die for a leader who was not rushing to the battlefield with him—their blood soaking into the dust together,” pointedly asks Queen Elizabeth I, entering the stage briefly in Part Three (174; emphasis in original). She and the other representatives of the state, and the statesanctioned religion, Hitler and Reagan, are all played by the same actor. They all love being onstage. In Part One the Queen interrupts the village performance announcing, “I do not want my subjects to impersonate the holy figure of Christ” (71). “If any man or woman in England is seen with a painted face,” other than herself of course, as Elizabeth I’s painted face was infamous, “assuming the person of a holy figure on the stage, I will have them beheaded. Immediately” (72). Hitler, as noted earlier, commends the condemnation of Jews in “your holy play” (138). “How I love the theater,” he says to himself (138). Reagan, speaking to the audience of the play in South Dakota, throws out phrases that have become connected with him, such as “It’s morning in America” and “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!” Nostalgically recounting his ability to create illusion, he relates to the audience his experience of calling baseball games for the radio while he was in Davenport, Iowa, away from the games in Chicago. “I would make the folks feel like they were there, even though I was—elsewhere! That’s what a great leader does. You don’t even need to be at the game!” (229), he says, countering Elizabeth I’s depiction of the days when rulers risked themselves and fought alongside their armies. P, watching the play, which has become “more of a musical. Very professional” (230), is haunted by Mary 1’s and J’s love onstage. He approaches the stage, where Reagan asks him, “What’s the matter, son? Dontcha have a part in the play?” (233). P pulls out a gun, pointing it at himself. As the scene blacks out we assume that P will kill 108

“I’m Interested in Those More Invisible Terrains”

himself. But the lights come back up for an epilogue, in which P addresses us in the present moment. Ruhl gives him a curtain speech: “You might think, at the very end, that I’d kill my brother. Kill myself. Kill my ex-wife. Big love triangle, bang bang, an American passion play” (234). But instead he left the theatre and takes buses to a different city each month, sleeps outside to hear the wind. “I don’t know if this country needs more religion or less of it. Seems to me everyone needs a good night’s sleep. That way we’d all wake up for real in the morning. It’s good to be awake. When you’re awake you can fight for what you believe in, no matter what costume you’re wearing” (235).

The Oldest Boy One of Ruhl’s enduring themes is how to love and let go. In Eurydice she presented the parent-child relationship from the daughter’s perspective of having lost her father. The Oldest Boy is a tale told from the mother’s point of view of facing the loss of her son. It is a play about motherhood, attachment, and taking refuge. “Taking refuge,” we learn in the play, is the term used for becoming a Buddhist. While it is quietly depicted literally in Act Two when the mother takes refuge with a Buddhist lama, Ruhl employs it metaphorically throughout the play to explore ways we take refuge in— that is, love—others: teachers and students, husbands and wives, parents and children. If we looked at The Oldest Boy autobiographically we might call it Ruhl’s conversion narrative since she took refuge at some point during the process of conceiving and writing it; it was also inspired by the experiences of her Tibetan nanny Yangzom.37 The plot of the play is spare: a white Midwestern American woman and her Tibetan husband (called just Mother and Father) are visited by a Tibetan monk and lama, who tell them their three-year-old son is the reincarnation of the visiting lama’s former teacher, and that because it is the boy’s destiny to become the next lama, they would like to take him to India to be educated in the monastery. The dramatic conflict of the play is not whether the boy really is the reincarnated lama. That is dispensed with rather quickly in a test where the boy, Tenzin, easily identifies items (prayer beads, a prayer book, a bowl) that belonged to him in the past life. The conflict is more internal: how can a mother let go of her son? The play contains very little dramatic action; instead, it has the audience sit patiently with the mother as she mourns the change in her original relationship with her child and grows to accept the transformation of his 109

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

and her own dharma or spiritual obligation. Like Noh drama it has a single focus rather than multiple plots; the story is told through music, dance, and ritual action as well as dialogue; and the pace is slow for Western theatre audiences. (This is felt especially keenly in Act Two, when the scene moves to India and the stage directions tell us “Time appears to slow a little in Act Two; there is more time for silence and ritual” [93].) Acts One and Two both open with the mother meditating: “She places a candle on the floor, faces the audience, and tries to meditate” (9). At the top of Act One the mother is more easily distracted. She is aware of the audience and gets up to turn her candle and meditation cushion around to face the back wall; she stops to listen to her baby monitor when she hears a little crying. By Act Two her concentration has improved; “she opens her eyes for a moment, / sees the audience, and goes back to meditating” (93). In both cases the acts begin quietly, with the audience drawn in to the meditative moment. When I viewed Sarah Rasmussen’s production at the Jungle Theater in Minneapolis in 2016 it felt akin to partaking in a Buddhist meditation practice myself, as my mind and body felt quieted and cleared from the outside world I brought into the theatre and prepared for the world of the play. I asked Rasmussen about this directing choice. “Like a poem, there’s a lot of space on the page in Oldest Boy,” she said, and she sought to translate that feeling on the page to the set, to let the action and the audience breathe.38 Reviews reveal that audiences need to adjust themselves to the experience Ruhl is creating for them. Charles Isherwood notes in the New York Times, “Had I read or seen the play, not knowing its author, I would not have guessed that Ms. Ruhl had written it. As a champion of Ms. Ruhl’s bolder forays, I’ll cop to some disappointment. The Oldest Boy is a touching but rather tame and predictable play.”39 Jesse Green complains in his Vulture review, “Not that there’s anything wrong with open-minded innocence in the exploration of other people and ideas, but combined with the suppressed psychology and mild dramaturgy here, it doesn’t leave very much of a play in the conventional (which is to say Western) sense.”40 Writing for the Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney is more attuned to what Ruhl was creating: “The Oldest Boy may not match the poetic complexity of the playwright’s The Clean House, or the sociopsychological acuity of In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play, but this meditation on such intellectually unfashionable concepts as faith, destiny and spirituality is delicate and affecting.”41 Rasmussen is right that The Oldest Boy is lighter on text than Ruhl’s other plays. Subtitled “A Play in Three Ceremonies,” it includes space and time for ceremonies to be performed as well as for the inclusion of Tibetan dances 110

“I’m Interested in Those More Invisible Terrains”

and music, depending upon the resources of the producing theatre and its community. Ceremony One is a traditional Tibetan marriage with the Mother dressed in a chuba, a traditional colorful apron worn in a Tibetan wedding, a procession, a white horse, and the ritual of throwing barley into the sky—although the ceremony is quickly and comically undercut by the Father’s statement that that is how the wedding would have been had he and the Mother been married in Tibet. Instead, they went to City Hall, the secular counterpart to the community ritual. The second ceremony is in remembrance of the Father’s mother, who died in Tibet. Because Tibetans aren’t allowed passports, the Father could not go to the funeral; at home he and the Mother perform a ceremony that involves filling seven bowls with water, saying a prayer in Tibetan, and lighting incense and butter lamps, all of which takes time on the stage. As with the building of the room of string in Eurydice, Ruhl invites the audience to witness the unfolding of a ritual of love. The third ceremony is the enthronement of the Oldest Boy as lama in India, in which each person lines up to be blessed by him. None of this is entirely new for Ruhl; from her earliest Dog Play she has experimented with onstage ritual, Noh dramatic structure, and the use of masks and puppets. What is particularly innovative and effective in The Oldest Boy is Ruhl’s choice to have the boy, Tenzin, be played by a puppet. She had wondered how she could cast the role “with a three-year-old who could memorize lines, project, and evince the spiritual authority of a seventy-year-old lama” and she also felt that a puppet “would be the clearest way to see the child and the child’s previous life at the same time” (139). In the premiere production directed by Rebecca Taichman for Lincoln Center, there were three puppeteers, following traditional bunraku style. When Sarah Rasmussen directed The Oldest Boy for the Jungle Theater, she decided to use just one puppeteer. As she explained to me, “My son is about the same age as Tenzin in Oldest Boy, and I felt that many puppeteers sort of overwhelmed the puppet,” and having just the puppet and puppeteer clarified the “metaphor between the student and the teacher and the old and the young and the duality of that.”42 The duality of Tenzin is revealed in his lines, which blend an age-old wisdom with the observations of a threeyear-old, such as when he asks the Mother, OLDEST BOY Mama, would you like to be God? MOTHER No, I like being your mother. OLDEST BOY But if you were God, then dinosaurs couldn’t eat you. (88–89) 111

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

At the close of the play the Mother has given birth to a second child, a girl, and Tenzin, now installed as the lama, holds her. The Mother warns him to hold the baby’s head up. He assures her, “I know, Mama. I’ve done this before. I used to be your father, remember? . . . Many lifetimes ago. I held you in my arms, like this” (131). We’re given the meeting story of the Mother and Father in a flashback: it took place in the restaurant that the Father opened when he fled Tibet, where one afternoon the Mother took refuge from a rainstorm. Time slows down as we watch them fall in love onstage; Ruhl pulls the audience into this event, instructing as the Mother and Father wash dishes (whether realistically or pantomimed) “the audience’s attention slows / as they experience the feeling, real or imagined, / of soap and water” (48). There are some initial cross-cultural tensions: the Father is engaged in an arranged marriage. (The Mother is also engaged, as it happens, but forgets to whom; “it’s no longer relevant,” she says [50].) She insists you should be able to choose your marriage partner. She chooses him; he should choose her. The Father responds, “Americans like to choose things. You choose things all the time. I would like: a soy chai latte, wet, with extra foam. You have these preferences. And you believe that these preferences reflect your identity, and that’s all you believe. When it’s convenient you are religious. When it’s not convenient you are not religious” (55). Religious searching and questioning is voiced by the Mother, who laments, “Why does every religion have stories about giving up your child?” (80) and confesses, even after her son has become a lama, “the cruel animal fact of motherhood is bigger than any idea” of reincarnation or other theological doctrines (133). The Mother was raised Catholic (like Ruhl herself). When the visiting lama asks her if that means she is Catholic she explains, I think when you are born Catholic, you are always sort of Catholic— but when I grew up, I didn’t believe in some of the—things—and then there were those—sort of—problems?—in the church—you know [alluding to the scandal of pedophile priests] and somehow I never believed that only the pope could talk to God—it seemed sort of silly—and the Catholic children I knew weren’t very nice and I wasn’t sure how Catholicism was contributing to their ethical natures—and then I became an atheist and waved Bertrand Russell’s “Why I am Not a Christian” around for a while—and then my father died and I had a dream, and in the dream these huge letters in silver spelled 112

“I’m Interested in Those More Invisible Terrains”

out “There is no God,” written across the heavens, and I turned to my father in the dream, and I said, “But who could have written that in the heavens?” and he said, “Exactly.” And since then I have been looking for God. (23)43 The Mother is also studying Buddhism, intending to take refuge, and Ruhl sets up a conflict between attachment and nonattachment, since the Mother adheres to the current trend in attachment parenting in which “you wear your child around, you breast-feed for a long time, you sleep in the same bed as the child” (27). “Ha ha! And yet you practice nonattachment,” the lama says. “Well, yes—but I guess not as a mother,” she replies (28). “Do you think attachment is the same as love?” he asks. “No Yes No. Do you?” she responds. The lama tells her, “It is not the same. Maybe there is a problem in the translation. Affection between a mother and a child, that is natural, that is good, you don’t have to do ‘attachment parenting’ to have love. Attachment is grasping, clinging, it is not comfortable. It seems that American mothers are worried their children will not attach to them?” (28–29) These questions—of attachment and love, and being in relation to another—are vital to our lives and should be asked of men as well as women, Ruhl argues. In interviews “women [writers] are asked about being  in relation to, and I don’t think that’s bad,” she’s said, but we all exist in relation to the world, our partners, the human race; so now how can we extend that privilege to men? And let’s think of it as a privilege. . . . It’s good to be thought of in relation to our kids, our society, and our culture. How can men be in a position equally of living in relation to the world and not be living in a little tower? It’s not writing in a tower—that’s not how it is for women or men. How can we re-position even the concept of the artist as someone who includes other parts of life and isn’t hermetically sealed in a tower?44 In other words, the topics of attachment and love, of living in relation to others, are not just questions for women or mothers. They are, as Ruhl states in her acknowledgments to The Oldest Boy, “big questions about death, love, and how we should treat each other in this lifetime” (145). Just as central as the parent-child relationship in The Oldest Boy is the relationship between teacher and student. When the lama asks the Mother if she has a meditation teacher and she responds, “no—just books,” he tells her, 113

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

“You need a teacher. Books are—books” (26). The Mother had been a graduate student in English but left her studies after the death of her professor, whom she has been mourning. He was “very interested in the relationship between virtue and books,” which made him “very unfashionable at the university” (116).45 Rather than reading “books about books” she “wanted to be a better person” but found that “anything with a practical application, or to do with virtue, is forbidden” (113). The requisite joke about deconstruction that Ruhl tosses in feels like a setup to her true urgency, a concern that English departments don’t educate students about virtue. How do we learn to be good? (This calls to mind the husband Harrison’s plea to his wife She in Stage Kiss that marriage is repetition: “every night the sun goes down and the moon comes up and you have another chance to be good” [142].) It is a notion that is timely once again; in Becoming Wise Krista Tippett observes that virtue, which may be an old-fashioned word, is “magnetic to new generations, who instinctively grasp the need for practical disciplines to translate aspiration into action.”46 Virtues are “tools for the art of living” . . . “spiritual technologies for being our best selves in flesh and blood, time and space.”47 Ruhl’s plays, from her earliest student venture Dog Play to the present, are concerned with our cultural loss of rituals that teach us virtue, technologies for being our best selves.

To Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday To Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday has the homey charm of a story written for a family about themselves.48 And because Sarah Ruhl enjoyed a happy childhood, it isn’t Long Day’s Journey into Night. The play is dedicated to Ruhl’s mother, Kathleen Kehoe Ruhl, a former actress who played the role of Peter Pan at her community theatre while she was in high school, and many of the details are drawn directly from Kathleen Ruhl’s family life in Davenport, Iowa, down to her home address, 111 McClellan Boulevard, which is mentioned several times in the play. (Ruhl includes a photo of it at the end of the script, as though the play were a scrapbook of memories.) These precise family details extend even to dialogue, some of which is taken from interviews with her mother’s family. This gives the play an overheard quality—Ruhl instructs that the first two more realistic movements should feel “almost unperformed”—and the naturalistic dialogue creates an uncharacteristic flatness at times as characters tell stale jokes or use hackneyed expressions instead of the precise, inventive, surprising turns 114

“I’m Interested in Those More Invisible Terrains”

of phrase that we have come to expect of Ruhl’s plays.49 To Peter Pan is divided into three movements, which Ruhl has described as “waiting,” “remembering,” and “going” (3), framed with a prologue and epilogue spoken directly to the audience by Ann, the Kathleen Ruhl figure, who recalls playing Peter Pan at the Davenport Children’s Theater. It presents a family of five siblings—called by their number in the birth order: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5—who sit with their father in a hospital room as he dies, toast his memory the evening before his funeral and, newly orphaned, become the characters in Peter Pan, trying to fly away from their grownup lives. Movement One—“waiting”—takes place in the hospital room, where the siblings are keeping watch over their father as he quietly lays dying of leukemia. The time moves relatively slowly; as she did in The Oldest Boy, Ruhl has the audience sit with the characters as they sit and wait. As Lily Janiak put it in her review of Les Waters’s production for Berkeley Rep, “Waters adheres to the actual rhythms of waiting for someone to die—characters drift about the stage, silences sprawl—which should be anathema to live performance, particularly when you haven’t yet been given enough plot to care about the dying or his survivors.”50 Charles Isherwood, reviewing the premiere at the Humana Festival for New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville, wrote “It’s a hushed, intractably sad scene, drawn in precise detail—naturalism I wouldn’t expect from Ms. Ruhl, whose imagination is among the most adventurous at play today in the theater.”51 They fill the time with crossword puzzles and chitchat, punctuated by moments when they hold their father to ease his pain, worry about when to let him go, and try to guide him on the journey by recalling to him the individual intimacies that each child had enjoyed with him, such as cribbage scores and a secret place on the golf course they called “berryland” (26). Although the audience knows that the father, George, is going to die—that this isn’t a play about a miraculous recovery—it may come as a surprise that he dies onstage. The hospital monitors beep, he looks up “as though he sees something” (32), and the siblings gather around his bed calling to him. Character 1 (Ann) begins to say the Lord’s Prayer and the others join in. There is nothing theatrical about this moment; it is not elevated or sentimentalized. What I found remarkable as an audience member at the Humana Festival was viewing a wholly unironic, natural unfolding of the prayer. The words were simply spoken into space. Afterward, the tone shifts: “the prayer becomes a song,” and Ruhl suggests that if the actors “play instruments, they might now form a rag-tag 5-piece band with trumpet and accordion and play ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ / Or a marching band might enter. / Or they might just 115

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

sing the song, with some home-spun attempts at harmony. / And push the hospital bed off, ceremonially ” (34). In the premiere production, directed by Les Waters for Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2016, a curtain closed over the action onstage and from the back of the theatre a high school marching band paraded in playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” As Thomas Butler phrases it in his essay in Chapter 6, an “interweaving of the serious and the light defines the texture of this play,” perhaps nowhere more so than in this emotionally moving transition from the quiet witnessing of a family death to a rousing celebration of the dead’s entrance into heaven. 52 Movement Two, “remembering,” “the Irish wake,” takes place in the kitchen of the family home on the night before the father’s funeral. As in the First Movement, most of the dialogue feels overheard; the characters reminisce about their father and mother, toast the father with Jameson’s whiskey and Chex Mix, and fight about politics. The scene expands when they compare their views about death, the afterlife, church, and prayer. No one is presented reductively; all describe complicated, personally negotiated faiths that swerve from their Catholic upbringing but maintain semblances of belief or conversations with God. Sibling 5, Wendy, is the most certain; she believes that consciousness continues after death, that “when we pray we make God happen” (42), and that she has lived many lives before and will again in the future. Sibling 1, Ann, “ religiously believes fairies on stage are real” but doesn’t believe in an afterlife (53; emphasis in original). What elevates this scene is the heartwarming comic juxtaposition between the siblings’ theological grappling and the presence of their father, who walks in and out of the kitchen, casually mingling among them, as a ghost—not a spooky ghost out to haunt the family, just an ordinary ghost going about his everyday business of reading the newspaper and eating grapefruit. In the most delightful moment, right after character 4 recalls wondering about the meaning of life when they had to put down the family dog, Capp, the father reenters with Capp, who scarfs up Chex Mix that was spilled on the floor. The invisible is made literally visible, giving the impression that the departed are with us always; we just haven’t attuned ourselves to them. As might be expected of a tale about Peter Pan, the guiding question of the play is “what does it mean to be a grown up?” (46). The siblings compare the moments when they knew they were grown up: when 2 moved from the kids’ card table to the big dining room table for holiday dinners, when 4 finished his medical residency and found himself running toward rather than away from emergency code calls, when 5 found her life’s work helping other people. Only 1 (Ann, playing Peter Pan) and 3 (Jim, who plays 116

“I’m Interested in Those More Invisible Terrains”

Captain Hook) don’t feel grown up, and don’t want to grow up. As the scene disintegrates into tiresome political squabbling, the same argument they’ve had for the past thirty years, 1 steps forward to reflect that “now there are no parents to adjudicate—we’re supposed to be the grown ups now” (70). Her father brings a trunk onstage in which she discovers her old Peter Pan costume. She puts it on and crows. The scene moves seamlessly into Movement Three, which takes place in Neverland and finally fulfills audience expectations for a Sarah Ruhl play—which is to say, the play transforms from naturalism into the fantastical. As Ruhl instructs, this movement “should often feel like full-on children’s theater, arms akimbo, with real people hovering underneath their roles in Peter Pan ” (3). There are comic moments when the siblings’ own aging bodies make acting the roles difficult: Peter struggles to climb in through the nursery window and hobbles on a cane, the brothers jump off furniture and fall. Wendy psychoanalyzes the story: sewing Peter’s shadow back on the costume she says, “Everything has a shadow, Peter Pen. Honestly, you should have gone to Jungian analysis. You would have learned that you can’t experience joy without your dark side” (76), a comment that could speak for Ruhl’s own dramaturgy. When Peter claims not to understand, Wendy preaches “you can live on Freud until you’re 40 but when you’re 70 and facing death you either need religion or Carl Jung” (76). The adults, worn out from their journey, come to the realization that they are now orphans, that they are “the lost boys” (83) and start crying. MICHAEL I don’t want to grow up. Michael starts to cry. JOHN I don’t want to grow up either! WENDY I want my mother! I want my father! MICHAEL Me too! JOHN Me too! 2, 4, and 5 We don’t want to grow up! (83–84) Peter Pan fights with Captain Hook (sibling 3) and dies. The others gather around Peter’s body, audibly weeping for him while secretly attaching flying cables to his body. Wendy approaches the audience, treating them like the audience of a children’s theatre production, imploring them to clap if they believe in Peter Pan. When they clap, Peter “comes back to life and is hoisted 117

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

into the air” (89). A painted drop representing Davenport, Iowa comes down and Peter can see home. He and Wendy fly and the boys pile into a ship that flies and they all head toward home. But reality breaks in: they cannot go back home, for their father died and sold the house; it isn’t theirs anymore. And suddenly the adult responsibilities return: they remember they have jobs, spouses, kids, and they all fly away, waving goodbye to Peter Pan, who wants to keep flying and never come down. The play closes with a reunion between Ann and her father, who has come to see her performance of Peter Pan, bouquet in hand, and is fetching her for a family party in her honor. In a time meld, Ann is both the high school girl playing Peter Pan and the adult aware that her father has died. Resonant with Eurydice’s desire to speak with the dead, Ann as Peter Pan asks him what his death was like. “Your breathing was terrible. / It seemed you didn’t want to go. / Was it awful?” (99). Her father finally tells her what he never did in life: “I’m very proud of you, Annie” (100). And Ann as Peter Pan turns to the audience and gathers them in the magic they all share. Before she went home, she tells us, “I stayed in the theater a little while longer. Where you don’t have to grow up” (101). In “ a fantastical exit” (101), she throws a handful of pixie dust and flies off .

How to Transcend a Happy Marriage If Ruhl’s early plays, starting with Eurydice, were more abstract and ethereal, they have become gradually more rooted in the body. We see this in The Clean House and In the Next Room or the vibrator play and Stage Kiss (where, John Lahr wrote, Ruhl “gets down to the carnal, where everyone lives”53) but it is perhaps nowhere as realized as in How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, a play about polyamory that is steeped in the animality of the body. “I’ve come to believe that our capacity to reach beyond ourselves—experiencing mystery or being present to others—is dependent on how fully we are planted in our bodies in all their flaws and their grace,” Krista Tippett writes in Becoming Wise,54 echoing the discovery made by Ruhl’s character George in the last line of the play, “And oh my God we’re all straining so hard for transcendence, and there it was all along”:55 in their everyday lives, imperfections, marriages and children and animal bodies. In an interview Ruhl shared, “One question that the play poses is, how many people can a great love include? How inclusive can love be?”56 She gets readers thinking about that from the beginning, with the four epigraphs that preface the play. 118

“I’m Interested in Those More Invisible Terrains”

They evoke transformation: from Ovid, Ruhl’s steady, on “how bodies are changed into different bodies” and Paul Bowles on his wife Jane Bowles, from whom he learned that “a woman can change from one minute to the next without anyone saying anything about it” (2). And eros and love: from The Ethical Slut, a guide to polyamory, “Great sluts are made, not born,” and e. e. cummings on the phenomenon of constraining our lives, preventing ourselves from the very thing we want most: love. “A lot of people ‘love’ because, and a lot of people ‘love’ although, and a few individuals love. Love is something illimitable and a lot of people spend their limited lives trying to prevent anything illimitable from happening to them” (2). Polyamory, or the practice of loving more than one person at the same time, had been enjoying a renewed interest in the new millennium and had reached a peak in journalistic coverage in the spring of 2017, when Ruhl was finishing the writing of How to Transcend a Happy Marriage and rehearsing it at Lincoln Center. The cover story of The New York Times Magazine for May 14, 2017, asked “is an open marriage a happier marriage?”57 It should have but did not reference How to Transcend a Happy Marriage (the Lincoln Center run of which had closed the week before) but did reference Ruhl’s epigraph source The Ethical Slut as well as Mating in Captivity, a work by therapist Esther Perel, who served on a panel with Ruhl promoting Stage Kiss, and introduced philosopher Carrie Jenkins’s best-selling What Love Is.58 How to Transcend a Happy Marriage concerns two married couples— George (for Georgia) and Paul, and Jane and Michael—who are longtime close friends in their late forties; they are involved parents and appear to be content in their marriages, if we also see hairline fractures from the compromises they made in their career dreams to accommodate the needs of their partners and families (George wanted to pursue a PhD in classics but is teaching high school Latin so that Paul, an architect, could quit the soul-numbing work of bathroom renovations and write about architectural theory; Michael was a musician in a rock band who stopped touring and started composing jingles for commercials when he and Jane had a child). Scene One opens with them in the middle of a conversation over dinner, with Jane telling the others about a beautiful young woman working as a temp at Jane’s law firm who is in a polyamorous relationship with two men. This immediately ignites their desire to learn more about the temp and to pin down and categorize her relationship: “They live together?” Paul asks. “Are the two men bi—or gay—or—” George asks. “I think she’s the hub,” Jane answers; “like, they have sex with her, the hub—but they don’t necessarily all have sex with each other—” (3–4). The temp, named Pip, also slaughters 119

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

her own meat. Ruhl has crafted a Prelude to the play that shows us this. It takes place in a forest: “Steam rises from a recently slaughtered animal. / A woman—Pip—runs in towards the animal, which she has just killed. / She puts her arms around the animal.” Ruhl follows this stage direction with the caveat “If you cannot achieve this beautifully, go straight to Scene One” (3). Pip “used to be a vegetarian but now she ethically slaughters her own meat,” Jane tells the others (4), which gives them fresh material to pounce on and analyze. GEORGE I don’t know if I could do that. Slaughter my own meat. Do you think I shouldn’t eat meat if I can’t bring myself to slaughter it? PAUL No. You don’t walk around naked just because you don’t know how to knit. You let someone else knit. Or sew. Or make your cheese. GEORGE Yes but I don’t have an ethical revulsion towards knitting, or making cheese. I just don’t know how to knit or make cheese—or I don’t have time to do it—but I wouldn’t object to doing it— (5) The combination of polyamory and slaughtering your own meat—the primal animality of it all—disrupts the surface of their lives and George, Paul, Michael, and Jane arouse themselves imagining Pip and her partners and then reflecting on their own marriages, striving to find ways to feel superior and smug in their monogamy. “Really polyamory takes all the fun out of adultery,” Paul argues; “the fun of adultery in the abstract seems to be partly the erotic tension around the secret, not the endless talking about—.” He is interrupted by George: “maybe you replace the pleasures of the secret with the pleasures of voyeurism” (7). Jane, the lawyer, states that polyamory is a movement now, and that “polyamorous people are discriminated against. Like—there’s no box to check at the doctor’s off ice— single, married, widowed—poly—I think it’s next now after gay marriage” (12). When Jane pulls out her phone to show them a picture of Pip, though, they refrain; they would rather imagine her. She is a fantasy figure to them. They decide to invite Pip and her partners to dinner for New Year’s Eve, and the rest of Act One follows the party—after which their “lives would change, forever,” George, who serves as the play’s narrator, tells us in advance (20). She and Paul, on the threshold of leaving for the party, are anxious. Paul tells her, “It was you who wanted to meet Pip.” George responds, “I thought it was you.” “A moment” (20). In the stirring of our own desires, in 120

“I’m Interested in Those More Invisible Terrains”

wanting to discover and feel our own desires, we learn, and fear, the desires of our partners. When we all meet Pip, she “is beautiful. / But more ordinary than you might think. / In fact, it might be her ordinary relationship with / her fearless sexuality which does not require deodorant or lipstick / that makes everyone immediately think about sex. / She is unvarnished and unashamed” (22). The party gets off to an awkward start when Paul confesses that he had personally slaughtered a duck for dinner, just for Pip, but it tasted awful—“sinewy,” “ducky” (22–23)—so they threw it in the trash and picked up takeout Peking duck instead. George is haunted by this cruel, wasteful act; when they killed the duck she wanted “to say some kind of prayer over it” but “didn’t know any and that made me sad” to be so far from the primal sources of our lives, without rituals to ground us. She will later blame this act for the reason things spin out of control. We are introduced to Pip’s partners. Freddie is gentle and vegan and lives very simply, trying “not to leave any footprint” (42). He is bisexual but says, “Sometimes I find it embarrassing saying: I’m bisexual. It’s like, aren’t we all? / It’s like declaring—I’m coming out as human, everyone” (40). David (pronounced Dah-veed) is a mathematician with an unplaceable accent. Much mileage is gotten from discussion of David’s research on Pythagoras— triangles and all, given his polyamorous triad with Pip and Freddie. It turns out that a triangle is not just “the strongest shape” (with all accompanying implications about relationships of triads vs. couples) but “a propitiator of magic” (30). He and Michael discuss Pythagoras’s “more spiritual idea of numbers” such as that three is the number of harmony (33). Pip, David, and Freddie are submitted to questioning by the married couples: Do they shower together? Do they sleep together? And the inevitable question from married people, “So are you all, like, married?” (39; emphasis in the original) which leads into a discussion of relationships and David’s comment, echoing Ruhl’s epigraph from e. e. cummings, “Our language is limited and so our imagination is limited” (40) to a very narrow array of options for love and companionship. Pip shares that when she was a child, the idea of marriage “seemed so lonely”; being alone in a house with one man made her feel “so exposed, so small. No—camaraderie” (40; emphasis in the original). “Monogamy is a construct that will seem passé in the next century,” David ventures; and “so will race. The whole world will be like Brazil” (41). The evening really gets going when David and Freddie pass around the hash brownies they brought, which loosen everyone’s inhibitions, and Pip starts singing to Jane and Michael’s daughter’s karaoke machine, “She’ll be coming around the mountain when she comes.” The stage directions tell 121

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

us “she’s breath-taking and sexy it is almost too much to bear” (46). At first she sings it at the regular tempo, a kids’ song; then she stops, adjusts the karaoke machine and “a slow sensual beat comes on; she sings on top of it. / The mood changes (46). She mesmerizes the others with her sexy, double entendre-soaked version of the song, at one moment slithering against Jane as though Jane is a pole for pole-dancing. At midnight all of the couples kiss each other following the New Year’s custom, then start kissing one another; the lights shift, and the others engage in slow writhing and kissing while George addresses the audience, comparing the scene behind her to the children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. “LET THE WILD RUMPUS BEGIN!” they all cry, while George describes, creating the orgy “through her language rather than through their bodies,” how “the words poured out into silence and there was no sound just people riding each other and suddenly there were so many bodies” and “time slowed down” and “it was dirty but I felt sort of gloriously clean” (50). Act One ends with the arrival of Jane and Michael’s daughter, Jenna (a Woolfian “life breaks in” moment) who, horrified at the sight, shames them by screaming, “You’re all fat. Your flesh has gravity. It’s embarrassing. What do you think you are, like twenty-two?” (51). The adults “look down at their bodies, ashamed” (51). Act Two explores the repercussions, and ultimately questions the reality of the New Year’s Eve party. While Act One is tightly constructed— comparisons reviewers made to drawing-room comedies are apt—Act Two is more capacious and essayistic. The play has been criticized for broaching too many ideas: Ben Brantley of the New York Times called it an “idea-inebriated, unsteady comedy”59 and Jesse Green, writing for New York magazine thought “the proportion of ideas to people is out of whack.”60 Lincoln Center Theater Review, a publication by the theater, encourages audiences to celebrate the intellectual breadth of the play. It contains essays such as “How to Tolerate Uncertainty Without Becoming Psychotic,” “The Animal in Us,” and “God as Loving Many People All at Once,” and editor Alexis Gargagliano illuminates that, like Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway, How to Transcend a Happy Marriage “operates on two levels: on the surface it is a domestic play, whimsical and titillating, but the issues pulsing beneath the surface are profound—identity, sexuality, and an examination of the clash between civilization and wild, human nature at its most fundamental and urgent.”61 Having seen the Lincoln Center production myself, I disagreed sharply with Brantley and Green (idea-inebriated is not a turnoff to me). I found the first act highly entertaining, seamlessly smooth, and the second act more thoughtful and probing in its in-time synthesizing of the animal 122

“I’m Interested in Those More Invisible Terrains”

natures of our eating and loving and parenting, our relationships to our bodies as well as to one another. We are transitioned from one act to the other through snow. While George, played by Marisa Tomei, spoke to us about the daughter Jenna walking in, snow fell slowly and quietly on the characters and more heavily around the perimeter of the set (the “outdoors”). In a practical way this set us up for Act Two, which opens on an outdoor winter hunting scene with Pip and George, but I was also reminded of Ruhl’s essay, “Snow on stage” (#88 of the 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write) in which she reflects, “Snow simply is. Snow reminds us of is-ness. .  .  . If rain on stage might be said to be God’s tears cleaning away human dirt, misery, and memory, then what is snow on stage? A revelation that dirt can be covered by something clean from the sky?”62 (Snow is not called for in the press script of How to Transcend a Happy Marriage that I have worked with for this book; I’m assuming, then, that it was introduced during the rehearsal process and perhaps will be included in the published version of the play.) Act Two is also more magical, less naturalistic, in its staging. It opens with George having called Pip to help her hunt a deer; she has been haunted by the idea that the improper killing of the duck on New Year’s Eve caused bad luck (Jenna walking in and consequently running away from home) and that if she “consecrated a deer,” treating it “like a substitution,” they might be able to get Jenna back. What do we consecrate in our secular lives? We’ve lost any idea of the sacred, the play keeps reminding us. George is Jenna’s godmother but when Pip says “so you’re responsible for her spiritual education,” George demurs, “not really,” only “in the way that people are godparents now, like they’re close friends of the parents and make an extra effort to remember their birthday and give them presents—” (53). Pip gives George psychedelic mushroom tea, George accidentally kills a family dog instead of a deer, and they both end up in jail, where George learns that Pip has a record in the system and has been living under an assumed name. While George is in jail with time to think she wonders aloud, You know how sometimes your necklaces are tangled up together in a jewelry box, even though you haven’t touched them in years, and you think: how on earth did they get tangled? . . . I haven’t touched them in ten years, how did they wind their way around each other? And I wonder: is that like a marriage? You put these two strands in a box and don’t touch them and they’re tangled up together the next time you look? (59) 123

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

Pip tells her, “you have to take your fingers and pry them apart gently, and hang them loose, side by side” (59), calling to mind the popular verses from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet read at weddings to “let there be space in your togetherness.” In Ruhl’s Scenes from Court Life, written within a year of How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, a female protagonist (Laura Bush in Scenes from Court Life, like George in How to Transcend a Happy Marriage) addresses the audience in longer, more direct cultural commentary than is seen in any of Ruhl’s earlier work. Throughout the play we’ve been hearing George lament that she knows no prayers or rituals for sacrificing an animal to eat, or spiritual guidance to give her goddaughter. Now she lets loose in a dirge that Americans have no culture to pass along to their children: “We just work and sleep and order more crap from Amazon. So because you can’t give your children wisdom, from the ages, you say, honey, do you want this crap, or this crap? And they’re like: I want this particular piece of crap. Other countries have children, we have little relentless live-in customers— and we are their fucking patron saints” (60; emphasis in the original). When the jailer arrives to get the women, Pip suddenly disappears; where she was, there is just “a feather.” And “three small drops of blood. / A feather falls from the ceiling” (61). That is the last time we see Pip onstage. She is physically transformed; in a later scene a bird (a live bird) flies in and lays three eggs in the palm of Jane’s hand and George is convinced it’s Pip. George is less visibly transformed, but after her experience out in the wild with Pip and her lamentation in the prison, she returns to suburban “civilized” life feeling claustrophobic; she doesn’t want to eat meat, she wants to be outside walking. Jane is shaken by the experience of Jenna walking in on them, not because what they were doing was immoral but because our society hides sexual desire. Ruhl gives Jane two of the most powerful, direct lines on this subject: “parents and children are not supposed to look at one another if there is anything like desire anywhere near” (67) and “It’s no fair, no fair, you have to become an animal in order to have children and then have a child and you have to disguise your animal nature forever after” (89). It is David who deals the most cutting blow to the married couples. He and Freddie come over, looking for Pip, and David scolds George, Jane, Paul, and Michael for their frightened curtailing of their lives and their desire to likewise constrain the lives of others. He tells them, “I stand with Pythagoras, who said over two thousand years ago: ‘All things change, but nothing dies: the spirit wanders—passing from beasts into human bodies, or from human spirit to beasts, but never does it perish.’ You are all so 124

“I’m Interested in Those More Invisible Terrains”

anxious to fix your identities—to walk into Noah’s ark two by two” (72) but he and Freddie and Pip have made a home that those couples envy. “You would find religion again if you saw us” reunite, he tells them; and then, again echoing the e. e. cummings epigraph to the play, “You spend your lives praying that nothing illimitable happens to you. But God and love are illimitable. You touched that spark of fire and I’m afraid you will never be the same. Good luck trying to tame your wild spirits” (73). We—and she—discover that George, who had been eating the hash brownies, hallucinated the huge orgy. Collective, communal lovemaking had taken place, but it was just among the two couples. The triad had gone home at midnight. Jenna walked in on her parents and their best friends, and the friends have to come to grips with what they experienced together and how their relationships have been irrevocably changed. Michael, who’s been reading The Ethical Slut, insists they talk about their feelings and expand themselves to learn to cultivate “compersion,” a feeling of “taking pleasure in your lover taking pleasure” (74). As George says, she “can’t unsee” how Paul looked at Jane as though he loves her (78); but then of course they all love one another. And each kisses the other, showing different ways of kissing to express different ways of loving. George walks around kissing each: Michael, Jane, and then Michael and Paul kiss. But “this time the kissing is not like a wild orgy. / They kiss and it’s about forgiveness and love” (79). George asks, “Can it get bigger than two people? Can it? Can it include other people? Otherwise it’s so small! Oh my life is so small! Can this (she gestures to the space between her and Paul) include the world? I can’t—hold it” (79). It’s not compersion (an ungainly word) that she wants; it’s caritas, like in the famous passage from Corinthians, read so often at weddings, that starts out “love is patient, love is kind” (80). Paul and George confess that they’ve felt lonely in their marriage (harkening back to Pip’s childhood fears of being lonely in a house with just one other person). To renew their love, they consecrate it in front of Michael and Jane. Paul conjugates his love: “I have loved, / I will love, / And I love you, George. // It’s as though they get married again, / different people now, in front of new witnesses” (81). Michael blesses the occasion with the song he sang at their tenth anniversary party, a song about the precise small moments of marriage with lines such as “A little box of days / spent together / married” and “Married is: We talk about our / Bodies / you tell me / what’s in your stomach / and we / talk of itchy bumps” (82). When he sings of Jenna (“And married is / Jenna runs / Between us / so much / Joy on her face / and it is your face / and it is my face  / and it is her face”) it is a consecration of his marriage to Jane as well. It is a 125

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

very sweet, moving moment onstage. “Let’s all get married,” Jane suggests at the close of the song. “Yes, let’s all get married,” George agrees, although the play stops short of exploring this and leaves the friends’ currents of desire unexamined. George closes the play as she did the first act, through address to the audience, reassuring us that everyone survived: Jenna forgave the adults, both marriages survived intact, and George, Jane, Paul, and Michael remained lifelong friends. She closes with images of communion and community: with “music and food, and love, carrying on after” any one person’s life, “unmade by any one single person” but shared among the collective (90). The “sound of Bach’s minuet being played on a small violin” fills the theatre. The audience has heard it earlier, on Jane’s phone, Jenna learning it. Now we’re told we’re hearing George’s daughter Daphne playing it. And then we hear a second violin come in, “in counter-point—a duet—” and George adds, “in love we think all we can tolerate is a duet—but then another violin is added—a trio— ”: Another violin is added— And then a quartet—each with its own beauty and on and on— And I can no longer hear my daughter playing, but the melody is still there—and more and more children play—until three hundred violins are all playing together in one church. More violins are added until it feels as though 300 children are playing in one church. And the sound cannot be contained. And oh my God we’re all straining so hard for transcendence, and there it was all along. (91)

Coda Theatregoers, critics, and scholars looking for materialist theatre from Ruhl will walk out unsatisfied, even irritated. Those who enjoy her work savor the ineffable qualities that feel magical. Yet her talent lies in combining these: in conjoining earth and spirit. Theologian Mark McInroy has coined a term, “radiant invisible,” that precisely captures this paradox; it describes the phenomenon of seeing the invisible in the physically visible, radiating within it. Studying the “spiritual senses” tradition (i.e., seeing with the “eyes of the soul”) within Catholic theological aesthetics, McInroy would say that Ruhl’s audiences are perceiving “in a register that exceeds the corporeal 126

“I’m Interested in Those More Invisible Terrains”

and gains purchase on a ‘spiritual’ or intellectual realm (which is invisible, yet paradoxically seen).”63 This experience is not metaphorical; we are actually perceiving, even if we can’t measure it quantitatively. Because the physical and spiritual are conjoined we don’t need to strain to transcend our bodies and situatedness; it is right in them, right here, that we will perceive splendor. Theatre scholar Marvin Carlson argues that “theatre is perhaps particularly well suited as an art” to awaken our perceptive faculties and “generate moments of such intensity that they might be called epiphanies,” or insights initiated by ordinary occurrences, because theatre “constantly oscillates between the fleeting present and the stillness of infinity.”64 In each of the plays discussed in this chapter characters wrestle with matters that fall into the broad category of the spiritual, religious, or theological, and Ruhl’s use of stagecraft—the magic of the theatre—moves audiences beyond a purely intellectual engagement with those matters and into experiences of spiritual perception. In Passion Play the enactments of the biblical stories are grounded in the everyday preoccupations of the terrestrial characters but big beautiful fish puppets take over the stage, the sky turns red, and the character P sails away on an enormous boat, reminding us of the radiant invisible of the world beyond our political, familial, or doctrinal squabbles. The Mother in The Oldest Boy wondered who wrote “There is no God” in the sky in her dream and took refuge in the nonattachment of Buddhism, but she finally feels the communion of reincarnation when her son Tenzin, now installed as lama and played not by the three-year-old-boy puppet but by the older man puppeteer, holds her newborn daughter, and the Mother sees the radiant invisible of her own long-deceased father holding her. At the wake of their father, the siblings in For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday share theories of what the notion of God means to them—while the spirit of their father and the family dog walk among them, demonstrating the radiant invisible of permeable boundaries between death and life, the unseen and seen. The soaring violins that close How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, building in intensity and volume from one violin, played haltingly and imperfectly by one child, to three hundred in unison moves the audience to tears in the recognition of the imperfect bodies that come together to create beauty. It is this quality of Ruhl’s playwriting—deeply grounded yet soaring—that gives her work its own kind of “seamless equipoise between the morality play and the mystery play” that she described, citing Kushner’s Angels in America, as her ideal.65

127

CHAPTER 5 DIRECTING SARAH RUHL: AN INTERVIEW WITH SARAH RASMUSSEN AND HAYLEY FINN

Sarah Rasmussen is Artistic Director of the Jungle Theater in Minneapolis, where her production of In the Next Room or the vibrator play won IVEY awards for Best Direction and Overall Excellence, and where she directed Ruhl’s The Oldest Boy in November 2016. From 2012 to 2015 she served as Head of the MFA in Directing program at the University of Texas at Austin. Rasmussen is also a 2011 Princess Grace Award Recipient and the former Resident Director for Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Black Swan Lab (2010–12). Recent credits include Sense and Sensibility (Guthrie Theater, Dallas Theater Center), an all-female The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Oregon Shakespeare Festival), I & You (Marin Theatre Company), Dear World, The Seven (Ten Thousand Things), We Play for the Gods (Women’s Project), Bureau of Missing Persons (Neighborhood Prod. NYC), Ballad of 222 & 223, Hero Dad (Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival), Chile Pod (La Jolla Playhouse), and Crashing the Party, Red Ink, and 1001 (Mixed Blood). In 2009 she directed Eurydice for Long Island University’s BFA program. Hayley Finn is Associate Artistic Director of the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, where she works with some of the nation’s leading and emerging playwrights. A classmate of Sarah Ruhl’s at Brown University, she worked with Ruhl on the development of Eurydice while at Brown and directed the first workshop production there. She also directed Eurydice for the University of Missouri in 2010. Directing credits in the Twin Cities include Death Tax by Lucas Hnath (Pillsbury House Theatre), Hiding in the Open by Kira Obolensky (The History Theatre), ADY by Rhiana Yazzie (Pangea World Theatre), Permanence Collection by Kira Obolensky and Ed Bok Lee (Walker Art Center), and Doe by Trista Baldwin (Workhaus Collective). She has also directed the New York premieres of works by Sheila Callaghan including Katecrackernuts (The Flea Theater), Scab (Greenwich Street Theater), and Metal (Here Arts Center).

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

Our interview took place at the Jungle Th eater in Minneapolis on June 13, 2017. Amy Muse

How did you two first become acquainted with Sarah Ruhl?

Hayley Finn I first met Sarah actually not at Brown but after we had both graduated in New York. . . . We met in New York and we both had gone to Brown . . . and we really liked a lot of the same things, and so we connected mostly as people, and we were very attracted to the same kind of theatre. She was very excited by Caryl Churchill and Churchill’s working methods; she really loved Chekhov, she was really interested in Butoh, and there were a lot of great conversations we were having and we really wanted to work together, so we were looking for ways to make that happen. And then she went back to Brown to be in the graduate program, and when she started working on Eurydice, she asked me to come out and work with her and direct the workshop production of her play at the Brown New Play Festival. So, I first started working with her on that piece when she was studying with Mac Wellman at Brown. Sarah Rasmussen Many connections in life stem from a love of Paula Vogel. Paula was one of the first contemporary playwrights I fell in love with and started directing. I had read some of Sarah’s work but when I was in grad school at UC-San Diego, I worked a lot with a student named Lila Rose Kaplan who had been a student of both Paula’s and had intersected with Sarah at Brown, and so I really fell in love with Sarah through her writing. The first time I got to meet her was when I was in grad school and Lila Rose and I went up to LA to see a project she was doing for Cornerstone [Demeter in the City], and we met with her afterward, and I remember that she was nursing her baby backstage in a little room, and I was so happy to meet her. It was sort of a perfect Sarah Ruhl moment to meet her with her child. It really struck me at the time that this was a different way of working. She was unique, both in her work and in her personhood and life. As we’ve become friends and worked more closely together over the years, she’s been such a guiding force for me not only as a storyteller, but also as a human being, a parent, an artist-thinker in the world. . .

130

Directing Sarah Ruhl

But we worked most closely together when I was the assistant director on the Broadway production of In the Next Room, so that’s where we really got to start spending time together. AM What draws you two as directors to Sarah Ruhl’s work? What are the qualities that distinguish a “Sarah Ruhl” play? HF To me, the thing that really draws me into her work is the very distinct worlds that she creates. That’s what attracts me as a director. I often feel that the rules of the world are very different and very seemingly unfamiliar, but then, there are these moments of intense emotional connection that I feel and the unfamiliar becomes familiar. I think that she has a wonderful intuitive sense of writing. . . . Her language is very distinct. As a person who loves language I’m drawn to the specificity of her language. It’s often very simple, clear and precise. I think that comes out of her love of poetry. And the images in the piece are very evocative, which inspires a director’s imagination. I love the way that she balances ideas and emotion. . . . Kinda makes the ideal theatre [laughs]. In her work, you have a theatre of ideas, a theatre of images and of emotion. SR There’s a way that she acknowledges an audience and invites them in, that’s really singular to me. There’s a courage and a sort of pureness of intention at play—she’s aware that her characters are telling us a story. They know we exist in the audience. They can see us, and I think as a result we can enter more deeply into their emotional journey. And that to me is incredibly, incredibly rare to find. Sarah’s plays often start with a sort of gift to the audience. She has such a poetic ear, and she teaches us how to listen to the music of her plays. She often, in the very first moments of her plays, makes us laugh. Paula [Vogel] said something about that, and I’m paraphrasing, that “laughter allows us to open our hearts a little bit more so that we can go deeper,” and I think that whether or not it’s conscious or not, it’s part of Sarah’s genius: how she invites us in to her stories. HF Can I just add one other thing? I love that she puts women at the center of her stories, and that they’re complicated women. AM Yes, I loved that in Lincoln Center’s program for How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, [editor] Alexis Gargagliano wrote that Sarah Ruhl “examines the inner lives of women in sly, powerful, gorgeous ways.” 131

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

HF Yeah, I think about that too and that it’s really [based] on her interest in Virginia Woolf, and I think that comes through in a lot of her pieces, even in Oldest Boy to a certain extent, . . . having access to the inner life of the character. AM Both of you have directed Eurydice, and Hayley you of course were part of the initial development of it and directed the premiere, and some of your director’s choices ended up in the published script. I’m wondering about your experience of being part of the creation of that play, and if you had any sense at the time that that particular play and playwright would have such an impact on American theatre. HF I first thought she was brilliant, when I read her work. It’s difficult to tell what the extent of anyone’s career is going to be, but I certainly believed in her writing. I loved the whimsical and poetic nature of that piece. I was amazed that she was able to tie in a very deep, personal experience that was still relatively fresh at that time, with a very aesthetically polished, complicated, beautiful, rich story. I think that’s extremely hard to achieve at any age, but particularly when you’re younger and at the beginning of your journey as a writer, and it was pretty spectacular. . . . I felt very fortunate to get to work with her, because she was a very open collaborator, and was really excited about exploring that world together. And so when we talked about how some of those images would be realized she was very invested in the collaborative process, which I think came out of her interest in Caryl Churchill’s Joint Stock Theatre Company. And some of it was just very fortuitous . . . she’s a very open person, so some of the things that came out of the process were about seeing what was in the room, and so we were working with students, a combination of students and actors in Providence, so that when we were talking about who would be Hades, you know, who would be that, it became a boy because we were auditioning people, and one of them was young, and so the idea of him being young, and then thinking about what would it be like if he was even younger . . . and we were very excited about finding props in the neighborhood, so we went to an old antique store, where they had all of these fantastic things, like glow-in-the-dark globes, and . . . these very fifties nostalgia elements, and a little tricycle, and I said, “Oh, it’d be really cool if he came out on this red tricycle” and there was just a sense of energy and enthusiasm for being open and responsive to what was in the world.

132

Directing Sarah Ruhl

I’ve been thinking a lot about nostalgia lately because Lisa D’Amour was here doing a workshop at the Playwrights’ Center, and she was talking about nostalgia and work, and I thought Sarah was able to mine that so richly in Eurydice, that idea of childhood nostalgia, the loss of childhood and tying it to nostalgia, a nostalgia that goes back to old films and even a greater American landscape. So those were some of the things I found particularly exciting and evocative, and I also loved the way that she draws upon other theatrical time periods. So obviously, there’s the chorus, critiquing the idea of the Greek chorus, and the whole idea of the Eurydice myth, how she inverts that, . . . and I think . . . giving Eurydice the autonomy, and that’s just really beautiful. . . . Those were some of the things that were happening at that time. AM I’m curious to know about your experiences directing actors in a Sarah Ruhl play, and whether and how it is different from directing actors in other playwrights’ work. Specifically on the issue of subtext. As you’ll know, Sarah has written in 100 Essays instructing actors in her plays not to play subtext. These aren’t Pinter plays, actors are not to create a separate, parallel inner world for the character but to play what’s on the page, and to imagine “pools of silence and the unsayable to the left or the right or even above the language.” What would that look like onstage? How do you play it? Is this something that is a conscious part of the rehearsal process, or is it something that is only interesting to scholars and essayists, or perhaps a matter that gets brought in by the designers but not in your work with actors? HF I can talk about that. I got that sense from her work as well, maybe it wasn’t conscious, but to me the characters live very much in the present— this is very much true in Eurydice because everything is about the present, but I feel like that’s true in a lot of her plays, that the characters are very much living in the moment. Even the way that Eurydice tries to remember is more about the present than the past. I think that idea of character also stems from Mac Wellman’s statements on character, which steers away from subtext as the character motor and rather focuses on what the character does and says. SR I think the musicality of her work is the magic of her work for me. I think of it more as working with a song or working with a poem, and the immediacy and distillation of those forms. Her characters are

133

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

incredibly present and that’s one of the reasons that I tend to work with people who are singers on her work. I prefer to work with people who are singers or clowns when it comes to Sarah Ruhl plays. . . . Christina Baldwin and I have collaborated a lot on her plays and I think Christina is an incredible interpreter of her work. I think a lot of it comes from Christina’s training as a singer, because singers know how to move from one emotional state to another very deftly. They do so without a lot of baggage about “why did we go from here to here?” I think Sarah and I are both really interested in transformation and transcendence, and music is something that transforms and transcends without effort. I’d be happy if I was always directing plays that were written by Sarah. . . . It reminds me more of working with Shakespearean text—the sound is the meaning and the meaning is the sound. I think that’s in part what she’s saying about how meaning lives within the heart of language. HF Yeah, and I think in Eurydice, you can really see that, just starting with how she talks about words and how the words sit in your mouth, . . . what they sound like. I think it’s interesting you said “transformation.” Paula Vogel, when she was here [at the Playwrights’ Center] talking with us, . . . well, Paula’s obviously really interested in structure, and I think Sarah is interested, and has become more interested in structure, and talking about Sarah discovering a new structure, a metamorphosis, like using Ovid’s Metamorphoses structure, so that’s interesting that you mentioned that about transformation, like how you can transform very, very quickly without taking that baggage forward. SR Yeah, that’s something I hear a lot from people after they’ve seen her plays . . . that they felt that they were laughing and crying in the same moment. And I look for actors who are able to ride that and authentically experience those chords. HF Yeah, in some ways it goes back to Chekhov because that’s at the heart of all Chekhov’s plays, laughing and crying at the same time. SR But how we rarely see Chekhov done. HF Yes, right, how we rarely see his work done . . . how infuriating . . . [All laugh.] 134

Directing Sarah Ruhl

AM Sarah, that is precisely the experience I’ve had seeing your productions of In the Next Room and The Oldest Boy, and I’m interested in the kind of effect you want to have on audiences and how you create it. You said a few minutes ago that it is Sarah Ruhl’s extraordinary gift to let the audience know that they exist, that they are invited in. You do that, too, in your directing; obviously that’s something that’s important to you. How do you create that? SR I started directing plays when I was a kid, and I think it was a way to extend playing dress-up and writing stories into early adulthood. I was entranced by how a small, made up story can sound out larger truths in our lives. I was drawn to the poignance of crystalizing a sort of tension between the known and unknown onstage. I’m interested in the lineage of storytelling: Paula was Sarah’s teacher, and Paula has written so eloquently about Thornton Wilder’s impact on her work. Thornton Wilder was really instrumental in my understanding of theatre—that it could be a place where we could appreciate simple, beautiful things more profoundly, having also wrestled with elements of darkness, despair or frustration. I think that tension of hope and raw human questioning is a chord that I feel so strongly in Thornton Wilder’s work and Paula’s work and Sarah’s work. A combination of humor and an invitation into a deep meditation on the truly unknowable, difficult, glorious aspects of being human is at the heart of Sarah’s work. So I guess that’s a long-winded way of saying that I don’t know how I do anything except that I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. And so I can’t help but bring that initial wonder into the room, of what stories meant to me as a child. I think it’s something Sarah’s written beautifully about the experience of sitting in the dark together watching theatre and the feeling of the curtain coming up on a play. I’m always chasing a sort of transcendence I felt in storytelling as a child. I think when we go to the theatre, we all kind of hunger for the experience of, for lack of a better word, “magic.” I want to take the audience to a place deep within themselves, and Sarah’s work has always been a great catalyst for that. AM When I saw The Oldest Boy, I felt like I was sitting in Buddhist meditation while I was watching it, and I’m curious whether this was conscious on your part as a director. I thought it was very powerful, but also very risky, and I think it’s in the script too, a playwright and a

135

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

director daring to have us sit with little dramatic action, having us sit and observe and be, and I’m curious about your experience of directing it, if it was a deliberate choice to have the audience experience a kind of meditation, even if it makes some feel a little restless, like you do sometimes when you meditate. SR Something Sarah and I talked a lot about with Oldest Boy is that she had never seen it with one puppeteer and a puppet. It had always been done with multiple puppeteers. At Lincoln Center I believe it was done with three puppeteers, and so in a more classic bunraku style, and then it had a few subsequent productions but always with multiple puppeteers and the puppet. My son is about the same age as Tenzin in Oldest Boy, and I felt that many puppeteers sort of overwhelmed the puppet. I was interested in having one puppet and the puppeteer because it became a clear metaphor between the student and the teacher, the duality of the old and the young in one being. I’m so glad to hear that your experience of it was meditative. . . . I think any experience that the audience has stems from a million other choices that happen in the process. Masanari Kawahara, the actor who created the puppet and played Tenzin was really to me the heart and soul of the piece. There was such wisdom, vulnerability, and joy in his embodying a boy and a teacher. Masa is ageless. The first time we read the play, we sat around a table and he picked up a plastic water bottle. As he read, he started to just animate this water bottle, and it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen because of his skill as a puppeteer. I was just incredibly moved by the way he inclined the water bottle one way or another and let it breathe as if it were living. I think that a lot of how a piece works and why it works is the specific quality of the energy of the collaborators in the room. It infuses everything. Like a poem, there’s a lot of space on the page in Oldest Boy. I’m a very visual director—I was a visual artist before I ever was professionally directing—so it’s important to me to somehow translate what it feels like on the page onto the set. And it’s interesting, because having done In the Next Room here and Oldest Boy, I wanted them to live and breathe very differently, and I feel that this is very much coming from the way Sarah scores it on the page. AM Sarah, you were also assistant director for the premiere production of In the Next Room or the vibrator play at Lincoln Center. When you directed In 136

Directing Sarah Ruhl

the Next Room for the Jungle Theater, were there any elements you especially wanted to reproduce in your production, or significant changes you made, like you did with having only one puppeteer in The Oldest Boy? SR Working on the LCT version allowed me to become very close with the text. So I went into my own production feeling very friendly with the words. But mine was quite different. Of course, there were two rooms. But my rooms were flipped from the New York version, because that’s the way I felt the flow of the play. I cast mainly singers, and gave room for their unique comedic personality. However, I felt that the metronome of the play was set in ear. I remember talking to actors about the way the play starts with the lamp: “On, off, on, off.” That’s the heartbeat. We all have to get on that time signature to find the speed of comedy. I love the end of In the Next Room. And it’s still one of my most beloved moments in theatre. Set designer Bain Boelkhe and I thought that the winter garden must come to Mrs. Givings. Emotionally, I wanted the language to flow there, and not stop for a scene change. It’s both a real garden, and more importantly, the new wellspring of feeling in their souls at that moment. So rather than anything subtracting from the set, the trees and snow came to her. We had the idea later in the process. There was no real fly space in the Jungle. We cut trees out of lowly plywood, and painted them. We didn’t have enough crew backstage, but the cast really believed in the idea. So as Mrs. and Dr. Givings stepped across a threshold into the winter garden and undressed, their fellow castmates were behind the set. They would count along to the beautiful music, and slowly lower a tree on a heavy rope in their lovely, period clothes. And somehow, through the magic of Barry Browning’s lights, the whole thing became so delicate and transcendent. People would ask how we made a hologram happen onstage. The view from behind the scenes was just as lovely, a group of artists making something simple and magic by believing in it together. AM Hayley, as associate artistic director of the Playwrights’ Center you’re in the enviable position of always seeing what’s emerging in American playwriting and theatre-making. Can you discern the impact of Sarah Ruhl on the next generation of playwrights? Do you find yourself noticing elements in new plays that feel influenced by Sarah’s work? Or is it too soon to tell?

137

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

HF I am fortunate to read a lot of plays each year. It’s difficult to discern the impact that Sarah has had on writers. She sits within a continuum of other writers and teachers like Paula Vogel, Mac Wellman, Caryl Churchill, and Erik Ehn—all of whom have had a great impact on writers. Many of the writers I work with are of Sarah’s generation or 10–15 years younger. Some of the burgeoning artists I’ve met who have been particularly excited about Sarah’s plays are in undergrad or just out of undergrad, so perhaps the writers who will be most influenced by Sarah’s work are still finding their own voices and making their way as writers. AM Finally, what I love about Sarah Ruhl is what she says she loves about Woolf and Chekhov and Maeterlinck: that they were “unafraid of the soul.” Is this notion of soul something you tend to as directors—is it a producible matter?—or something more interior that a reader or scholar would engage with more than a director or actor would? HF I think that spirit, if you go back to the origins of theatre, that spirit is in the origins of theatre, and I know that Sarah’s deep interest in Greek theatre, and medieval theatre, and I mean, Passion Play certainly stems from questions of the soul. For me personally, I think theatre is spiritual, in that there’s something very beautiful and ephemeral and theatre is a place where we can ask big questions, and meditate on those questions . . . and it’s communal, so that there’s this sort of connection that you’re having with a group of people in the audience which could almost have a religious or spiritual component to it. And I think that the themes that she deals with in her plays are often about life and death, which are, you know, questions of the soul, so in terms of .  .  . I don’t know, I never think of things as producible or not producible [laugh] in that way. I just think of what I’m attracted to, and the questions are very accessible because they’re questions most people ask themselves about life and death and how we navigate our feeling toward those things. And you can see that obviously in Eurydice, but in The Clean House, Passion Play, Oldest Boy, really in all her plays, and . . . you know, transformation has to do with all of this, how we transcend our circumstances and move forward within them. . . . Those are some things that come to mind. I don’t think that she’s afraid of the soul. She seems very comfortable in that evocation of the soul, of that language, that spirituality. I think emotion and soul are very connected 138

Directing Sarah Ruhl

too. I think depending on the actor I’m talking to, I might approach the conversation differently. Yeah, and in terms of soul in Peter Pan, you know, there’s this older woman, but her soul is Peter Pan, that energy of the inner life that’s a physical manifestation. SR As an artistic director, I do think about what is producible, that’s part of my world. The fact that Ruhl plays that we’ve done here have met with strong critical support, sold out, extended, and brought so many new people into the theatre speaks to a deep hunger in audiences to encounter the soulfulness you’re talking about. There’s a level of anxiety in our society in talking about spiritualities or souls, but absolutely I think it’s in Sarah’s work, I think it’s one of the primary reasons I’m drawn to it. It’s interesting that we started the conversation in talking about Sarah’s awareness of an audience and how she invites them in, and to me, that’s the presence of soul in her work. There is a holiness to recognizing each other. I’m always really moved by the way her plays end. For me, they reach for a transcendence. They often end with something elemental, with a gesture beyond words. I think that the winter garden in Vibrator Play is one of the most extraordinary ever poetic endings to a play, and the ending of Oldest Boy destroyed me every time I saw it, because it’s something beyond what we can name or say but that we know deeply to be true. That’s our souls responding. I feel like it’s always really an honor to wrestle with that, to try to bring the life of the soul onstage. I don’t know who said this, but years ago I saw an incredible painting in Havana and the artist had written on it, “We’re not human beings trying to live spiritual lives. We’re spiritual beings trying to live human lives,” and that is what fuels my journey as a director in terms of what I’m putting onstage and I think that’s why I find such a kinship in the heart of Sarah’s work. But yes, you’re right, it’s not dogmatic. I’m always surprised at how many people tell me “Theatre is my church,” theatre is where I have a feeling of being with people, or a place to wrestle with deeper truths. I’m always curious as to how Sarah’s Catholic roots play into her sense of storytelling and ritual. So yeah, I’m always reticent to name things, because I think that sometimes by over-naming things, we can limit them. I’m interested in creating that space for an audience to have the possibility of a soulful response to story.

139

CHAPTER 6 CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

SARAH RUHL’S PASSION PLAY AND CONTEMPORARY EXPRESSIONS OF MEDIEVAL PERFORMANCE Jill Stevenson In her essay “Reading Aloud,” Sarah Ruhl contends: Theatre in its most basic form is a kind of reading aloud. When children are small, we tell them to make a circle and we read to them. When they grow up, we tell them to sit in a corner and read to themselves. In the theater, we ask adults to be children again, to sit in a circle and be read to. I enjoy the sensation of being read to in a theater as opposed to watching people behave behind glass . . . . So to break the fourth wall, or the implied wall of glass, for the actor to read to, speak to, sing to the audience, is an ancient form of communication, which now seems almost revolutionary.1 Here and in other essays, Ruhl implores playwrights to create work that allows the audience to “exist in relation to the stage as opposed to watching the stage as object.”2 This “ancient” mode of theatrical communication that Ruhl desires was particularly common in the Middle Ages. It is not altogether surprising then that when writing her first full-length play, which she returned to and revised repeatedly over years as she developed her unique voice, Ruhl would find inspiration in a medieval performance tradition. Passion Play uses the medieval passion play genre as its launching point. As Amy Muse explains in Chapter 4 of this book, the play opens in 1575 as a Northern English village prepares to stage its annual passion play in the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s prohibitions against Catholic plays. This opening act originally emerged out of Ruhl’s BA thesis at Brown University and was produced at Trinity Repertory Company in 1997. Years later she finished Part Two after rereading a childhood book that included an account of

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

Oberammergau and its famous passion play. Revisiting the story prompted her to visit the Bavarian village and research its passion play, which has been produced by the community nearly every ten years since 1634. Part Two of Ruhl’s Passion Play takes place in Oberammergau in 1934 as the village prepares for its tercentennial production in the shadow of Hitler’s rise to power. While Queen Elizabeth visits the village of Part One, in Part Two Hitler appears in Oberammergau, a visit based on an actual, historical event. This two-act play was directed by Mark Wing-Davey in 2002 as a workshop production in London. Ruhl wrote Part Three several years later after learning about a passion play in Spearfish, South Dakota that was produced annually from 1939 to 2008. Arena Stage in Washington, DC, had invited Ruhl to write a play about America; as she explains in her playwright’s note, “I figured that there’s nothing more American than the nexus of religion, politics and the theatre” (xi).3 As Ruhl herself acknowledges, this third section emerged out of her very personal reactions to the immediate political moment: “It took me a long time to write it. . . . I was so angry during the years of the Bush presidency. I mean, I was just angry all the time, about politics anyway. And about how religious feeling was being made a travesty of in this country.”4 Passion Play’s final part takes place in Spearfish and is divided into two Acts. Act One takes place in 1969, while Act Two skips from 1972 to 1984 to the present; Ronald Reagan makes an appearance during the 1984 section. The full cycle was first produced by Arena in 2005, with Molly Smith directing. Ruhl later revised it significantly for the Goodman Theatre’s 2007 production, directed by Wing-Davey. Rather than depicting the Passion play performances themselves, Ruhl’s play is a backstage drama that explores how these communities utilize a medieval religious genre to wrestle with issues of identity, politics, religious tradition, and, most of all, history and its construction. For example, in Part Three the character P, who is cast as Pontius Pilate in Spearfish’s play, has returned from the Vietnam War and is struggling with PTSD as well as with issues of responsibility for his actions in combat. In a scene entitled “Rehearsal,” he challenges the depiction of Pilate in the play: P I, Pontius Pilate, at the desire of the whole Jewish people, condemn—Wait. The Jews are saying: kill Jesus! But they’re religious men, right? And Pilate was a bad guy, a tyrant. How come they want to kill him and I’m being all heroic—like—no, no, I can’t kill him?

142

Critical Perspectives

Young Director The Jews want to kill Jesus because He’s too powerful. That’s how it’s written in the Bible. Isn’t it? Mary 2 Kind of. Mary 1 We’re just telling the story, honey, the story from the Bible. P Just telling the story, bullshit! Either the Jews killed Jesus or else they’re innocent! Young Director Look, we’ve had the Anti-Defamation League here, haven’t we? Carpenter 2 (To Young Director) Oh, yeah they came, about six years ago, and gave us some feed-back. Used to be we had horns on the costumes of the high priests but we took them off a long time ago— um—six years ago. So the Anti-Defamation League—now they really— um—like our play. P I don’t care about a fucking league, I’m talking about a man, a real man. Young Director I think we need to get away from talking about the play as a real historical document and get back to the play as a play. It is our task as actors to— Mary 2 It’s not just a play! It’s the word of God! Young Director Yes, of course. Can we move on now? P Move on, move on, who cares about anything as long as we move on. (199–200, original emphasis) Here and throughout Passion Play, Ruhl explores how dramas can simultaneously solidify a community’s tradition, while also opening up to new interpretive possibilities in performance. In this way, Ruhl’s play depicts the complicated cultural work of performative historiography. In this essay, I use Claire Sponsler’s concept of performative historiography to consider the potential cultural work of Passion Play. After introducing and defining performative historiography, I examine productions of Ruhl’s play in order to move beyond the text and consider how the play invites the audience to exist in relation to the stage. Ruhl has said her intention is to create performance experiences;5 I am therefore interested in how companies and directors have interpreted Ruhl’s text to encourage specific kinds of audience experiences. Ultimately, I argue that productions of Passion Play that used an intimate, communal, ritual approach—a mode that recalls medieval performance traditions—functioned for contemporary audiences as performative historiography. In doing so, these productions allowed audiences to experience how “history is not merely what happened 143

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

in the past, but what continues to be represented and communicated in the present moment through performance.”6

Ruhl’s performative historiography In Sponsler’s study of medieval ritual performance in the Americas, she argues that certain performances “preserve a record of the past” and thereby serve as “performative historiographies that enact a set of relations with history.”7 Consequently, performances that function as performative historiography “have a distinctive historicity in which the interplay between past and present is of fundamental importance.”8 By exploring how three communities present their passion plays, Ruhl not only explores the idea that past history can be made and reshaped through performance, but she also creates a space in which the audience feels the past pressing upon the present to the point of recurrence. This is most obvious in Part Three when characters begin to repeat lines or actions from the first two Parts, a reiteration that the triple casting reinforces. For instance, in Part One, Mary 1 says, “I hate to sleep alone. My feet get cold. I put socks on and then my feet get hot so I take them off under the blankets but then my feet get cold again in the night. It’s unnatural, cold and unnatural, this solitary sleeping” (31). In Part Three, the same actress plays Mary 1 and repeats these exact lines. Other elements from Part One return in Parts Two and Three, such as the act of trapping night air in jars, or, in Part Three, when the character Violet, a young child, tells her father that she “was in the war.” He replies: P What do you mean, honey? What war? Violet The war before. P Before what? Violet There is always a war before, and a war after. P Before this war you were safe, safe in your mother’s womb. Violet Nope. There was a war before. I died. (193) The actress cast as Violet plays a different Violet in Part Two, a young Jewish girl living in Oberammergau. At the end of Part Two, she is about to be taken out of the village to a death camp where it seems certain she will die. These echoes vividly reinforce the past’s ever and urgent presence/ 144

Critical Perspectives

present. The same is true with the anachronistic appearances of Hitler and Queen Elizabeth in Part Three. These tactics, while clear on the page, have a powerful resonance in performance as spectators see the same bodies reenact these past(s). As in the rituals that Sponsler analyzes, Ruhl creates theatrical moments that vividly “show the past as still present,”9 thereby functioning as performative historiography. I would argue that Ruhl’s use of a medieval genre helps the play accomplish this work. Significant to the performances that Sponsler studies are their medieval roots—either real or imagined—and how these are used to create ritual spaces of community. Many authors, most notably Umberto Eco, have analyzed the ongoing fascination with using the Middle Ages to investigate our own time. He writes, “The Middle Ages are the root of all of our contemporary ‘hot’ button problems, and it’s not surprising that we go back to that period every time we ask ourselves about our origin.”10 It is the era’s simultaneous closeness and distance that makes it particularly valuable for cultural reflection; the period is like ours, but with the difference necessary for a critical examination of ourselves and our own time. As Sponsler notes, this has been particularly true in the United States: Although the term medieval can be used in a pejorative way in popular discourse . . . in the United States the medieval past is usually an aspect of affirmative culture and as such is imagined as the vaguely defined repository of all things culturally beneficent: closely knit communities based on shared ideals and labor, an aesthetically rich yet simple and pious culture, and economic order in which hard work leads not just to wealth but to happiness. . . . In its role as a positive cultural value, the idea of the medieval past thus has emancipatory force as a refusal of the present. In its emancipatory role, the medieval is soundly on the side of social goodness: it promises renewal and redemption as an antidote to the present.11 As a genre that emerged during the Middle Ages, passion plays bring with them a medieval “aura” that can be harnessed to do critical cultural work. Of course, Ruhl’s play does not actually represent performances of the passion plays themselves; there are rehearsal scenes, but few lengthy scenes from the plays are shown. Instead, as the “Rehearsal” scene illustrates, Passion Play depicts and is ultimately concerned with the ways history is constructed and represented, and the ramifications of that for communities—in other words, it is concerned with historiography. As Ruhl noted in an interview 145

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

about her play and passion plays generally, “It fascinates me that it’s the same story but how you tell it and what events you choose to include either you’re blaming an entire people for the death of Jesus, or you’re not.”12 The contradictions and problematics of history-making were clearly at the forefront of Ruhl’s mind when writing and revising the play, and, as her comments about writing Part Three make clear, they continued to be concerns with regard to the present moment. Therefore, it is not surprising that her play showcases the processes of history-making. However, I would also argue that live performances of Passion Play can themselves serve as performative historiography for contemporary audiences. This function is possible when the performance employs a ritualoriented, anti-illusionist, perhaps one could even say, “medieval” production style to create an intimate, ritual space in which spectators experience the past as alive in the present. Or, as Ruhl says in her production note, a style that allows audiences to experience “how history bleeds through” (239).

Medieval contexts and ritual space Passion Play situates Ruhl within a long tradition of American artists who have turned to the Middle Ages in order to comment upon and examine the present. Yet, unlike many, she did not choose to adapt a medieval text or genre directly; as she emphasizes, “It’s not actually a Passion Play.”13 True, Passion Play contains a number of textual features common to medieval religious drama, such as direct address and anachronism, as well as song and music. In addition, as James Al-Shamma notes, Ruhl uses biblical imagery and apocalyptic symbols that were common in medieval art, like fish, water, the moon, and a red sky. 14 She also employs a wise fool character, another trope found throughout medieval literature. 15 Yet, despite these features and the play’s title, it is defi nitely not an updated passion play. Understanding Passion Play’s historiographic function—and the function of its “medievalness”—therefore necessitates that we move from an analysis of the text to an examination of the play in performance. In this way it is similar to plays from the Middle Ages, whose texts were not designed as published works, but instead as launching points for live performances. The Middle Ages was an era without professional theatre buildings and therefore plays were regularly produced in repurposed everyday spaces— city streets, town halls, churches. They were often performed by amateur actors appearing as the most sacred, extraordinary figures of the Bible 146

Critical Perspectives

who spoke in a mix of scriptural and vernacular language. During these performances, when audiences saw familiar faces from the community performing religious roles in everyday locales and heard lines that deployed anachronisms to link the biblical past to the immediate present, they were reminded that the sacred past is not distant from, but continues into, the present and future. Such associations could only emerge out of the specific context of live performance. For example, York’s Corpus Christi cycle, produced annually from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, is comprised of approximately fifty pageants that span the biblical story from the Fall of the Angels and the Creation all the way to the Final Judgment of humankind. The cycle was performed on a processional route with each pageant presented at twelve to sixteen stations around the city. A different craft guild or group of guilds presented each play. This production style enhanced the relationship between the familiar and extraordinary, especially for spectators from York who knew the actors and traversed the city streets as part of their daily lives. In addition, characters sometimes drew connections between the biblical stories and the medieval present. For example, as God makes the earth in The Creation, he says, The firmament shall not move, But be an intermediate place, thus will I intend, Over all the world to stay in one place and remain suspended, And be those two waters between (2.41–44, emphasis mine)16 Like the earth that God creates, much of York is located geographically between two waters—the rivers Ouse and Foss. Therefore, although God is alluding to the seas of Genesis, the lines may have established a more immediate association with the York topography surrounding spectators. Such tactics likely encouraged spectators to understand the biblical dramas in relation to their own lives. Medieval performances like York’s explored the interplay between the ordinary (human) and the extraordinary (divine). In doing so, they suggested that the distant biblical past had an immediate presence in people’s lives. This temporal collapse was designed to reinvigorate faith, helping audiences to see the familiar in new ways that would deepen their devotional commitments. And it was employed both in vernacular performances produced by lay communities as well as in plays produced 147

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

and performed by religious communities. For instance, an early fifteenthcentury manuscript specifically notes that because “people seemed to have grown cold in devotion” and “this human torpor [had] greatly increased,” the abbess of Barking Abbey, a renowned English convent, decided to insert dramas into the community’s Easter liturgy and thereby “stimulate among the faithful more devotion.”17 Medieval religious dramas accomplished this work, in part, because oftentimes they were essentially community theatre—dramas performed in local, communal spaces by individuals from the community. This kind of theatre is exactly what Ruhl’s Passion Play explores as it examines how three very different communities stage their annual passion plays. But while community theatre is the subject of the story, it is also the substance of its form and style. For example, each Part opens with a Prologue delivered in direct address by the ensemble. These prologues highlight the play as a play and immediately break the fourth wall, telling spectators that they will need to use their imaginations to create the theatrical world before them. The play’s opening Prologue exemplifies this: We make our play in England in the north by the sea in the open air of England. The Virgin Queen is on her throne the Catholics are mostly done. Take pity on our simple play— we’ve no fancy lights only the bare light of day. The good Lord tells us, to be most simple is to be most good so here is honest rough-hewn wood. We ask you, dear audience, to use your eyes, ears, your most inward sight for here is day (a painted sun) and here is night (a painted moon). And now, the play. (11) While the opening prologues establish the performance as a collaborative event that relies on both actors and audience for its full effect, they also 148

Critical Perspectives

reveal (and revel in) the play’s community theatre production aesthetic, an aesthetic typical of many medieval communal performances. Indeed, I would argue that stagings of Passion Play that have embraced an intimate, community theatre approach to production have been able to create a ritual space that inspires the kind of spiritual, existential reflection on past, present, and future often associated with sacred medieval drama. In this way, these productions function as do the medievalist rituals Sponsler examines—“reperforming a past that is repeatedly incorporated in meaningful ways into the present.”18

Creating intimate communities In 2010 I attended Epic Theatre Ensemble’s production of Passion Play staged at the Irondale Center, a former Sunday school inside the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Like many critics, I found this production exceptional with respect to thematic clarity, acting, and audience engagement, but it was especially effective in its use of space. As Charles Isherwood wrote for The New York Times, “a more ideal auditorium, and a more genially funky production, is hard to imagine,”19 while David Sheward’s review in Backstage noted how “following his acclaimed fullscale productions of the play at the Goodman Theatre and Yale Repertory Theatre, director Mark Wing-Davey has inventively reimagined his staging to accommodate the site-specific nature of this engagement. Employing about a dozen mobile prop cabinets as scenery . . . Wing-Davey creates a found-object world reflecting the nonprofessional status of the characters.”20 It is not surprising that Wing-Davey would employ this approach given his work with Joint Stock, a theatre collective that produces devised performance pieces. And yet, it does not appear that this minimalist, “devised” style was fully adopted until the Brooklyn production. A review of the Wing-Davey production at Yale suggests a somewhat more elaborate approach to design: Allen Moyer’s set (designed with assistance from Warren Karp on the huge proscenium stage of Yale’s University Theater, better suited to the play’s epic scale than is the Yale Rep’s own stage) begins as a plain suite of wooden plank walls, but as the action expands, so too does the setting. By the end, it has encompassed magical airborne sailing ships, giant wooden crosses, and spectacular projections by 149

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

Ruppert Bohle of sunlit skies, vast highways, railway yards, the Alps, the Black Hills.21 Alternatively, and likely necessitated by budget constraints, Epic’s production was filled with simple staging choices that reflected confidence in the power of imagination. Ruhl highlights (and champions) one of these choices in her staging notes to the published text. Discussing the boat on which the character P “sails off into the distance” at the play’s conclusion (235), she notes that Arena used flying gear rather than a boat, while the Goodman’s large budget afforded the construction of “a massive boat” (240); here, again, earlier stagings appear to have taken a more literal approach to the text. Yet, Ruhl says she “was very fond of the ‘poor theatre’ version in Brooklyn,” which used a moving ladder with a sail attached that the chorus moved offstage. She writes, “It used the simple tools of theater to create transformation: a little height, a little movement, a simple sail—and suddenly—an enormous boat” (240). Collective imagination, of the kind called for in the opening Prologue, produced the effect. By embracing a more minimalist, found-object, anti-illusionist style, the Brooklyn production invited audience members to exist in relation to the stage, creating a ritual space that could function as performative historiography. It also used other means to construct this kind of intimate ritual space. Although free bread and wine were served during all intermissions, at Sunday matinees, like the one I attended, spectators were invited to stay after the production to join the cast for a locally supplied dinner and discussion around the table used in the production.22 Food is a fundamental way to invite community, particularly in the theatre, something Ruhl herself noted when describing the performance of another artist’s work: “The audience came onto the stage and shared lemonade and bread with the performers and their children, and the stage was no longer an ‘it’; it had become a ‘thou.’”23 As in that example, at Passion Play in Brooklyn, food broke down barriers between spectators and those involved in the production, inviting conversation during intermission that reinforced the communal spirit articulated in the Prologues. Moreover, the production was also the centerpiece of a larger “festival of related events intended to bring together believers and nonbelievers to investigate the intersections of faith, ritual, belonging and performance.”24 All of these production and extra-performative elements supported the creation of an intimate community within a professional theatre space. 150

Critical Perspectives

Notably, several subsequent productions of the piece have used techniques similar to those employed by Epic. A 2012 production staged at four different Boston venues by a group of theatre students called The Circuit Theatre Company had the actors/musicians create all of the music and sound effects live onstage using a range of instruments that included a banjo, small accordion, an eight-stringed lute, and train whistle.25 As in Brooklyn, this production experimented with space and ritual to foster community. As Jon York explains, the show began “as the enthusiastic actors interact with the audience members. The interactions continue as the cast performs an unusual shoe removal ritual with audience members. In the performances at the Central Square YMCA Theatre, the performers further engage the spectators by making good use of the center aisle and the steps up to the stage.”26 A 2015 production in the Washington, DC, area by Forum Theatre used similar approaches to space, staging the show in a black box theatre on a strip stage with the audience situated on two sides. Nelson Pressley’s review in the Washington Post suggests a casual metatheatrical world similar to the one created in Brooklyn, as “performers mingle with the audience at the top of each act, pulling costume pieces off a rolling rack.”27 Likewise, the Canadian premiere of Passion Play, presented by Crow’s Theatre in 2013, was described in one review as “an experience so immersive that we in the audience began to feel less like we were watching a play than we were participating in a communal Passion.”28 As in Epic’s production, this one repurposed space and used food to build community. Part One was staged outdoors in Winthrow Park. As Matt McGeachy explained, When that playlet ended we walked over to Eastminster United Church in a scene that was not totally unlike walking the Stations of the Cross (but with more people smoking). In between playlets two and three we had coffee and bagels in the church basement. . . . People who knew each other wandered over to say hello and catch up. We introduced ourselves to strangers, gathered together for this live human event.29 Clearly community-building was at the core of this production; the producers’ note declared, “We have been saying that Ruhl’s play is about ‘faith and community,’ but really it’s about faith in community.”30 In each of these productions, theatrical tactics were used to create a ritual communal space in which, I would argue, audiences could experience the past as meaningfully integrated into the present. 151

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

Performing community in relation to history Reviews of early professional productions of Passion Play ranged from tepid to solidly positive. However, while most critics appreciated Ruhl’s ambition, reviewers of both the Goodman and Yale productions tended to find the play “simply too big, and maybe even too thematically unwieldy.”31 Critics use words like “overlong,” “directionless,” “cluttered and scattershot,”32 noting that “moments don’t fully connect into a coherent whole. For all its vastness of scope and greatness of intent, the cycle is a collection of sometimes intriguing and sometimes incomplete scenes, rather than an intriguing and complete play.”33 Furthermore, critics emphasized the play’s size and epic scope. While some reviews of the Brooklyn production noted weaknesses, I would argue that no previous staging of Passion Play received the kind of effusive critical response as did this one. Sheward’s Backstage review proclaims the play “the most exciting, stimulating, and thrilling piece of theater to hit New York since Angels in America.” And while Isherwood’s review in The New York Times contends that “it is not always easy to extrapolate much larger meaning from Ms. Ruhl’s pixilated pageant,” he maintains that Epic’s production “culminates in a powerful third act” and that “under the sympathetic direction of the ensemble expert Mark WingDavey . . . this youthful play blooms with fragrant grace in the hands of a bright, engaging cast.”34 Certainly this critical shift is due to many things, among them, significant ongoing development of the piece by Ruhl and Wing-Davey across subsequent productions. Indeed, Ruhl acknowledges Wing-Davey’s and the performers’ significant contributions to the revision process between the Arena and Goodman stagings. During my interview with Ruhl she mused about a desire for the kind of ongoing community experimentation that happened across these Passion Play productions: “I also feel like Mark, in the course of that process, which was long, sort of evolved this aesthetic with a kind of loose ensemble . . . [W]e had the luxury of continuing in a way that you don’t usually have in the American theatre.”35 The production style Ruhl describes in many ways emulated the kind of community theatre approach used in annual medieval passion plays and continued in the passion play traditions in Elizabethan England, Oberammergau, and Spearfish—the same group of people regularly returning to the same piece, reexamining its meaning and relevance with past history and present circumstances as a guide. I would argue that it was only when Wing-Davey chose to use a 152

Critical Perspectives

more community theatre production style—repurposed space, found objects, ritual activities such as communal eating—that the play unlocked, creating a ritual communal space that enveloped spectators into the “loose ensemble.” No longer did the play feel large and epic; instead, this lengthy three-part play felt extremely intimate. The power of this intimacy was perhaps most evident during a preview performance in Brooklyn when a fire alarm went off, an episode that Ruhl has recounted in several publications. I will quote her at length (although not in full) because both the description of her own responses, as well as her almost ritual desire to retell the story, illustrates the kind of unique communal space this production created: The audience was evacuated, as were all the actors, dressed in Biblical clothes on a windy night. After some milling around on the steps of the church, when it was clear we would be outside for a while, the actors decided to go on with the play. First Mary 2 sang a song about a tollbooth from the middle of Part Three, where we’d stopped. I thought perhaps we’d just have the song as an interlude; but slowly the audience quieted and gathered round, and somehow one after another, the actors came up and performed their scenes with no blocking, no props, no nothing, in silent agreement. A stage manager improvised a lighting cue with a flashlight, pretending to be a car; a cross was improvised with two actors hoisting up another actor . . . . [O]n the steps of the Lafayette Avenue church, they had nothing but  each other, the audience, and the story. And for half an hour, I  was as transfixed as I’ve ever been, remembering that theatre is, at its roots, some very brave people mutually consenting to a makebelieve world.36 Following this description in the Appendix to the published play, Ruhl writes, “I tell that story only to give designers permission to do perhaps less than they would think they would need in order to create three epochs. I also tell the story to encourage smaller theaters with smaller budgets to do the play in burnt-out factories, or synagogues, or churches, or out of doors.”37 Arguably, the production in Brooklyn helped Ruhl realize something new about her own “epic” play, and to recognize the kind of production style that would allow its audiences to exist in relation to history. In the play’s Epilogue, the character P says: “I don’t know if this country needs more religion or less of it. Seems to me everyone needs a good night’s 153

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

sleep. That way we’d all wake up for real in the morning. It’s good to be awake. When you’re awake you can fight for what you believe in, no matter what costume you’re wearing” (235). This sentiment echoes the purpose of many medieval religious dramas—to give spectators a live encounter with human history (one they do not watch behind glass, but that envelopes and incorporates them), and one that motivates reflection and action in the present. To accomplish this goal Ruhl turned to a medieval performance tradition, not in content but in form, and in doing so created a work that may function for contemporary audiences as performative historiography—building an intimate ritual community in which we recognize our responsibility to the future by feeling the weight and presence of the past in the present.

154

Critical Perspectives

FROM PONTIUS PILATE TO PETER PAN: LIGHTNESS IN THE PLAYS OF SARAH RUHL Thomas Butler That is what is lighthearted in it; as a change in the existing mode of consciousness, that is also, to be sure, its seriousness.38 The first act of Sarah Ruhl’s play Dead Man’s Cell Phone ends when two characters kiss for the first time in a stationery store causing all manner of paper to fall from above. Jean, the play’s good-hearted protagonist, strikes up a sparkling relationship with the brother of the dead man whose cell phone she has taken to answering. Dwight, the living brother, works in a stationery store and takes Jean there after she admits her fondness for paper products: “I think heaven must be like an embossed invitation” (48).39 As soon as they kiss, the paper begins to fall: Embossed stationery moves through the air slowly, like a snow parade. Lanterns made of embossed paper, houses made of embossed paper, Light falling on paper, falling on Jean and Dwight, who are also falling. (56) This exquisitely realized moment imaginatively presents aspects of Jean’s spritely kindness and the precariousness of cell phone relations the play explores. It conveys an elusive joyful and playful vitality that distinguishes Ruhl’s drama from the work of other contemporary playwrights. Routinely, critics describe Ruhl’s plays as whimsical or quirky. Not surprisingly, Ruhl bristles at this critical shorthand. In one of the short essays in her collection 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, Ruhl notes that the designation of “whimsy” is “a way of making feminine and therefore trivial a whole school of aesthetic fabulation.”40 As for “quirky,” she allows only that it “is so much more loathed than the word ‘whimsy’ that it does not bear the time it would require to dissect its horrors.”41 As much as Ruhl has good reason to take issue with these words that regularly appear in discussions of her work, anyone who has seen or read Ruhl has a sense of what the reviewers are trying to get at. What else could describe a “snow parade” 155

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

of stationery? It is the same quality that appears when Queen Elizabeth turns up in Spearfish, South Dakota to preside over a marriage proposal in Passion Play, or when, in The Clean House, a character opens the play by telling a long joke in Portuguese, or when a stage direction in Melancholy Play instructs a character to turn into an almond. Or, most recently, in For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, when a marching band parades through the auditorium playing “O When the Saints Go Marching In.” What can account for these moments if not whimsy or quirkiness? In another one of her short essays, Ruhl recalls the novelist Italo Calvino’s celebration of lightness as an aesthetic choice. She explains, “A suspicion that lightness is not deeply serious (but instead whimsical) pervades aesthetic discourse. But what if lightness is a philosophical choice to temper reality with strangeness, to temper emotion with humor. Lightness is then a philosophical victory over heaviness. A reckoning with the humble and the small and the invisible.”42 In this essay, I consider how lightness works in Ruhl’s plays in an attempt to get a handle on the plays’ depth and poignancy, which the dead-end categories whimsy and quirkiness cannot approach. In doing so, I suggest that lightness is the means to another aspect of Ruhl’s work: its hopefulness. What is remarkable is that in Ruhl’s imaginative world, lightness—as, for example, when paper falls from the sky—successfully brings together both the experience of mourning and the experience of joy. Calvino’s essay on lightness is the first of the lectures he prepared for the Norton lecture series at Harvard in 1985. He died before he ever gave the lectures at Harvard, and the lectures appeared posthumously in a book entitled Six Memos for the Next Millennium. His goal in his first essay is to expand the concept of lightness beyond its common understanding as frivolity. Instead, he describes what he calls “a lightness of thoughtfulness.”43 Calvino says that in his fiction he attempts to use writing to counter the “weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world.”44 To help clarify this idea, he turns to the story of how Perseus defeats Medusa in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Perseus discovers that Medusa turns anyone who looks at her into stone. He is the agent of fleet-footed agility and proves a match for the literally petrifying Medusa. Calvino emphasizes that Perseus manages to kill Medusa only by looking at her indirectly: her image appears on his bronze shield. Lightness, it seems, works in concert with indirection. After beheading Medusa, Perseus carries her snake-enmeshed head around with him as a weapon that can turn anyone into stone, as Perseus demonstrates in his encounter with the inhospitable Atlas. After he frees Andromeda by slaying an enormous sea serpent, Perseus needs to put Medusa’s head down so he 156

Critical Perspectives

can wash his hands. First, however, he makes a little nest on the beach and fills it with soft leaves: “and there he rests Medusa’s snake-fringed head, / lest he be damaged by the beach’s gravel.”45 Calvino notes “that the lightness, of which Perseus is the hero, could not be better represented than by this gesture of refreshing courtesy toward a being so monstrous and terrifying yet at the same time somehow fragile and perishable.”46 Lightness for Calvino is not a matter of rejecting weight; rather, it entails incorporating heaviness—as represented here by Medusa’s petrifying head. Lightness comes across as a gesture of welcome that can get beyond the rigidity of the immediate concrete circumstance. Calvino notes that the concept of melancholy brings together these conflicting or disharmonious impulses. He writes, “As melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness, so humor is comedy that has lost its bodily weight.”47 Thus, melancholy and humor are in league with each other to create an experience of lightness. Lightness functions as an interpretation of the heaviness that seeks to free heaviness of its stasis and to present an opening whereby it could transform. Lightness presents the possibility of flight without instantiating it and thereby severing itself from the weight of the world. The melancholic may have humor but never manages to shake his or her worldly concerns. Calvino says that Perseus’s strength lies “not in a refusal of the reality in which he is fated to live; he carries the reality with him and accepts it as his particular burden.”48 To this point, Calvino recalls Paul Valéry’s memorable line: “One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.”49 Attracted to this kind of “lightness of thoughtfulness,” Ruhl took on an adaptation of Chekhov’s famously heavy Three Sisters, which premiered in Cincinnati in 2009. Perhaps most noteworthy in this work is its final scene. After the military brigade has left town and Irina’s fiancé has been killed, the old doctor, Chebutykin, reads the newspaper, singing the show tune refrain “Tararaboomdeay” and mumbling that nothing matters: “It’s all the same, all the same!” (125).50 Then Olga ends the play with the line, “To know, to know!” (125). Translators have tended to render this line as “If only we knew, if only we knew!”51 Ruhl, however, believes the line crystallizes the sisters’ defiance of their fate. She notes that the line in Russian has no pronoun and is “not necessarily past tense” (6). The effect of Ruhl’s rendering of the line is to add lightness to the play’s ending. This lightness is not evasion or frivolity. Rather, by freeing the line of the past tense and of a specific pronoun, Ruhl breathes possibility into it. In an interview, Ruhl said, “‘To know’ felt so much more hopeful, more like a defiance in a way, an emotional defiance . . . where ‘If only we knew,’ is more about looking 157

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

back.”52 The line remains mysterious—we can only guess what the object of the knowing may be—but it now welcomes hope and admits a future. Ruhl’s new rendering of this famous line reveals something important about the optimism critics occasionally ascribe to her work. For example, Leslie Durham refers to “Ruhl’s optimistic worldview,” 53 and Michael Bloom calls Ruhl “a writer who is both an optimist and an idealist.” 54 I agree with this assessment, but it would, I think, be more precise to describe Ruhl’s worldview as hopeful rather than optimistic. I make this distinction to draw attention to Ruhl’s method of incorporating reality, the suffering of the present and the past, into her vision for the future. Terry Eagleton’s recent book Hope without Optimism argues that optimism is a belief that things will work out well no matter what the facts may be. It is a personal disposition. It is not, he says, “a virtue, any more than having freckles or flat feet is a virtue.”55 As such, it is fairly neutral, but it can become problematic when it, as Jonathan Lear writes, “depends on averting [one’s] gaze from devastating reality.”56 Hope, in contrast, is a commitment to the future and a concomitant acknowledgment of one’s present reality. Eagleton writes that “the most authentic kind of hope is whatever can be salvaged, stripped of guarantees, from a general dissolution. It represents an irreducible residue that refuses to give way, plucking resilience from an openness to the possibility of unmitigated disaster.”57 This is the kind of clear-eyed hope that animates Ruhl’s drama. In the third act of Ruhl’s Three Sisters , after Masha confesses her doomed love for Vershinin, she says to Irina, “Somehow we will live through our lives” (94). That “through” is important, because it suggests that whatever possibility is open to the sisters at the play’s end emerges out of their lives, not in sunny opposition to them. The sisters, like Perseus, carry their reality with them. Perhaps nobody in Ruhl’s drama insists on the weightiness of reality as much as the character referred to only as P in Passion Play. In the final part of Ruhl’s Passion Play, which takes place in South Dakota between the 1960s and the present, P plays the role of Pontius Pilate in the local passion play until he is deployed to fight in the Vietnam War. The violence of the war deeply affects him, and its psychic trauma haunts him after his return home. Once P returns from Vietnam and again assumes the role of Pilate, his brother, who plays the Jesus character, complains in a rehearsal that the scene doesn’t seem real enough. P flies into a rage and hammers a nail through his own hand onto the cross in an attempt to demonstrate what is really real. P loses his role and spends time at a VA hospital for treatment. He returns to the Passion play in 1984 as a spectator when President Reagan 158

Critical Perspectives

visits as part of a campaign tour. P interrupts the play and commands the president’s attention. The president then asks him, “What’s the matter, son? Dontcha have a part in the play?” (233).58 P says he doesn’t and then pulls out a gun and aims it at himself as a secret service agent jumps on him. The scene blacks out at that point, but the lights come up again for an epilogue in the present spoken by P, who stands alone on stage with his “left hand limp at his side” (234). He says, despite appearances, no gun was fired in the previous scene. In fact, he says, that he sat in his seat “and whispered: Mary, stop the play, and an old woman next to me said: shh” (234). In effect, P here contrasts the reality of the present against the play and fictional account in the previous scene. His short, declarative sentences serve to convince the audience that this, now, is the unadorned real world. For example, he says, “I left the theater that day. Every month I take a bus to a different city. I sleep outside. That way I can hear the wind” (234). But this prosaic world is not without its charms. P says that “the good people at the VA hospital got rid of most of my delusions but I like to keep one or two around” (235). He summons the wind, he tells the audience, so “you [the audience] can sleep better” (235). Then the play ends with this remarkable stage direction: The sky turns white. P gets on an enormous boat. He opens his left hand to the sky. He sails off into the distance. (236) This scene serves as an emblem for Ruhl’s understanding of lightness. It presents a transformation of reality into an indeterminate possibility. The boat here is a fabulous reimagining of the war ship P served on in Vietnam. His raised hand, wounded from his nailing it to the cross, opens to a new reality. Importantly, Ruhl does not set a destination for this concluding change. The reality is not left behind; it is open to the future. Change and vitality are the important things, not defined resolution. Theater, Ruhl writes in an essay, is fundamentally an art form that traffics in lightness and mutability. She writes, “Many western traditions pin the arts against mortality; we try to make something that will abide, something made of stone, not butter. And yet theater has at the core of its practice the repetition of transience.”59 Therefore, Ruhl says theater should take a page from Ovid, who, she says, teaches that “the play takes pleasure in change 159

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

itself.” 60 And change is the means by which lightness brings about a vision of hope. Theodor Adorno has argued that seriousness and lightheartedness can coexist in art once we reject “the situation under the culture industry in which art is prescribed to tired businesspeople as a shot in the arm.”61 He says that such complementarity is possible when we find the lighthearted aspect of art not in its content but in its demeanor. Adorno wants to reserve a place for art apart from the pat happiness that modernity’s pervasive advertising culture has propagated. Therefore, he insists that art needs to be serious—and not simply a means of conveying an ingratiating message as, he says, the culture industry practices. The kind of seriousness Adorno goes on to describe allows for humor and joy; in contrast, the culture industry seeks to banish seriousness, which it determines to be an obstacle to happiness. To this end, he cites a distiche by Hölderlin entitled “Sophocles”: “Many attempt, vainly, to say the most joyful thing joyfully / Here it finally expresses itself to me, here, in sorrow.”62 What is joyful appears in art with sorrow. If we expand our experience of art beyond representational content to include a work of art’s demeanor, we could detect joy in work that could fairly be described as bleak. “Even in Beckett’s plays,” Adorno writes, “the curtain rises the way it rises on the room with Christmas presents.” 63 The image of a young Adorno on Christmas morning is difficult to pass over, but the key idea here is that a work of art, in its demeanor which turns from representing the world, conveys an indeterminate experience of joy: “As something that has escaped from reality and is nevertheless permeated with it, art vibrates between this seriousness and lightheartedness. It is this tension that constitutes art.”64 This interweaving of the serious and the lighthearted defines the texture of Ruhl’s plays. For example, in the middle of For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, five siblings drink whiskey, mourn the loss of their father who just died, tease one another and, at one moment, discuss what it means to be a grown-up. One says he first felt like a grown-up when he was allowed to join the adults at the big table on holidays; another mentions the responsibility he felt in his training as a physician, and another points to her “finding a livelihood where I could help other people” (49).65 But Ann, the oldest of the five, says, “The older I get the less grown up I feel” (50). The conversation turns serious as they note the relation between growing up and dying, but they maintain a joviality, reflecting what Ruhl writes in the introductory notes: “There is a certain musicality of speech when a family of five is talking” (3). For example, in the thick of this conversation about growing up 160

Critical Perspectives

and dying, one of the physician brothers, Jim, says that the body helps fight cancer. As soon as he says, “The body is your closest ally,” his brother John quips, “Like Canada?” (51). Then: “Someone begins singing a brief phrase of ‘O Canada’ and they all chime in” (51). The play begins in a hospital room with George, the siblings’ father, lying in a bed dying. The pacing of the scene is slow, and the siblings’ dialogue is checked by the steady, ominous beeping of a piece of medical machinery. In three movements, as Ruhl calls the play’s three acts, the play moves from the hospital room, to the family home where the siblings drink and talk, and, finally, to Neverland, the fantastical counterweight to the play’s opening heaviness. Years earlier, Ann played the role of Peter Pan at the Davenport Children’s Theatre, and at the end of the Second Movement, she opens a trunk to find her old Peter Pan costume. Once she changes into it and her siblings change into costumes for the Darling children, the play reenacts Peter Pan. Peter wants to lead the children to Neverland, but they quickly realize their aging bodies aren’t physically up to the demands of flying, something even pixie dust can’t remedy. So they limp their way on foot to Neverland. Captain Hook, played by the brother John, eventually appears and kills Peter in a duel. The siblings cry over Peter’s body and “secretly” attach him to flying cables (78). Wendy, played by Ann’s sister—conveniently also named Wendy—then turns to the audience to report what Tinkerbell told her: “She says, if you believe in Peter Pan, clap, please clap! Do you believe in Peter Pan?” (79). With the audience’s applause, Peter takes flight: “Oh I’m light! Light as air!” (80). The siblings soon join Peter in flight, and they peek into the windows of their childhood home. After John mentions that the house isn’t theirs anymore, the brothers drop their roles and head back to their “grown up lives” (85). In the end, only Ann remains in costume, and once alone on stage, she says she sees her father in the audience. George enters with a bouquet of flowers and tells Ann to “change costumes” and head home for a party. After embracing her father, Ann, still dressed as Peter Pan, addresses the audience: “Before I went home I stayed in the theater for a little while longer. Where you don’t have to grow up” (90). Then after throwing a handful of pixie dust, she flies off in a “fantastical exit” (90). In Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, theatre—and, more broadly, imagination—is conceived of as a practice of mourning. The characters’ journey to Neverland comes about only through their process of mourning their father, and it is never detached from that reality. In her introductory notes, Ruhl writes, “Movement Three should often feel like full-on children’s theater, arms akimbo, with unperformed real people hovering underneath 161

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

their roles in Peter Pan” (3). Neverland never gets too far from the hospital room, just as Peter, Wendy, and the other Darling children never break free of the grieving siblings who hoist whiskey tumblers to their father’s memory in the Second Movement. This weight of the real does not compromise the flight of the fantastic; rather, it infuses the play with seriousness. As Valéry says, “One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.”66 The efficacy of mourning achieved by the imaginative flights to Neverland becomes clear in Ann’s final lines: “But before I went home, I stayed in the theater for a little while longer. Where you don’t have to grow up” (90). Staying in the theatre gives Ann the means to connect with her deceased father. He greets her with a bouquet of flowers and ends their brief exchange with a simple, poignant line: “I’m very proud of you, Annie” (89). Earlier, Ann admitted that even though her father never missed a single one of her Peter Pan performances, she felt a sting of disappointment. During the Second  Movement, she recalls, “One time Dad said to me driving home from an Iowa game: well you’re very smart, Annie. But it made me feel like he was saying: you’re smart so why have you not accomplished anything?” (46). Therefore, his final appearance brought about by an imaginative theatrical performance brings Ann comfort. They embrace after he tells her that he is proud of her. If, as the play suggests, imagination can be efficacious in the work of mourning, it is lightness, that nimble, good-humored openness of mind, that enhances it. In his essay on lightness, Calvino reserves special praise for Cavalcanti, whom he designates as “the poet of lightness.”67 He is particularly attracted to an image of Cavalcanti in Boccaccio’s Decameron in which Cavalcanti is harassed by a group of young, mischievous noblemen as he is quietly strolling through a churchyard full of “great marble tombs.”68 Cavalcanti defuses their taunts with one line: “Gentlemen, you may say anything you wish to me in your own home”; “then,” Boccaccio continues, “resting his hand on one of the great tombs and being very nimble, he leaped over it and, landing on the other side, made off and rid himself of them.”69 This image of the spry Cavalcanti can serve as a touchstone for an understanding of Ruhl’s For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday. Cavalcanti uses his wit, puts a hand on the marble tomb, and leaps over it. Similarly, Ruhl puts her hand on a scene of death in the play’s First Movement and leaps over it into the fantastical Third Movement, all the while never abjuring the seriousness of the mourning family. Rather, Ruhl’s leap demonstrates the comfort imagination can afford those beset by grief. In conclusion, it is worth recalling Matilde, the aspiring comedian and ineffective house cleaner in The Clean House. Throughout the play, she wears 162

Critical Perspectives

black as she mourns her parents who died the previous year. Her mother died as she was laughing after hearing Matilde’s father tell a joke that took him a year to make up. After her mother died, her father shot himself. For much of the play, Matilde mourns, which means not cleaning and keeping order (which her boss, the regimented physician Lane, would prefer), but rather waiting for inspiration for a joke. Jokes upset one’s desire to control experiences. Jokes offer a touch of lightness that chips away at order. Matilde says, “The perfect joke was not made up by one person. It passed through the air and you caught it. A perfect joke is somewhere between an angel and a fart” (24).70 Twice in the play, Matilde says, “This is how I imagine my parents,” which prompts them to appear on stage and enact her imagined scene. The play concludes with her imagining them at the moment of her birth, which was notable because, among other things, Matilde came into the world laughing. Matilde tells the audience that her mother said I was laughing at my father’s joke. I laughed to take in the air. I took in some air, and then I cried. (109) The script then directs Matilde to look at her parents. This meeting of the eyes achieves “a moment of completion between them” (109). Matilde’s mourning of her parents brings about satisfaction, if not a conclusion, through the work of her imagination. The taking in of air, the embrace of lightness, is the heartening practice of mourning that Ruhl’s drama consistently welcomes.

163

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

ARRESTED DEV-ELOPEMENT: MYTH-UNDERSTANDING FATHER-DAUGHTER LOVE IN SARAH RUHL’S EURYDICE Christina Dokou In Eurydice, Sarah Ruhl creatively reconfigures classical myth to sensitively probe what is still in many ways a taboo subject, the Electra complex, an abnormal emotional investment of a daughter on her father as the ideal male partner. However, Ruhl does not approach her story through the psychologically designated tragedy of the House of Atreus, to which the original Electra belongs, but through the myth of Eurydice, the young bride of the musician Orpheus, whom he tried to bring back from the dead. The presence of an Electra complex in Ruhl’s heroine has been noted by a couple of critics,71 yet only in passing and concluding, in Miriam Chirico’s case, on a “disturbing” note, that “the perception that human relations are ultimately absurd because they cause pain is a much darker message than Sarah Ruhl, who wrote the play for her deceased father, could have possibly intended.”72 The present examination intends to shed a more positive light on the playwright’s endeavor. First, it will show how Ruhl deftly uses the mythic conventions and fantastic symbolisms of the Underworld to portray Eurydice’s mental distortions of reality while in the grip of her neurosis, when she is forced to “abandon” the father she loves for a bridegroom she views as alternatively immature and predatory. The fragmentation, conflicts, and resulting atavism within Eurydice’s pysche are immediately translated as both part of the mythical setting and the splitting of the character’s emotional functions into multiple, opposing yet complementary roles. Second, it supports how Ruhl’s use of Eurydice’s Electra complex is not so much a sign of Eurydice’s weakness but her heroic attempt to define her own destiny apart from the dictates of patriarchy. In this way, Ruhl subverts not only the original myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, but also common conceptions of the Electra complex as social tatoo. The Electra complex was formulated by Carl Jung, Freud’s student best known for his psychoanalytic study of myth via the concept of “archetypes.” First coined in a 1913 article,73 Jung’s theory joins a neurosis-inducing “conflict” where “a daughter develops a specific liking for the father, with a correspondingly jealous attitude towards the mother,” with the myth of Electra, who plotted the murder of her own mother to avenge her beloved father’s murder.74 Jung’s Electra complex was refuted by Freud who recast it as a “female Oedipus complex,” but the idea persisted, although it was later questioned.75 164

Critical Perspectives

Given the above information, nothing could seem more unrelated than the story of Orpheus, the mythical first poet-musician, brought to us mainly by Latin renditions of lost Greek versions.76 Orpheus’s bride, Eurydice, is killed (either while being pursued by the rapist Aristaeus or by a snake) on their wedding day; he journeys to the Underworld and, through the power of his superb music, persuades Hades and Persephone to release his bride. Tragically, though, at the last moment he disobeys the divine injunction not to turn back and look at her until they have reached the living world, and loses Eurydice forever. Inconsolable, Orpheus forswears all relations with the female sex, and is torn to pieces for that by a group of raving Maenads. As Owen Lee tells us, the myth spawned many retellings from the Middle Ages onward, “And as the story continued to appear in literature, part myth, part legend, part folklore, it came to grips with three subjects: the mystery of life and death and rebirth; the all-compelling power of poetry and song; [and] the tragic destruction of love and beauty when human emotion is not properly controlled.”77 It is however Shane Butler’s inspired reading of the backward glance that brings us closer to Ruhl’s play, the idea of revision in its multiple creative functions: The backward glance is the name we should give to all moments, including these most elemental ones, when the poet—call him Orpheus—suddenly becomes a reader of himself. . . . And it is thus in the unended . . . that we catch a glimpse of the poet who is still a living author, still, after all these centuries, unwilling to look back, to let go, to lose.78 Literary revision, then, breaks the taboo of looking backward because of the ineradicable love for a corpse bride/text, and emerges from myth as a way to maintain what is lost, even while it is admitted as irrevocably lost—a literary equivalent of melancholic “introjection.”79 Freud extensively analyzed this concept in “Mourning and Melancholia,” and indeed, it has been a critical diagnosis for several of Ruhl’s creations.80 Still, the popular understanding of melancholia does not seem to coincide with Ruhl’s rendition of melancholy as “Bold, Outward, Sassy, Sexy and Unashamed”;81 or those supposedly maladjusted characters—all women— as “mostly of the superior variety,” able to “perceive the true nature of existence,”82 and as agents “of female awakening, sharing, and resistance to oppression.”83 165

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

This consideration inevitably returns us to the problem posed by Sherod Santos regarding the original Orpheus story: Of Eurydice we know a good deal less than we do of Orpheus. Or do we? Perhaps predictably (given the determinedly patriarchal tradition out of which this story grows) what we don’t know about her is precisely what we do know: her mystery. For once she entered the underworld, that mystery became her identity, “the strangeness of that which excludes all intimacy.”84 It is precisely this mystery of absence that Ruhl tackles with “moxie” and “rare creative boldness”85 by imaginatively filling in the gaps in the original myth. Her play captures what happens to Eurydice at the time of her death and during her stay in the Underworld, events that provide an alternative yet credible answer to the question, “Why turn back?” Spurred by her personal loss, Ruhl looks back to her own childhood and, using Eurydice as an alter ego, pens a loving tribute to her father, whom she lost to cancer, by having her heroine meet her father again in death. It is an analogy—Freud would call it the transference or displacement of feelings from one person toward another86—that Ruhl is highly aware of, as she indicates in an interview: “Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. They’re pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.”87 Ruhl’s artistry, however, joins the personal with the universal by turning her own story, transformed for theatre, into “herstory” (to use the feminist term), an attempt to record the missing or silenced pieces of women’s past existences that patriarchal views of “his-story” have always neglected or exploited, consigning women to the underworld of recorded annals. Thus, as Kelly observes, one more Orpheus-like dimension is added to the revisionist work of Ruhl and other like-minded women playwrights: “The drama offers an alternative or supplement to narrative history for those driven to look back; it brings an audience along to serve as fellow-seekers or, at the very least, sympathetic onlookers to the framing of a collective memory.”88 This potent blend of the personal and political finds in myth an ideal vehicle of expression, as the forces of the unconscious, where trauma and desire reign, and the pinch of playfulness—in Ruhl’s case, a tendency toward surrealist humor and postmodern mashups—required to serve heavy messages to modern audiences are the natural home to myth’s fantastic elements. As Casado166

Critical Perspectives

Gual notes, anachronisms in Eurydice “point to the subjective presentation of temporality that characterizes modern and postmodern art, while at the same time signaling the temporal elasticity of myths themselves.”89 It is in this junction that the elements of the Electra complex unfold, in their tactful disguise but with the boldness of Greek drama’s avowal of taboo subjects. From the beginning, the epigraph “This play is for my father” (37) states explicitly that the father-daughter dynamic here blends with, and even might impose itself on, the classical myth’s focus on the starcrossed lovers. Accordingly, Eurydice’s thoughts on her wedding day oddly turn to her dead father; when she runs from the wedding party because the unsociable Orpheus has left her alone to deal with the guests, she declares, “A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and a daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day” (42). Portraying the father as a betrayed groom at the same time the mother is characterized as a sexual rival is a classic rendition of the Electra complex. Yet, coming on the heels of the first two scenes of the play, where we meet the lovers and the dead father respectively, this preoccupation with her father seems more justified and bittersweet than neurotic. In fact, if there is something infantile and neurotic, it is in the sugary romance of the two young lovers, “a little too young and a little too in love” (38), whose bliss is already experiencing discordant undertones. For example, Eurydice is depicted as a bookworm who can’t carry a tune, while Orpheus is so absorbed by the myriad musical compositions happening in his head that he is often withdrawn and mute (38–39); when he romantically offers her the birds, the sea, the sky and the stars, she responds, “That’s very generous . . . Perhaps too generous?” which could be construed as ironic (38). Moreover, when Orpheus proposes to Eurydice by wrapping a piece of string he carries to repair broken instruments around her ring finger—signifying their marriage as a form of patriarchal bondage and a “fixing” of the rogue maiden—Eurydice declares, “I don’t know if I want to be an instrument” (40). No wonder then that it is Eurydice first who utters the fateful edict, “Don’t look at me,” not just foreshadowing but, in a way, eliciting the couple’s final dissolution (38). Juxtaposed with the antics of Scene 1, the dead father’s heartfelt letter and emotional pantomime of his would-have-been role on his daughter’s wedding day is characterized as “solemn” and “affectionate” (42) in Scene 2. His attempt to offer her support and advice on her wedding day, even at the risk of being caught (the dead are not supposed to remember how to read or write, but the father held his breath when he was first dipped into Lethe, 167

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

the river of Forgetfulness), captures the audience’s sympathy. This letter, in the hands of the Nasty Interesting Man becomes the lure to lead Eurydice— who has already run away from her wedding party—to his apartment, where his attempt to seduce her drives her to run and fatally trip down the stairs. Interestingly, her death is described this way: “She follows the letter down, down, down” (45), as if it is not only her father’s love that leads to her fall, but also as if it is not an accidental fall, but a willed one, her following rather than her falling. It should also be noted that neither Aristaeus (the mythological equivalent of the Nasty Interesting Man), nor Hades, the Lord of the Underworld, who appears later and is played by the same actor as the Nasty Interesting Man, are named by their proper names, unlike Orpheus and Eurydice. This discrepancy only makes sense if we consider what Freud says in chapter 6 of The Interpretation of Dreams about unconscious distortion mechanisms, which mask (in our daydreams, psychopathological symptoms, or  literary creations) subjects too painful or shameful for an individual to consider openly. If we take the surreal elements of Ruhl’s plot as simply renditions of Eurydice’s mind, and keep in mind the aforementioned defense mechanism of transference or displacement, we could conclude that Eurydice unconsciously projects the blank namelessness of the Man/ Aristaeus/Hades onto the anxiety-inducing fragments of both groom and father: Orpheus’s possessive amorousness (about to be consummated), and her own clandestine belief that her father is more “interesting” and manly than her bridegroom, though to consider him in amorous terms would be deemed “nasty.” The Man’s words confirm this reading: “[Eurydice wants] A man who can put his big arm around your little shoulders as he leads you through the crowd, a man who answers the door at parties. . . . . A man with big hands, with big stupid hands like potatoes, a man who can carry a cow in labor” (45). The emphasis on her as “little” and the man as “big” and protective may well be stereotypical machismo, but it also indicates a kind of father-daughter patronizing relationship. After all, the Man’s sole attraction for Eurydice is her father’s letter, a direct link between literacy/ literature and allure that we see repeated in the Second Movement, with its emphasis on the father-daughter literacy lessons. In the light of this, we can then consider Eurydice’s voluntary escape from her wedding party, and especially her “involuntary” fall straight into the Underworld, as a neurotic breakdown precipitated by the spiking anxiety of a person with an Electra complex when faced with marriage. The onstage action portrays all the signs of neurotic behavior, such as ego fragmentation, 168

Critical Perspectives

displacement, stress, and flight. Moreover, Eurydice is not shown fleeing from a pleasant situation into a necessarily unpleasant one, but rather responding to subtle signs of discontent already present in her “perfect” romance. Thus in Ruhl’s play, the Electra complex, and Eurydice’s reactions according to it, are presented as a woman’s (spasmodic) attempts to define her destiny according to her own wishes, not those of a man, no matter how gift ed or enamored he might be.90 Eurydice’s quasi-decision to escape is further understood when we actually see her interact at length with her dead father in the Underworld. Interestingly, Eurydice’s symptoms of anxiety end when she is in Hades, on the one hand because, naturally, the waters of Lethe have made her forget her past life, but on the other because the Underworld transforms into a miniElysium through her gradually regained intimacy with her father. In fact, the surreal décor and action of the Underworld seems engineered to underscore the Electra complex instead of a classical romance since, as Chirico notes, “Surrealism, as an artistic style, stimulates the unconscious mind though not the heart.”91 Myth-informed surrealism is also a way for Ruhl to keep her play engaging, since, as she claims, “Psychological realism makes emotions so rational, so explained, that they don’t feel like emotions to me.”92 The Hades experience also finally explains the ubiquitous—one could even call it nagging, or symptomatic—presence of water and water symbols in the play: Orpheus and Eurydice’s bathing costumes and seashore romance in the First Movement, Scene 1; Eurydice’s two meetings with the Man by a water pump in the First Movement, Scene 3, where he finds the father’s letter and reads it to the accompaniment of “Musty dripping sounds”(42); and, when they are in his apartment, Eurydice asking the Man for water instead of the champagne she’s been having at her wedding (44). All can be read as symptoms heralding the immersion into the neurotic unconscious, which is shown as practically waterlogged. Inside the elevator  that leads to the Underworld it rains, surreally, and there are exposed water pipes and “strange watery noises. Drip, drip, drip” (46). Of course, this is partly the playwright’s rendition of the classical Greek Hades as a marsh fed by five subterranean rivers and the lake Acherousia, and Eurydice recounts with appropriate anguish her swim in the river Lethe and her crossing on Charon’s boat (27). Soon, though, her classically inflected suffering is erased by father-daughter intimacy, and this leads us to seek a further explanation for the symbol of water. The Electra complex occurs in the so-called phallic stage, around the age of five, and “is often described as penis envy” in female children.93 169

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

Freud categorically associates images of water and its metonyms with two things: first, “Birth is regularly expressed in dreams by some connection with water,”94 but also, “easily comprehensible, too, is the substitution for the male member of objects out of which water flows: faucets, water cans, fountains, as well as its representation by other objects that have the power of elongation” 95 —like the string with which Eurydice’s father makes her a makeshift home, and which is longer and brings more pleasure to her than the string-ring Orpheus offers her. In other words, Eurydice’s desire for the father, who represents the prime Phallus, is one which is finally uninhibited because it has been already censored in the strictest way possible—she is dead and her mind has been erased, so she technically bears no responsibility for her desire. Moreover, it resembles a rebirth, a regression from a sexually mature bride toward a renewed state of infancy that, despite its helplessness and speechlessness, is nevertheless what all humans secretly desire: the bliss and perfect contentment of the womb. Accordingly, the father has conveniently taken care not to drink from Lethe—an exception that makes no sense in the mythic context, but perfect sense if Eurydice’s unconscious dictates the rules of the play and exempts the daddy she craves—and so recognizes and takes under his wing the bewildered Eurydice, making for her the aforementioned string-home and teaching her slowly how to regain her beloved literacy. Indeed, Eurydice’s love of reading is of seminal importance in the play. It is telling that, though the love-lorn Orpheus sends Eurydice a volume of the Collected Works of Shakespeare , it is her father who teaches her to recognize its beauty. He reads her King Lear’s address to his dead daughter Cordelia—the daughter who loved him best, more than even her would-be husband, and the one to whom Lear also showed, in his last words, a love that is very much in the vein of the Electra complex: “We two alone will sing like birds i’th’cage” (57). Extrapolating from what Al-Shamma says below, we can claim that these intimate father-daughter conversations are the psychological and personally invested core of the play: The stories he tells her are about his childhood rather than hers, however, so the longed-for past and the complex of memories of which it consists are associated with the father rather than with Eurydice herself. Ruhl has stated that she wrote the play in order to have one last conversation with her father and that all of the memories that the character recounts are transcribed from conversations she recorded with him when he was in the hospital.96 170

Critical Perspectives

However, there is an undertone of sexual aggression in this Underworld that takes the play beyond biographical nostalgia, and boldly pits fatherdaughter love against romantic love between a bride and groom. Of Orpheus, Eurydice’s father remarks, “His shoulders aren’t very broad. Can he take care of you?” (60). The father’s mention of her name gives Eurydice “tingles” (48), and his explanation to her of the concept of “father,” is Eurydice’s first post-mortem memory: FATHER When you were alive, I was your tree.— EURYDICE My tree! Yes, the tall one in the backyard! I used to sit all day in its shade!” (48) Like water, the tree metaphor, an overtly phallic symbol, is used extensively throughout the play to show Eurydice’s intense love and infatuation with her father, as in “The tree talks so beautifully” (49) or, more explicitly in terms of sexual love, when, for example, the father ventriloquizes Orpheus’s love letter to her: FATHER It’s addressed to Eurydice. That’s you. EURYDICE That’s you. FATHER You. It says: I love you. EURYDICE I love you? FATHER It’s like your tree. EURYDICE Tall? The FATHER considers. EURYDICE Green? FATHER It’s like sitting in the shade. EURYDICE Oh. FATHER It’s like sitting in the shade with no clothes on. EURYDICE Oh!—yes. (51) In the same vein, we can read the two strange appearances of the Lord of the Underworld (a nameless stand-in for Hades). He first appears as an aggressive man-child in oversized clothes who sexually propositions Eurydice in very Electra-like terms: “Husbands are for children. You need a lover” (57). Later, Hades returns in greater potency, transformed into 171

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

a 10-foot version who “now resembles the NASTY INTERESTING MAN more than he resembles the CHILD” (65) to repeat his proposition more forcefully, this time in Oedipal terms: “My mother’s needs have been satisfied. I’m ready to be a man now” (66). Yet his definition of love is abhorrent: “A song is two dead bodies rubbing under the covers to keep warm” (66), a statement that juxtaposes him with both Orpheus and the father (as both musically inclined, more or less), and which harps again at the erotic tenor of the world of the dead, where primal instinct supersedes social taboo, as in the unconscious. Compared to the gentle and loving father, then, all other men appear to Eurydice’s unconscious mind as simultaneously unappealing, predatory, immature, too mundane and, at best, too fanciful to be reliable. She says, “This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful” (53). It is ironic that Orpheus’s extraordinary singing can make the chorus of Stones, who are emotionally dead anyway, weep (58), but it is precisely his gift that drives Eurydice away, as it clashes with her own autonomous emotions, thoughts, and desires. Thus, instead of an imbalanced soul interrupted by her neurotic complex, Eurydice comes off as a person who has a rich inner world, and is content being herself and loving her father, just as Orpheus is also fully himself and loves his music. This suggestion brings the play to its climax of the backward glance, which is presented here, just like the death before, not as Orpheus’s mistake, but as Eurydice’s own choice. Her joy at Orpheus’s coming is immediately cooled with concern for the father she leaves behind: EURYDICE I hear him at the gates! That’s his music! He’s come to save me! FATHER Do you want to go with him? EURYDICE Yes, of course! She sees that his face falls. EURYDICE Oh—you’ll be lonely, won’t you? (60) She is only persuaded to leave after her father mimes walking her down the aisle toward her groom, as well as instructing her on how they can 172

Critical Perspectives

reunite successfully the next time she dies if she doesn’t drink from Lethe: she promises to “look for a tree” and he promises to write her letters (60). Yet the very next moment annuls even this temporary good-bye, when Eurydice not only performs the forbidden gesture—“She looks back” toward her father (60)—redirecting the glance of insurmountable desire  that inscribes the whole original myth, but also, despite opposition from the Stones, declares: “I want to go home! I want my father!” (61). In the briefest of stichomythia that ensues, the Stones fail to persuade Eurydice to move forward either intellectually or emotionally, and so, at the apex of the play’s dramatic climax: She makes a decision. She increases the pace. She takes two steps for every step that Orpheus takes. She catches up to him. EURYDICE Orpheus? He turns toward her, startled. Orpheus looks at Eurydice. Eurydice looks at Orpheus. The world falls away. ORPHEUS You startled me. A small sound—ping. They turn away from each other, matter-of-fact, compelled. (61) The choice of vocabulary in this segment is meaningful. “Pace,” or tempo, is a musical quality, and thus Eurydice’s conscious decision to choose her father over her husband is also her first attempt to make her own music, walk to her own beat, despite her husband having always remarked on her lack of musical rhythm (39, 61, 62). Indeed, from that moment on, Eurydice appears to be very much certain of what she wants, demanding her room (which her despairing father has dismantled) back, giving orders, and boldly telling the Stones that she hates them for their lack of emotion (64–65). Faced with the imminent prospect of a forced marriage to Hades, she pens a “Dear John” letter to Orpheus, which also gives considerate instructions to her “Husband’s Next Wife” (67)—a gesture of cruel irony on the part of the playwright, since the “next wife” will be the group of sexually raging, flesh-rending Maenads, worse than Mother Hades—and “dips herself in the River,” “lies down next to her FATHER, as though asleep” (67), imitating his fetal position, and begins eternity in the liebestod manner97 of Romeo 173

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

and Juliet, or Tristan and Isolde, legendary lovers all. Interestingly, she lies next to her father after drinking from Lethe, suggesting that, even as an unconscious gesture, their love survives fatal Forgetfulness. The pair becomes central to the closing tableau of the play, as they are joined by Orpheus, who eventually dies and comes to the Underworld but can’t read Eurydice’s letter. Framed by emptiness and senility as an odd pair of alternatives, the father-daughter love seems by comparison less cold and more genuine, more nirvana, and appears more as a return to the primal womb than as the irremediable loss which is death. Thus, in conclusion, Ruhl inserts psychological awareness into timeless myth to draw attention to a modern malaise, “the breakdown of connections—of family, of love, of compassion—that should define and comfort us.”98 Against that, which the heroine’s Electra complex appears rather as a cure and a means of resistance to the erasure of female and other nonconforming experiences that patriarchy and Stony logic jointly dictate.

174

AFTERWORD “I HAD HOPED TO GIVE THEM PLEASURE”

I’ve thought many times during the process of writing this book that it is arriving prematurely. Ruhl is essentially mid-career, with surely many more years and likely many theatrical revelations ahead of her. How can we know what will be, to borrow the words of the late literary and cultural critic Edward Said, her “late style”?1 Will she, like Beckett, write works that become ever more spare, or like Beethoven, more intricately complex? Will she write more plays in the direction of Scenes from Court Life or the whipping boy and his prince—more explicitly political, more epic in scope? Or like How to Transcend a Happy Marriage—essayistic, philosophical, discursive? As this book goes to print Ruhl has returned, whether momentarily or for the long term, to her first genre, poetry, and published three poems, “Summer, Rhode Island,” “Miscarriage,” and “I Wanted Music,” in Narrative Magazine. She is also completing a book on the poet Max Ritvo, who was her student. Called Letters from Max, it collects their email correspondence at the end of Ritvo’s life, as he was dying of cancer and writing his first collection, Four Reincarnations, about that experience. Ruhl’s letters to Ritvo radiate love and concern; they share visions of cosmology and creation and desires for communion and transcendence that we see in The Oldest Boy and How to Transcend a Happy Marriage. From her earliest foray in Dog Play to How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, Ruhl’s plays are a “sensuous and joyful immersion in the marvelous specificity of things.”2 They pay “fastidious attention to the luminous aesthetic detail” while also inviting us into an “all-embracing sense of being swept up into another world.”3 They are inspired by Virginia Woolf ’s intuition that the most meaningful occurrences in our lives are “moments of being” when we discern a “token of some real thing behind appearances,”4 and by Chekhov’s linguistic music and Maeterlinck’s desire to trace acts of life back to their mysterious sources. They ask, what does it feel like to fall in love? And answer (in Dead Man’s Cell Phone): as though

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

you and this astonishing other being are enclosed in a gentle shower, a “snow  parade,” of paper houses, each one delicately handcrafted out of the highest-quality embossed paper. And: what does it feel like to mourn the death of your father? Answered in Eurydice: as though incessant rain is pouring on you, while you are trapped in an elevator, going down into the center of the earth. And: what does it feel like to be truly intimate with your spouse? Responds In the Next Room or the vibrator play: as though the walls of your house have suddenly flown away and you are naked together in the snow, in a winter garden that in the spring blossoms with pink flowers. Ruhl’s plays use the resources of the stage to fuse psychology and scenery, the inner and outer, to conjure the subjective states that lie invisible to others and are unreachable through realistic dialogue. In the Preface I wrote that Ruhl is an artist-thinker whose cultural influence will eventually reach beyond the theatre, and that her plays, which ask “big questions about death, love, and how we should treat each other in this lifetime,”5 and strive to convey “a kind of primal familiarity wedded to the newness of soaring insight,”6 should be seen as part of a larger conversation taking place on emotion and intimacy across the humanities and sciences, in literary criticism, psychoanalysis, theology, and medicine. I situate her with those whom William Demastes has called the “new alchemists,” artists and scientists who are re-enchanting the world through a grounding in the world. Within the theatre world she is countering critic and director Robert Brustein’s famous critique of twentieth-century theatre as a “theatre of revolt,” concerned with demolishing old certainties but not yet envisioning their replacements. Although Brustein’s book was published in 1964, in the midst of the Off-Off-Broadway movement of radically political, experimental work, its basic argument holds up. Revolt, among artists and scholars, is still preferred to reimagination. Demastes puts it this way: “Condemning a culture that lost its way is essential, but perhaps even more essential today, and far more difficult, is the need to find regenerative options that can be made acceptable to the postmodern mind.”7 Ruhl’s playwriting is one of those regenerative options in our world, in conversation with developments in other fields including affect studies observing subjective emotional response to events; intimacy research that demonstrates the impact of attentiveness and (used in How to Transcend a Happy Marriage) compersion—taking pleasure in your lover’s pleasure separate from you; the doctrine of the spiritual senses in theological aesthetics, training our perceptive faculties to perceive splendor; the medical humanities, which teach us how to live with ambiguity and 176

Afterword

translate knowledge into wisdom; and literary criticism that moves away from a “paranoid” or “suspicious” reading of literature to one that seeks absorption and enchantment. Literary critic Rita Felski’s description of enchantment sounds like a Ruhl production: an “affirmation of wonder” that is “potentially enlivening, energizing, even ethical, encouraging a stance of openness and generosity to the world.”8 Ruhl’s plays aim to be events. That is, they are not so much about love, intimacy, communion, and transcendence as they are vehicles through which the audience and the theater makers experience these pleasurable states. In #50 of 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, an essay titled “On Pleasure,” Ruhl recalls an instance when she asked a director for permission to allow her husband and Paula Vogel to attend a rehearsal because they wouldn’t be able to see the performance of the show. “Oh, of course you must want their feedback,” the director said. Ruhl responded, “Oh no! I had hoped to give them pleasure!” (107). Sarah Ruhl’s plays give audiences pleasure. Not thrill-seeking fun, not distractions, but the deep pleasures of being attuned to the present moment and rediscovering the enchantment of the world and each other.

177

CHRONOLOGY

1974

January 24: Sarah Ruhl born in Wilmette, Illinois to Patrick Ruhl, a toy designer, and Kathleen Kehoe Ruhl, an actress and later an English teacher. She has an older sister, Kate, who became a psychiatrist.

1994

Ruhl’s father dies of cancer when she is a sophomore at Brown University. Begins studying playwriting with Paula Vogel at Brown. Writes Dog Play for Vogel’s class.

1997

Passion Play (consisting of just Part One at this point) premieres at Trinity Repertory Company, Providence, directed by Peter Dubois. Graduates with her BA in English from Brown University.

1998

Orlando, commissioned by the Piven Theatre Workshop in Evanston, Illinois, premieres there, directed by Joyce Piven.

2001

Eurydice produced in a workshop version in Brown’s New Plays Festival, directed by Hayley Finn. Graduates with her MFA in Playwriting from Brown University. The Lady with the Lap Dog and Anna around the Neck, commissioned by the Piven Theatre Workshop, produced there, directed by Joyce Piven.

2002

Melancholy Play premieres at the Piven Theatre Workshop, directed by Jessica Thebus. Passion Play produced in workshop form at the Tristan Bates Theatre, London, directed by Mark Wing-Davey.

2003

Eurydice premieres at Madison Repertory Theatre, directed by Richard Corley. Late: A Cowboy Song premieres at Clubbed Thumb in New York City, directed by Debbie Saivetz. Wins Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award and a Whiting Award for emerging writers.

Chronology

“How to Stage Reciprocal of Rain: A Non-manual” published in Play: A Journal of Plays (Providence and New York, Spring 2003). 2004

The Clean House premieres at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Bill Rauch. Wins the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2004, and is a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. Passion Play (in three parts) premieres at Arena Stage in Washington DC, directed by Molly Smith. Wins the Fourth Freedom Forum Award from the Kennedy Center.

2005

Marries Anthony Charuvastra, child psychiatrist. (Paula Vogel and wife Anne Fausto-Sterling officiate at the wedding.)

2006

Wins MacArthur “Genius” Award. Demeter in the City commissioned by Cornerstone Theatre in Los Angeles and produced at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, directed by Shishir Kurup. Nominated for an NAACP Award. Ruhl considers the play unfinished and it remains unpublished. Daughter Anna is born.

2007

Snowless commissioned for the Chicago Humanities Festival. Dead Man’s Cell Phone premieres at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, DC, directed by Rebecca Taichman. In 2008 it was produced in New York by Playwrights Horizons and wins the Wins the Helen Hayes award for Best New Play.

2008

Wins the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award.

2009

In the Next Room or the vibrator play, commissioned by Berkeley Rep, premieres there, directed by Les Waters. It opened on Broadway (Ruhl’s Broadway debut) at the Lyceum Theatre later that year, and was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize and nominated for the 2010 Best Play Tony Award. Three Sisters, commissioned by the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, premieres there, directed by John Doyle.

2010

Passion Play produced by Epic Theatre Ensemble at the Irondale Center, Brooklyn, directed by Mark Wing-Davey. Wins a Lilly Award for women in the American theatre. Twins Hope and William are born. 179

Chronology

2011

Stage Kiss, commissioned by the Goodman Theatre of Chicago, premieres there, directed by Jessica Thebus. Edits, with Caridad Svich, Popular Forms for a Radical Theatre.

2012

Dear Elizabeth, commissioned by Yale Repertory Theatre, premieres there, directed by Les Waters. Melancholy Play: A Chamber Musical, with music by Todd Almond, produced in New York by 13P.

2014

100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write published by Faber and Faber. The Oldest Boy premieres at Lincoln Center Theater, directed by Rebecca Taichman.

2016

For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday premieres at the Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival for New American Plays, directed by Les Waters. (A production at Shattered Globe Theater in Chicago, in May 2017, stars Ruhl’s mother Kathleen Kehoe Ruhl.) Scenes from Court Life or the whipping boy and his prince premieres at the Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Mark Wing-Davey. (It was researched and workshopped by Wing-Davey’s graduate acting class at NYU in November 2015.)

2017

How to Transcend a Happy Marriage premieres at Lincoln Center Theater, directed by Rebecca Taichman. Wins the Steinberg Distinguished Playwriting Award for Career Excellence. Poems “Summer, Rhode Island,” “Miscarriage,” and “I Wanted Music” published in Narrative Magazine.

2018

Letters from Max, the correspondence of Ruhl and poet Max Ritvo (1990–2016), her former student, published by Milkweed Editions.

180

NOTES

Preface 1. Sarah Ruhl, Dog Play, 2. Unpublished manuscript, courtesy of the author. I am working from a revised version that was read at the Ten Minute Play Festival, Chicago Dramatists, in 1998. All subsequent references to the play are from this edition. 2. Paula Vogel, “Sarah Ruhl” BOMB 99 (Spring 2007): 54. 3. Quoted in Graydon Royce, “Welcome to the New Jungle: Sarah Rasmussen Takes Over the Minneapolis Theater,” StarTribune, February 11, 2016, http:// www.startribune.com/welcome-to-the-new-jungle-sarah-rasmussen-takesover-the-minneapolis-theater/368488341/. 4. See, for one definition of this concept important to Continental philosophers such as Heidegger and Derrida, Slavoj Žižek’s: “something shocking, out of joint, that appears to happen all of a sudden and interrupts the usual flow of things,” which has an element of the “miraculous” in it, whether or not the event is a positive one. Žižek, Event: Philosophy in Transit (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 2. 5. It should come as no surprise that Ruhl became a playwright, since she grew up in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette watching her mother, Kathleen Ruhl, act in and direct plays in high school and community theatre, and took classes herself with Joyce Piven in the Piven Theatre Workshop in Evanston (famous for having spawned a generation of actors including John and Joan Cusack, Aidan Quinn, Hope Davis, and Polly Noonan, who would become a frequent interpreter of Ruhl’s work). But she majored in English at Brown with the intention of becoming a poet. After a year of mourning her father and studying English literature abroad at Oxford Ruhl found she “didn’t know what a poem should be anymore”; she felt she had exhausted the confessional “I.” “Plays provided a way to open up content and have many voices. I felt that onstage one could speak lyrically and with emotion, and that the actor was longing for that kind of speech, whereas in poetic discourse emotion was in some circles becoming embarrassing.” Quoted in John Lahr, “Surreal Life: The Plays of Sarah Ruhl,” The New Yorker, March 17, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2008/03/17/surreal-life. 6. Sarah Ruhl, “The Baltimore Waltz and the Plays of my Childhood,” in The Play That Changed My Life, ed. Ben Hodges (New York: Applause Book, 2009), 121. 7. Ruhl, “The Baltimore Waltz and the Plays of my Childhood,” 123.

Notes 8. Ibid. 9. Caridad Svich and Sarah Ruhl, eds., Popular Forms for a Radical Theatre (NoPassport Press, 2011). Svich founded NoPassport, a grassroots theatre alliance with a print-on-demand press, in 2003. http://www.nopassport.org/. 10. 13P’s website describes the collective thusly: “13P (Thirteen Playwrights, Inc.) was formed in 2003 by 13 midcareer playwrights concerned about what the trend of endless readings and new play development programs was doing to the texture and ambition of new American plays. Together we took matters into our hands, producing one play by each member playwright. We presented our final production in the summer of 2012 and then immediately imploded.” (13P, n.d., http://13p.org/) 11. Ruhl mentions this in the acknowledgments for The Oldest Boy, thanking her longtime collaborator director Rebecca Taichman. Sarah Ruhl, The Oldest Boy (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2016), 145. 12. Sarah Ruhl, “Re-runs and Repetitions,” Contemporary Theatre Review 16, no. 3 (2006): 283–90. 13. William W. Demastes, Staging Consciousness: Theater and the Materialization of Mind (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 5–6. 14. Celia Wren, “The Golden Ruhl,” American Theatre 22, no. 8 (2005): 30. 15. Rasmussen has directed In the Next Room or the vibrator play and The Oldest Boy at the Jungle Theater and was assistant director for the Lincoln Center production of In the Next Room. See “Directing Sarah Ruhl,” my interview with her and Hayley Finn, in Chapter 5. 16. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (New York: Vintage, 1993), 10, 12. 17. Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write (New York: Faber & Faber, 2014), 36. 18. Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 175. 19. I am borrowing these hopes for readers and viewers from Adam Phillips, “Interview,” Paris Review 208 (2014): 49.

Chapter 1 1. Sarah Ruhl, “When Woolf Saw Chekhov, something of an introduction,” in Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Woolf ’s Orlando: Two Renderings for the Stage (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2013), xii. 2. Ruhl, “When Woolf Saw Chekhov, Something of an Introduction,” x. 3. Ibid., xii. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 182

Notes 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

Ibid., xiii. Ibid., x–xi. Quoted in John Lahr, “Surreal Life.” Ibid. Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 70. Woolf, Moments of Being, 72. Sarah Ruhl, “Six Small Thoughts on Fornes, the Problem with Intention, and Willfulness,” Theatre Topics 11, no. 2 (September 2001): 94. Sarah Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008), 56. Anton Chekhov, letter, 1893. Gwen Orel, “Sarah Ruhl,” The Writer 122, no. 8 (August 2009): 66. Steve Waters, The Secret Life of Plays (London: Nick Hern Books, 2010), 157. Erin Hurley, Theatre & Feeling (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 4. Hurley, Theatre & Feeling, 77. Vogel, “Artists in Conversation: Sarah Ruhl by Paula Vogel.” BOMB 99 (Spring 2007): 54–59. http://bombmagazine.org/article/2902/sarah-ruhl. Vogel, “Artists in Conversation.” Ibid. Quoted in Ruhl, “When Woolf Saw Chekhov, Something of an Introduction,” xiii. Campbell Robertson, “Nine Writers See if the Fate of the Earth Can Be Any More Dramatic,” New York Times, April 19, 2008, http://www.nytimes. com/2008/04/19/theater/19climate.html Sarah Ruhl, Snowless. Unpublished manuscript, courtesy of the author, 2007. Richard Gilman, “Introduction” to Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), xx. The Playwright as Thinker was originally published in 1946; Gilman’s introduction appears in the 1987 reprint. Ruhl’s script uses the title “Lady with the Lap Dog,” which is more familiar to American readers. The Piven Theatre Workshop’s program titles it “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” which is the phrasing Ruhl uses within the play, http:// piventheatre.org/portfolio/chekhov-the-stories-2000/ Ruhl, Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Woolf ’s Orlando, 137. Ibid. Sarah Ruhl, The Lady with the Lap Dog and Anna Around the Neck: Two Stories by Anton Chekhov, Adapted by Sarah Ruhl. Unpublished manuscript, courtesy of the author, March 2000. Ruhl, Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Woolf ’s Orlando, 4.

183

Notes 31. Vogel, “Sarah Ruhl,” 57. 32. Karen D’Souza, “A Fresh ‘Three Sisters’ at the Berkeley Rep,” The Mercury News, April 15, 2011, http://www.mercurynews.com/2011/04/15/review-afresh-three-sisters-at-the-berkeley-rep/ 33. She mentions it first in “The Baltimore Waltz and the plays of my childhood,” in The Play That Changed My Life, ed. Ben Hodges (New York: Applause Book 2009), 126–27, and repeats it in 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 214. 34. Ruhl, Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Woolf ’s Orlando, 135. 35. Charles Isherwood, “Who’s Afraid of Fluid Gender and Time?” New York Times, September 23, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/theater/ reviews/24orlando.html?_r=0 36. Isherwood, “Who’s Afraid of Fluid Gender and Time?” 37. Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1956), 37. 38. Kerry Reid, “Unafraid of Virginia Woolf,” Chicago Reader, March 24, 2011, https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/virginia-woolf-orlando-courttheatre/Content?oid=3475064 39. Sarah Ruhl, Dear Elizabeth: A Play in Letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and Back Again (New York: Faber and Faber, 2014), xv. All subsequent references to the play are taken from this edition and will be cited in-text. 40. Orel, “Interview with Sarah Ruhl,” 66. 41. Quoted in Lahr, “Surreal Life.” 42. Thomas Travisano, ed., Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 213. 43. Sage Stossel, “Flashback: The Difficult Grandeur of Robert Lowell,” The Atlantic, June 18, 2003, https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/ flashbks/robertlowell.htm (accessed March 27, 2016). 44. Quoted in Lahr, “Surreal Life.” 45. Ruth Graham, “Lettering the Stage,” Poetry Foundation, December 18, 2012, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/245178 46. Charles Isherwood, “Proof that Virginia Woolf Did Have a Light Side,” New York Times, January 25, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/ theater/reviews/26fres.html 47. David Richman, “Directing Freshwater,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 2 (Spring 1974): 2. 48. “Sarah Ruhl: By the Book,” New York Times, February 25, 2016, https://www. nytimes.com/2016/02/28/books/review/sarah-ruhl-by-the-book.html

184

Notes

Chapter 2 1. Quoted in Lahr, “Surreal Life.” 2. Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 32. 3. Ibid., 16. 4. Ibid., 32. 5. Quoted in Lahr, “Surreal Life.” 6. Ibid., 83. 7. Ibid., 76. 8. See my interview with Rasmussen in Chapter 5. 9. In his 1962 speech, “Writing for the Theatre,” Pinter said, “I am not suggesting that no character in a play can ever say what he in fact means. Not at all. I have found that there invariably does come a moment when this happens, when he says something, perhaps, which he has never said before. And where this happens, what he says is irrevocable, and can never be taken back” (in Vol. 1, Harold Pinter: Complete Works [New York: Grove Press, 1976], 15). 10. Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 66. Although Ruhl quips that she cannot think one thing and say another because she is from the Midwest, she seems to forget passive-aggressiveness is a Midwestern behavior staple. 11. Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 66. 12. Quoted in Lahr, “Surreal Life.” 13. Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 30. 14. Ibid., 66. 15. Quoted in Lahr, “Surreal Life.” 16. Bess Rowen, “Ruhls of Play: An Interview with Sarah Ruhl,” Huffington Post, February 17, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bess-rowen/ruhls-ofplay-an-intervie_b_4805944.html. 17. Email correspondence with the author, March 21, 2016. 18. Kevin Jackson, “The Triumph of the Stage Direction,” American Scholar 68, no. 4 (1999): 59–60. 19. Lila Rose Kaplan, “In Dialogue: Inhabiting The Clean House with Sarah Ruhl,” Brooklyn Rail, October 1, 2004, http://brooklynrail.org/2004/10/ theater/n-dialogue-inhabiting-the-clean-house-wi. 20. Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 199. 21. Charles Isherwood, “A Comic Impudence Softens a Tale of Loss,” New York Times, October 3, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/theater/ reviews/03eury.html?_r=0. 22. Isherwood, “A Comic Impudence Softens a Tale of Loss.” 23. Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 125.

185

Notes 24. See Butler’s “From Pontius Pilate to Peter Pan: Lightness in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays,” in Chapter 6. 25. Ibid. Novelist Arundhati Roy was shown the same condescension after she won the Booker prize for The God of Small Things; one of the prize judges expressed, “there is something childish about Roy. She has a heightened capacity for wonder.” Quoted in Parul Sehgal, “Arundhati Roy’s Fascinating Mess,” The Atlantic 320, no. 1 (2017): 36. 26. Wendy Weckwerth, “More Invisible Terrains,” Theater 34, no. 2 (2004): 30. 27. See my interview with Finn and Sarah Rasmussen in Chapter 5. 28. Hayley Finn, “Mac Wellman, Pushing Boundaries,” HowlRound, March 21, 2012, http://howlround.com/mac-wellman-pushing-boundaries. 29. Quoted in Finn, “Mac Wellman, Pushing Boundaries.” 30. Ola Kraszpulska, “Visual Explorations of Metaphysical Ideas in the Works of Sarah Ruhl,” in Old Stories, New Readings: The Transforming Power of American Drama, ed. Miriam López-Rodríguez, Inmaculada PinedaHernández, and Alfonso Ceballos Muñoz (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 219. 31. Sarah Ruhl, Eurydice, in The Clean House and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006), 325–411. All subsequent references to Eurydice are from this edition and will be made in-text. 32. Weckwerth, “More Invisible Terrains,” 30. 33. Orel, “Sarah Ruhl.” 34. Ibid. 35. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.,” trans. A. S. Kline, Poetry in Translation, n.d., http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/ MoreRilke.htm#anchor_Toc527606964. 36. Weckwerth, “More Invisible Terrains,” 28. 37. Isherwood, “A Comic Impudence Softens a Tale of Loss.” 38. August Lysy, “Review of Eurydice, directed by Charles Riffenburg, BoHo Theater, Chicago,” May 22, 2016, http://chicagocritic.com/eurydice-2/. 39. Miriam Chirico, “Review of Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl, Les Waters,” Theatre Journal 59, no. 2 (2007): 317. 40. Chirico, “Review of Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl, Les Waters.” 41. Lahr, “Surreal Life.” 42. Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 89. 43. Ibid. 44. Sarah Ruhl, Demeter in the City, 4. Unpublished play manuscript, dated March 8, 2006, courtesy of the author. All subsequent references are to this edition of the play.

186

Notes 45. Michael Lamont, “Separation Trial,” TheaterTimes, June 2006, http:// theatertimes.org/June2006.html#demeterinthecity. 46. Sarah Ruhl, Melancholy Play, in Sarah Ruhl: The Clean House and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006), 221–324. All subsequent in-text references to Melancholy Play are taken from this edition. 47. Weckwerth, “More Invisible Terrains,” 33. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 32. 50. Ruhl, Melancholy Play, 227. 51. Richard Wattenberg, “‘Melancholy Play’ is High-energy, Fun-filled Surreal Romp,” The Oregonian, April 18, 2010, http://www.oregonlive.com/ performance/index.ssf/2010/04/theater_reviews_melancholy_pla.html. 52. Adam Hetrick, “Sarah Ruhl’s Melancholy Play, With New Score by Todd Almond, to Feature David Greenspan, April Mathis,” Playbill.com, June 7, 2012, http://www.playbill.com/article/sarah-ruhls-melancholy-play-withnew-score-by-todd-almond-to-feature-david-greenspan-april-mathiscom-194439. 53. Sarah Ruhl, “Theater Talkback: A Time and Place to Experiment,” New York Times, July 20, 2012, https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/theatertalkback-a-time-and-a-place-to-experiment/?ref=theater&_r=0. 54. Chris Jones, “‘Melancholy Play’: An Unfashionable Emotion Takes Center Stage,” Chicago Tribune, May 4, 2015, http://www.chicagotribune.com/ entertainment/theater/reviews/ct-melancholy-play-musical-review20150504-column.html. 55. Weckwerth, “More Invisible Terrains,” 34. 56. Jones, “Melancholy Play.” 57. E. Kyle Minor, “Sarah Ruhl’s Scenes from Court Life a Real Treat at Yale Rep,” New Haven Register, October 10, 2016, http://www.nhregister.com/arts-andentertainment/20161010/theater-review-sarah-ruhls-scenes-from-court-lifea-real-treat-at-yale-rep. 58. Christopher Arnott, “Yale Rep’s Scenes from Court Life is a Take On America’s Ruling Class,” Hartford Courant, September 30, 2016, http://www.courant. com/entertainment/arts-theater/hc-scenes-from-court-life-yale-rep20160930-story.html. 59. E. Kyle Minor, “Sarah Ruhl Play on Stuart, Bush Political Dynasties Opens Yale Rep Season,” New Haven Register, September 30, 2016, http://www. nhregister.com/arts-and-entertainment/20160930/sarah-ruhl-play-on-stuartbush-political-dynasties-opens-yale-rep-season. 60. Minor, “Sarah Ruhl Play on Stuart, Bush Political Dynasties Opens Yale Rep Season.”

187

Notes 61. Oriana Tang, “Pulitzer Prize Finalist Sarah Ruhl Discusses Scenes from Court Life,” Yale Daily News, October 5, 2016, http://yaledailynews.com/ blog/2016/10/05/pulitzer-prize-finalist-sarah-ruhl-discusses-scenes-fromcourt-life/. 62. Minor, “Sarah Ruhl Play on Stuart, Bush Political Dynasties Opens Yale Rep Season.” 63. Ibid. She also researched extensively; while the writing of the play was quite swift, “the gestation period was long” during which “I read everything I could get my greedy little hands on and quote extensively in the play.” 64. Ibid. 65. Sarah Ruhl, Scenes from Court Life or the whipping boy and his prince. All citations are taken from Ruhl’s Press Script of October 9, 2016. 66. On National Public Radio’s “Marketplace” Barbara Bush said, of Hurricane Katrina victims who had been evacuated to the Superdome football complex, “so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway . . . so this is working very well for them” (Quoted in “Barbara Bush Calls Evacuees Better Off,” New York Times, September 7, 2005, http://www. nytimes.com/2005/09/07/us/nationalspecial/barbara-bush-calls-evacueesbetter-off.html). 67. Alan Bennett, The History Boys (New York: Faber and Faber, 2004), 84–85. 68. These last three lines are repeated in Ruhl’s poem “Miscarriage,” published in Narrative Magazine, Fall 2017, http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/fall2017/poetry/summer-rhode-island-and-other-poems-sarah-ruhl. 69. This also turned out to be an economic fiasco for Dryden and the theater. It was staged in 1685, on the eve of the Monmouth Rebellion. All of that is outside of the scope of Ruhl’s play, but the resonances of the historical situation permeate the expensive, showy mask of “Mission Accomplished.” 70. Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 125.

Chapter 3 1. Lisa Ruddick, “The Unnamed Work of English,” ADE Bulletin 151 (2011): 29. 2. Lisa Ruddick, “When Nothing is Cool,” The Point, n.d., https://thepointmag. com/2015/criticism/when-nothing-is-cool. 3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading: or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–37. 4. Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2008), 55. 5. Quoted in Ruhl, “Six Small Thoughts on Fornes, the Problem of Intention, and Willfulness,” 187. 188

Notes 6. Ibid., 191. 7. Ibid., 189. 8. Weckwerth, “More Invisible Terrains,” 34. 9. Thomas Butler, “The Acknowledgment of Love in Sarah Ruhl’s Drama,” COLLOQUY text theory critique 26 (2013): 5. 10. Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 36. 11. Ruddick, “When Nothing is Cool.” 12. Quoted in Alexis Greene, “New Voices: An Interview with Sarah Ruhl,” in Women Writing Plays: Three Decades of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, ed. Alexis Greene (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 230–31. 13. Kaplan, “In Dialogue.” 14. Leslie Atkins Durham, Women’s Voices on American Stages in the Early Twenty-First Century: Sarah Ruhl and Her Contemporaries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 108–9. 15. Ruhl, The Clean House and Other Plays. All citations from Ruhl’s plays will be made in-text. 16. Actress Blair Brown, who judged The Clean House for a playwriting contest and later played the role of Lane at Lincoln Center in New York City, said the play “is so deceptively simple,” but got her laughing and crying and laughing and crying: “It’s like water running over your hand, and then you find you are feeling some quite big, personal things.” Quoted in Matthew Gurewitsch, “Wild Woman: Playwright Sarah Ruhl Speaks Softly and Carries a Big Kick,” Smithsonian (Fall 2007), 70. 17. Charles Isherwood, “Always Ready with a Joke if not a Feather Duster,” New York Times, October 31, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/theater/ reviews/31clea.html. 18. Gurewitsch, “Wild Woman.” 19. Marta Fernández-Morales, “‘Is Anyone Paying Attention?’: Breast Cancer on the Stage in the Twenty-First Century,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 32, no. 2 (2013)/33 no. 1 (2014): 136. 20. All citations from Ruhl, Late: A Cowboy Song, in The Clean House and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communication Group, 2006), 117–220. 21. “Mission & Programs,” Clubbed Thumb, n.d., http://www.clubbedthumb.org/ the-mission/mission/. 22. Eliza Bent, “Six Degrees of Clubbed Thumb,” American Theatre 26, no. 5 (May/June 2009): 54. 23. James Al-Shamma, Sarah Ruhl: A Critical Study of the Plays (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2011), 105. 24. Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015), 30. 25. Nelson, The Argonauts, 25. The intertextuality of It’s a Wonderful Life, which Crick watches, tearing up, runs throughout the play, reminding us of 189

Notes the so-called ideal family unit with clearly delineated gender roles, as well as living a life in which the individual’s dreams were sacrificed for the good of the community and the family. Is Crick sentimental for a life in which he would be head of a “normal” family and a hero in his community? 26. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 45. She also notes that the “incidence of intersexuality may be on the rise” because of complications in (and rising frequency of) in vitro fertilization, and because of environmental pollutants in the water (and fish) supply that mimic estrogen (54). 27. Al-Shamma, Sarah Ruhl: A Critical Study of the Plays, 106. 28. Joe Leydon, “Late: A Cowboy Song,” Variety 13 (2005): 47, General OneFile, accessed October 27, 2016. 29. Nelson Pressley, “Review of Late: A Cowboy Song at No Rules Theater Company at Signature Theater (Arlington, VA),” Washington Post, January 7, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/theater-review-late-acowboy-song-staged-with-bluesy-whimsy/2014/01/07/29ee4520-77b7-11e3a647-a19deaf575b3_story.html. 30. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 1. 31. Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2015), 8. 32. Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation, 13. She warns, “[I]n the past twenty years we’ve seen a 40 percent decline in the markers for empathy among college students, most of it within the past ten years” (21). 33. All subsequent in-text citations from Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone. 34. Michael Feingold, “The Live and the Dead,” Village Voice 53, no. 11 (March 12–18, 2008): 42, ProQuest Newsstand. 35. Charles Isherwood, “A Nagging Call to Tidy Up an Unfinished Life,” New York Times, March 5, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/theater/ reviews/05cell.html?_r=0. 36. Quoted in Lahr, “Surreal Life.” 37. Jean discovers what Sherry Turkle finds, in that “We can heal ourselves by giving others what we most need” (Alone Together, 9). 38. Lahr, “Surreal Life.” 39. Alan Read, Theatre, Intimacy, and Engagement: The Last Human Venue (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 2. 40. Read, Theatre, Intimacy, and Engagement, 2. 41. Ibid., 4. 42. Heidi Schmidt, “Review of In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play, dir. Les Waters, Lyceum Theater, Lincoln Center, New York City, 20 November 2009,” Theatre Journal 62, no. 4 (2010): 669. 190

Notes 43. Michael Feingold again criticizes Ruhl’s dramaturgy, calling the play “intelligent” but one that “gets trapped in its uncertainties of approach.” Ruhl’s premise for the play “could produce anything from stark tragedy to giddy sex farce: What she supplies is a kind of jittery tasting menu that offers little dabs of each possibility” (“Profusions and Confusions,” Village Voice [November 25–December 1, 2009]: 26, ProQuest Newsstand). 44. Quoted in Walter Bilderback, “An Interview with Sarah Ruhl,” The Wilma Theater, January 20, 2011, https://wilmatheater.org/blog/interview-sarah-ruhl. 45. Bilderback, “An Interview with Sarah Ruhl.” 46. Max Pikras, “In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) Review,” Studio M, November 22, 2015, https://blogs.miamioh.edu/arts/2015/11/in-the-nextroom-or-the-vibrator-play-review/. 47. Amy Muse, “Sarah Ruhl’s Sex Ed for Grown-ups,” in Text and Presentation 2013, ed. Graley Herren (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2014), 173–83. 48. Michel Martin, “Female Sexuality Takes Center Stage with The Vibrator Play: Interview with Sarah Ruhl,” NPR, December 7, 2009, http://www.npr.org/ templates/story/story.php?storyId=121152241. 49. Ruhl, “Six Small Thoughts on Fornes, the Problem of Intention, and Wilfulness,” 195. 50. Michial Farmer, “I Mourn the Body Electric: Science, Technology, Nature and Art in Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 17, no. 3 (2015): 356. 51. This attentiveness to the loved one’s body, the precision of language, is used also in The Clean House where it is emotionally painful for Lane to imagine Charles’s tender dedication to Ana’s body. 52. John Lahr, “Good Vibrations,” The New Yorker, November 30, 2009, http:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/30/good-vibrations-2. 53. Schmidt, “Review of In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play,” 670. 54. Lahr, “Good Vibrations.” 55. Quoted in Bilderback, “An Interview with Sarah Ruhl.” 56. Sarah Ruhl, “Sarah Ruhl on Stage Kiss: The Metaphysics of Backsides,” Playwrights Horizons, November 2013, https://www.playwrightshorizons.org/ shows/trailers/sarah-ruhl-stage-kiss/. 57. Citations from Sarah Ruhl, Stage Kiss (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2014), 5. 58. Isherwood, “They’re Carrying On as if It’s in the Script,” New York Times, March 2, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/03/theater/stage-kiss-asarah-ruhl-comedy-at-playwrights-horizons.html?_r=1. 59. Ruhl cites the work of sex therapist Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic (New York: HarperCollins,

191

Notes 2006), who appears on a panel with her at Playwrights Horizons. See “On Kisses and Chemistry: A Discourse on Stage Kiss,” Playwrights Horizons, n.d., https://www.playwrightshorizons.org/shows/trailers/kisses-and-chemistrydiscourse-stage-kiss/. 60. Lauren Berlant, Intimacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 2. 61. Joanna Baillie, The Plays on the Passions, ed. Peter Duthie (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2001), 91. 62. I think the best and most thorough discussion of Baillie’s dramaturgy is Catherine B. Burroughs, Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). See also the essays in Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist, edited by Thomas C. Crochunis (Routledge, 2004); and Anne K. Mellor, “Joanna Baillie and the Counter-Public Sphere,” Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994): 559–67. For a discussion of late eighteenth-century focus on reaction rather an action, see Jonathan Bate, “The Romantic Stage,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of Shakespeare on Stage, eds. Bate and Russell Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 92–111. 63. For a discussion of Strindberg’s Chamber Play dramaturgy and plans for the Intimate Theatre, see Stephen Conway, “Rhythm and Blues: Strindberg’s Chamber Plays,” in The Chamber Plays Strindberg Cycle, Cutting Ball Theatre, 1993, Web; and Strindberg, The Chamber Plays, ed. Evert Sprinchorn (New York: Dutton, 1962). 64. Laura Zebuhr, “The Work of Friendship,” American Literature 87, no. 3 (September 2015): 449. 65. Quoted in Sarah Ruhl, “Six Small Thoughts on Fornes, the Problem of Intention, and Willfulness,” Theatre Topics 11, no. 2 (September 2001): 187. 66. Ruhl, “Six Small Thoughts on Fornes, the Problem of Intention, and Willfulness,” 191. 67. Ibid., 189. 68. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1952), 170.

Chapter 4 1. “A Few Important Emails Between Max Ritvo and Sarah Ruhl,” Berfois, March 1, 2016, http://www.berfrois.com/2016/03/max-ritvo-sarah-ruhl/ 2. Weckwerth and Ruhl, “More Invisible Terrains,” 28–35, at p. 31. 3. Ibid. 4. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 45. 5. Brook, The Empty Space, 42.

192

Notes 6. Ibid., 45. 7. Sarah Ruhl, Passion Play (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2010), 19. All citations are taken from this edition. 8. Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, 15. 9. See my interview with Rasmussen and director Hayley Finn in Chapter 5. 10. Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 111–12. Ruhl is not sure “if this desire to create a ‘thou’ in the theater is shared in the contemporary American climate, where it seems we put all our efforts into becoming more of an ‘it’— glossy, cinematic, bold” (112). 11. Martin Buber, I and Thou, translated and introduced by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 69. 12. Buber, I and Thou, 54. 13. Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 112. 14. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Modern Library, 1902), 66. 15. Brook, The Empty Space, 46. 16. Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 35. 17. Ibid. 18. Ruhl and Ehn share a longstanding passion for exploring consciousness. See NoPassport, “Dirty Thoughts About Money,” HotReview.org, January 2003, http://www.hotreview.org/articles/dirty-thoughts.htm. 19. Sarah Ruhl, Chekhov’s Three Sister’s and Woolf ’s Orlando: Two Renderings for the Stage (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2013), xiii. 20. This history is narrated in Celia Wren, “The Golden Ruhl,” 31–32 and AlShamma, Sarah Ruhl: A Critical Study of the Plays, 112. 21. Jon York, “Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play,” The Theater Mirror, 2012, http://www. theatermirror.com/JYpassionCIRCUIT.htm. York explains that “more than 40 groups, which organizers called the Passion Coalition, participated in the festival, aligning with Epic Theatre’s mission to stage politically conscious work and to create programming directed at New York City’s public schools and their underserved communities. Zac Berkman, one of Epic’s executive directors feels that he ‘missed the sense of community religion gives you growing up. Theatre should feel like a secular church.’” 22. Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 214. 23. Ruhl, Passion Play, ix. 24. Ibid., ix. It is James Al-Shamma who states that the book in question was Betsy and the Great World by Maud Hart Lovelace, one of the Betsy-Tacy book series that Ruhl loved as a child. See Al-Shamma, Sarah Ruhl: A Critical Study of the Plays, 111.

193

Notes 25. Charles Isherwood, “The Intersection of Fantasy and Faith,” New York Times, May 13, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/theater/ reviews/13passion.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 26. “Artist Interview with Sarah Ruhl,” Playwrights Horizons website, https:// www.playwrightshorizons.org/shows/trailers/artist-interview-sarah-ruhl/. 27. Ruhl, Passion Play, xi. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 239. 30. “Poor theatre” is a term from director Jerzy Grotowski, who coined it to describe theatre in which actors are whole-hearted and the productions are stripped down to their essence, freed from the spectacular sets and costumes and other apparatus that can become mere trappings and traps for authenticity. The actor meeting the spectator with no masks, no illusory veils between him or herself and the spectator, “could be compared to an act of the most deeply rooted, genuine love between two human beings.” See Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 256. 31. Ruhl, Passion Play, 240. She retells this story in 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 97–98. 32. See Stevenson, “Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play and Contemporary Expressions of Medieval Performance” in Chapter 6. 33. Durham, Women’s Voices on American Stages in the Early Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 77. 34. Leslie Atkins Durham argues for a feminist theological reading of this scene, observing that “when Mary 1’s body pours forth water she has a clear connection to the body of Christ, his birth of a new Church, and the promise of baptism.” See Women’s Voices on American Stages in the Early Twenty-First Century: Sarah Ruhl and Her Contemporaries, 80. 35. Quoted in Ruhl, Passion Play, 152. 36. Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay coined the term “moral injury” to describe the experiences of Vietnam veterans whose consciences bore guilt and shame for having transgressed moral principles in war. See Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). On “souls in anguish” see Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini, Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013). 37. Ruhl explains the background in her “Playwright’s Afterword in the Form of Five Questions,” in The Oldest Boy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 137–42. All subsequent references to the play are taken from this edition. 38. Rasmussen discusses this in my interview with her and Hayley Finn in Chapter 5.

194

Notes 39. Charles Isherwood, “A Special Child: What’s a Mother to Do?” New York Times, November 3, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/04/theater/theoldest-boy-by-sarah-ruhl-opens-at-lincoln-center.html. 40. Jesse Green, “Sarah Ruhl, Seeking Something New in The Oldest Boy,” Vulture. com, November 3, 2014, http://www.vulture.com/2014/11/theater-review-theoldest-boy.html In this era of online reviews, the comments by readers can sometimes provide revealing counterpoints to the critics’ perspectives. One commentator on Green’s review, with the username “Doctasnooze,” responded: Wow, this review reads to me like professional malpractice. This is a profound, deep, rich, moving play that doesn’t operate by rules you keep trying to impose on to it, unnecessarily. You want it to be a mystery about whether a three-year-old child is faking it? Great, write that play, but don’t fault Ruhl because she didn’t. In her play, the kid is a lama. Why do you have trouble with that? Do you stand up in Harry Potter movies and yell “CARS DON’T FLY”? This is among the most pathetically small minded reviews I’ve ever come across. Luckily, it doesn’t seem to have done much harm—the audience was full when I saw it yesterday, and deeply moved. I feel sorry for you that you didn’t have the imagination and the openness to actually be present for the play the writer wrote, instead of trying to force it into your sad, narrow claustrophobic sense of what it should be. You missed out on something beautiful. 41. David Rooney, “The Oldest Boy: Theater Review,” Hollywood Reporter, November 3, 2014, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/oldest-boytheater-review-745916. 42. See my interview with Sarah Rasmussen and Hayley Finn in Chapter 5. 43. In her correspondence with poet Max Ritvo, her former student, Ruhl relates this dream, which was her own: The other dream that comforted me about death was about my father. I dreamed I saw him after he died, and in silver letters in the heavens it spelled out There is no God. I turned to my father in the dream and asked: but who wrote that in the heavens? And he said exactly. At the time I was in Prague (of course) and reading The Brothers Karamazov, my father’s favorite book. The dream seemed to be an answer to the questions the book was asking. That in the asking, the ability of consciousness to frame the phrase There is no God—there was an answer, an ability of the thinker to contemplate God was enough of a proof of God’s existence, or of an abiding, persisting consciousness. See “A Few Important Emails Between Max Ritvo and Sarah Ruhl,” Berfois, March 1, 2016, http://www.berfrois.com/2016/03/max-ritvo-sarah-ruhl/. 44. Victoria Myers, “Tony-Nominated Writer Sarah Ruhl on Plays About Motherhood and Challenging Theater’s Male Domination,” Indiewire.com, October 14, 2014, http://www.indiewire.com/2014/10/crosspost-tonynominated-writer-sarah-ruhl-on-plays-about-motherhood-and-challengingtheaters-male-domination-205621/ 195

Notes 45. In her acknowledgments Ruhl cites The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism After Auschwitz by her “beloved professor” from Brown University’s English department, David Hirsch. Presumably he is the model for the professor described by the Mother. 46. Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 9. 47. Tippett, Becoming Wise. 48. The play was indeed written as a gift for her mother. “I had been encouraging my students at Yale to write what I called gift plays,” Ruhl said, “and I had read this book called The Gift by Lewis Hyde, which I thought was really brilliant and affected the way I think about art-making. It’s about functioning within a gift economy rather than a capitalist economy.” Quoted in Morgan Greene, “Sarah Ruhl wrote ‘For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday’ for her mom as a hedge against getting old,” Chicago Tribune, April 21, 2017, http://www. chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/ct-sarah-ruhl-motherae-0423-20170420-story.html. 49. Sarah Ruhl, For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2018). All citations are taken from this edition. 50. Lily Janiak, “Berkeley Rep’s ‘For Peter Pan’ Never Takes Off,” SFGate, May 28, 2016, http://www.sfgate.com/performance/article/Berkeley-Rep-s-For-PeterPan-never-takes-7951725.php. 51. Charles Isherwood, “Humana Festival, Turning 40, Looks at Mortality, Dystopia, and Change,” New York Times, April 11, 2016, https://www.nytimes. com/2016/04/12/theater/humana-festival-turning-40-looks-at-mortalitydystopia-and-change.html?_r=1. 52. See Thomas Butler, “From Pontius Pilate to Peter Pan: Lightness in the Plays of Sarah Ruhl” in Chapter 6. 53. John Lahr, “Mouth to Mouth,” New Yorker, May 30, 2011, http://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/30/mouth-to-mouth. 54. Tippett, Becoming Wise, 10. 55. Sarah Ruhl, How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, 91. All quotations are taken from the unpublished press script of March 12, 2017. 56. Quoted in Andrew Chow, “New Sarah Ruhl Play to Premiere at Lincoln Center,” New York Times, September 26, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/ 2016/09/27/theater/new-sarah-ruhl-play-to-premiere-at-lincoln-center.html 57. Susan Dominus, “Not Just Us,” The New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2017, 34–43. 58. See Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (New York: Harper, 2007) and Carrie Jenkins, What Love Is: And What it Could Be (New York: Basic Books, 2017). 59. Ben Brantley, “Plunging into Polyamory with ‘How to Transcend a Happy Marriage,’” New York Times, March 20, 2016, https://www.nytimes. com/2017/03/20/theater/review-how-to-transcend-a-happy-marriage.html. 196

Notes 60. Jesse Green, “Sarah Ruhl Gets Into Polyamory, Maaan,” Vulture, March 20, 2017, http://www.vulture.com/2017/03/theater-review-sarah-ruhl-gets-intopolyamory-maaan.html. 61. Alexis Gargagliano, ed., “How to Transcend a Happy Marriage,” Lincoln Center Theater Review 68 (Winter 2017): 3. 62. Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 187–88. 63. Email correspondence with the author, October 25, 2017. “Radiant invisible” is McInroy’s term for a recurrent theme in twentieth century theology and philosophy, addressed by Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl in phenomenology and in the “spiritual senses” tradition in Christian theological aesthetics. See Mark McInroy, Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses: Perceiving Splendour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 134–60. 64. Marvin Carlson, “The Theatre Journal Auto/Archive,” Theatre Journal 55, no.1 (2003): 211. 65. Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 35.

Chapter 6 1. Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 109–10. 2. Ibid., 111, original emphasis. 3. Citations from Ruhl, Passion Play. Hereafter page citations from the play will be included in-text. 4. Jill Stevenson, “Passion Playing: An Interview with Sarah Ruhl,” in The Oberammergau Passion Play, ed. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017). 5. Quoted in Lahr, “Surreal Life.” 6. Claire Sponsler, Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 9. 7. Sponsler, Ritual Imports, 8. 8. Ibid., 9. 9. Sponsler, Ritual Imports, 7. 10. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, translated by W. Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986), 65. 11. Sponsler, Ritual Imports, 185–86. 12. Tanya Palmer, “A Passion for Theater: An Interview with Sarah Ruhl,” Goodman Theatre OnStage (September/December 2007): 5. 13. Stevenson, “Passion Playing,” original emphasis. 14. Al-Shamma, Sarah Ruhl, 121–31.

197

Notes 15. Ibid., 118. 16. For original Middle English text, see Vol. 1, The York Plays: A Critical Edition of the York Corpus Christi Play as Recorded in British Library Additional MS 35290, ed. Richard Beadle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 10. My modernization of the text was made using Beadle’s extensive glossary. 17. Translation from A. B. Yardley, Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 283. 18. Sponsler, Ritual Imports, 185. 19. Charles Isherwood, “The Intersection of Fantasy and Faith,” The New York Times, May 13, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/theater/ reviews/13passion.html. 20. David Sheward, “Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play,” Backstage.com, May 12, 2010, https://www.backstage.com/review/ny-theater/off-broadway/sarah-ruhlspassion-play/. 21. Louise Kennedy, “Moments of Beauty and Moments of Terror in ‘Passion,’” Boston Globe, September 30, 2008, http://archive.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/ articles/2008/09/30/moments_of_beauty_and_moments_of_terror_in_ passion/. 22. York, “Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play.” 23. Ruhl, 100 Essays, 112. 24. York, “Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play.” 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Nelson Pressley, “Backstage with Jesus and Hitler in Ruhl’s Epic Passion Play,” The Washington Post, March 25, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost. com/entertainment/theater_dance/backstage-with-jesus-and-hitlerin-ruhls-epic-passion-play/2015/03/25/5a15b42e-d2e0-11e4-8fce3941fc548f1c_story.html. 28. Matt McGeachy, “Encounters with Grace: Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play in Toronto’s East End,” HowlRound, July 11, 2013, http://howlround.com/ encounters-with-grace-sarah-ruhls-passion-play-in-torontos-east-end. 29. McGeachy, “Encounters with Grace.” 30. Quoted in McGeachy, “Encounters with Grace.” 31. Steven Oxman, “Passion Play: A Cycle in Three Parts,” Variety, September 25, 2007, http://variety.com/2007/legit/reviews/passion-play-a-cycle-in-threeparts-1200555931/. 32. Lawrence Bommer, “Passion Play: A Cycle in Three Parts,” CurtainUp, 2007, http://www.curtainup.com/passionplaychi.html. 33. Kennedy, “Moments of Beauty and Moments of Terror in ‘Passion.’”

198

Notes 34. Sheward, “Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play”; Isherwood, “Intersection of Fantasy and Faith.” 35. Stevenson, “Passion Playing,” forthcoming. 36. Ruhl, Passion Play, 240–41. 37. Ibid., 241. 38. Theodor Adorno, “Is Art Lighthearted?” in Vol. 2, Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tidemann, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 28. I would like to thank Doug Phillips for suggesting a connection to Adorno. 39. Citations from Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone. Hereafter quotations from all plays will be cited in-text. 40. Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 125. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 36. 43. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, translated by Patrick Creagh (New York: Vintage, 1993), 10. 44. Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 4. 45. Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated and edited by Charles Martin (New York: Norton, 2004), 4, 1014–15. 46. Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 6. 47. Ibid., 19. 48. Ibid., 5. 49. Quoted in Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 16. 50. Citations from Ruhl, Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Woolf ’s Orlando. 51. See the line in Laurence Senelick’s translation, for example, in Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2010), 181. 52. Quoted in Donna Doherty, “Playwright Sarah Ruhl Breathes New Life into Yale Rep Opener ‘Three Sisters,’” New Haven Register, September 9, 2011, http://www.nhregister.com/article/NH/20110909/NEWS/309099926. 53. Durham, Women’s Voices on American Stages in the Early Twenty-First Century, 29. 54. Michael Bloom, “Book Review: Sarah Ruhl’s ‘100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write,’” American Theatre, September 17, 2014, http://www.americantheatre. org/2014/09/17/book-review-sarah-ruhls-100-essays-i-dont-have-time-towrite/. 55. Terry Eagleton, Hope without Optimism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 2. 56. Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 105.

199

Notes 57. Eagleton, Hope without Optimism, 114. 58. Citations from Ruhl, Passion Play. 59. Ruhl, 100 Essays, 146. 60. Ibid., 32. 61. Adorno, “Is Art Lighthearted?” 248. 62. Ibid., 249. 63. Ibid., 248. 64. Ibid., 249. 65. Citations from Ruhl, For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, forthcoming (Script draft provided by Bret Adams, LLC). 66. See n. 12. 67. Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 12. 68. Quoted in Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 11. 69. Ibid., 12. 70. Citations from Ruhl, The Clean House and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006). 71. See, for example, James Al-Shamma, “Worshipping the Black Sun: Melancholy in Eugene O’Neill and Sarah Ruhl,” Eugene O’Neill Review 35, no. 1 (2014): 62; and Chirico, “Review of Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl, Les Waters.” 72. Chirico, “Review of Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl, Les Waters,” 317. 73. See Carl Jung, “The Theory of Psychoanalysis,” in Vol. 4, The Collected Works, ed. Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, translated by R. F. C. Hull, Leopold Stein, and Diana Riviere (New York: Routledge, 1961), 1233–1354. 74. Jung, “The Theory of Psychoanalysis,” 1304. 75. Jill Scott, Electra after Freud: Myth and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 7–8. 76. Cecil M. Bowra sums up the sources of the myth thus: The story, as we normally think of it, comes from Latin poets, especially Virgil, Georgic 4.454–503 and Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.1–73, to which may be added shorter versions in Culex 268–95, Seneca, Hercules Furens, 569–91 and Hercules Oetaeus, 1061–89. No doubt Lucan dealt with it in his lost Orpheus, but the scanty remains tell very little. The same story was known to mythographers, notably Conon, Narrationes 45.2 and Apollodorus, Bibliotheca I.3.3, and is presupposed alike in the rationalistic version of Pausanias 9.30.6 and the allegorical interpretation of Fulgentius, Mitologiae 3.10. This form of the story does not survive in Greek poetry, but we cannot doubt that it was told before Virgil, who deals with it allusively as if it were already familiar, and we may assume that it is derived from a Greek poem (in “Orpheus and Eurydice,” The Classical Quarterly 2, no. 3/4 [1952]: 113). John Heath, however, offers

200

Notes

77. 78. 79.

80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

an extensive analysis not only of the surviving Greek variants of the Orpheus myth, but also a very detailed reading of the “failure” of the backwards glance as ontological metaphor (“The Failure of Orpheus,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 124 [1994]: 163–96). Owen Lee, “Orpheus and Eurydice: Some Modern Versions,” The Classical Journal 56, no. 7 (1961): 307–8. Shane Butler, “The Backward Glance,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics (Third Series) 17, no. 2 (2009): 72. See fn. 1 of Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, Vol. 14 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1914-1916), translated by and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 241. Al-Shamma notes that “the title character of Eurydice, Matilde in The Clean House, and Tilly in Melancholy Play” all exhibit melancholy (“Worshipping the Black Sun,” 62). Quoted in Al-Shamma, “Worshipping the Black Sun,” 72. Al-Shamma, “Worshipping the Black Sun,” 62. Katherine Kelly, “Making the Bones Sing: The Feminist History Play, 1976-2010,” special issue, Theatre Journal 62, no. 4 (2010): 645. Sherod Santos, “The Story of Poetry and Poets,” The Kenyon Review (New Series) 18, no. 1 (1996): 9, quoting Blanchard (100) at the end of the quote. Glenda Frank, “Review of Passion Play: A Cycle by Sarah Ruhl,” special issue, Theatre Journal 58, no. 3 (2006): 500. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by A. A. Brill (Mineola: Dover, 2015), 255–59. Quoted in John Lahr, “Surreal Life: The Plays of Sarah Ruhl,” The New Yorker, March 17, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/03/17/surreallife (accessed August 29, 2016). Kelly, “Making the Bones Sing,” 645. Casado-Gual, “Ancient Voices,” 67. For a feminist reading of Eurydice and the politics of reclaiming mourning, see Durham, Women’s Voices on American Stages in the Early Twenty-First Century. Chirico, “Review of Eurydice,” 317. Quoted in Lahr, “Surreal Life,” 11. Scott, Electra after Freud, 8. Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, translated by G. Stanley Hall (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 132. Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, 127.

201

Notes 96. Al-Shamma, “Worshipping the Black Sun,” 74–75. 97. German for “love in death.” The motif, taken from Richard Wagner’s 1859 opera Tristan und Isolde, has become a term used to indicate all pairs of starcrossed lovers who find consummation of their love only in mutual death. 98. Chris Westgate, “Review of Dead Man’s Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl,” special issue, Theatre Journal 61, no. 3 (2009): 483.

Afterword 1. Edward W. Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006). 2. Said, On Late Style. 3. Ibid., 53–54. 4. Woolf, Moments of Being, 72. 5. Ruhl mentions this in the acknowledgments for The Oldest Boy, thanking her longtime collaborator director Rebecca Taichman. Ruhl, The Oldest Boy, 145. 6. Ruhl, “Re-runs and Repetitions.” 7. Demastes, Staging Consciousness, 15. 8. Rita Felski, The Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 58.

202

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor. “Is Art Lighthearted?” In Notes to Literature, Vol. 2, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 247–53. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl: A Critical Study of the Plays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2011. Al-Shamma, James. “Worshipping the Black Sun: Melancholy in Eugene O’Neill and Sarah Ruhl.” Eugene O’Neill Review 35, no. 1 (2014): 61–78. Arnott, Christopher. “Yale Rep’s Scenes from Court Life is a Take On America’s Ruling Class.” Hartford Courant, September 30, 2016. http://www.courant.com/ entertainment/arts-theater/hc-scenes-from-court-life-yale-rep-20160930-story. html. “Barbara Bush Calls Evacuees Better Off.” New York Times. September 7, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/us/nationalspecial/barbara-bush-callsevacuees-better-off.html. Beadle, Richard, ed. The York Plays: A Critical Edition of the York Corpus Christi Play as Recorded in British Library Additional MS 35290, Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Bennett, Alan. The History Boys. New York: Faber and Faber, 2004. Bent, Eliza. “Six Degrees of Clubbed Thumb.” American Theatre 26, no. (May/June 2009): 54–57. Bilderback, Walter. “An Interview with Sarah Ruhl.” The Wilma Theater, January 20, 2011. https://wilmatheater.org/blog/interview-sarah-ruhl. Bloom, Michael. “Book Review: Sarah Ruhl’s ‘100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write.’” American Theatre, September 17, 2014. http://www.americantheatre. org/2014/09/17/book-review-sarah-ruhls-100-essays-i-dont-have-time-towrite/. Bommer, Lawrence. “Passion Play: A Cycle in Three Parts.” CurtainUp, 2007. http://www.curtainup.com/passionplaychi.html. Bowra, Cecil M. “Orpheus and Eurydice.” The Classical Quarterly 2, no. 3/4 (1952): 113–26. Brantley, Ben. “Plunging into Polyamory with ‘How to Transcend a Happy Marriage.’” New York Times, March 20, 2016. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/03/20/theater/review-how-to-transcend-a-happy-marriage.html. Brock, Rita Nakashima, and Gabriella Lettini. Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War. Boston: Beacon Press, 2013. Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. New York: Atheneum, 1968. Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated and introduced by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970.

Bibliography Butler, Shane. “The Backward Glance.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics (Third Series) 17, no. 2 (2009): 59–78. Butler, Thomas. “The Acknowledgment of Love in Sarah Ruhl’s Drama.” COLLOQUY Text Theory Critique 26 (2013): 4–23. Butler, Thomas. “Sarah Ruhl’s Dear Elizabeth and the Mourning of Friends.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 28, no. 2 (2014): 67–84. Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Translated by Patrick Creagh. New York: Vintage, 1993. Carlson, Marvin. “The Theatre Journal Auto/Archive.” Theatre Journal 55, no. 1 (2003): 207–11. Casado-Gual, Núria. “Ancient Voices in Contemporary Theatrical Forms: The Case of The Bacchae by Kneehigh Theatre and Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 29, no. 1 (2014): 65–79. Chirico, Miriam. “Review of Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl, Les Waters.” Theatre Journal 59, no. 2 (2007): 315–17. Chow, Andrew. “New Sarah Ruhl Play to Premiere at Lincoln Center.” New York Times, September 26, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/theater/newsarah-ruhl-play-to-premiere-at-lincoln-center.html. D’Souza, Karen. “A Fresh ‘Three Sisters’ at the Berkeley Rep.” The Mercury News, April 15, 2011. http://www.mercurynews.com/2011/04/15/review-a-freshthree-sisters-at-the-berkeley-rep/ Demastes, William. Staging Consciousness: Theater and the Materialization of Mind. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Doherty, Donna. “Playwright Sarah Ruhl Breathes New Life into Yale Rep Opener ‘Three Sisters.’” New Haven Register, September 9, 2011. http://www.nhregister. com/article/NH/20110909/NEWS/309099926. Dominus, Susan. “Not Just Us.” The New York Times Magazine (May 14, 2017): 34–43. Durham, Leslie Atkins. Women’s Voices on American Stages in the Early TwentyFirst Century: Sarah Ruhl and Her Contemporaries. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Eagleton, Terry. Hope without Optimism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality: Essays. Translated by W. Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986. Eliot, T. S. “Ulysses,’ Order and Myth.” In Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode, 175–78. Orlando: Harcourt, 1975. Farmer, Michial. “I Mourn the Body Electric: Science, Technology, Nature and Art in Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 17, no. 3 (2015): 352–70. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Feingold, Michael. “The Live and the Dead.” Village Voice (March 12–18, 2008): 42. ProQuest Newsstand. Feingold, Michael. “Profusions and Confusions.” Village Voice (November 25– December 1, 2009): 26. ProQuest Newsstand. 204

Bibliography Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2008. Fernández-Morales, Marta. “‘Is Anyone Paying Attention?’ Breast Cancer on the Stage in the Twenty-First Century.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 32, no. 2 (2013)/33, no. 1 (2014): 129–46. Frank, Glenda. “Review of Passion Play: A Cycle by Sarah Ruhl.” Theatre Journal 58, no. 3 (2006): 500–01. Finn, Hayley. “Mac Wellman, Pushing Boundaries.” HowlRound. March 21, 2012. http://howlround.com/mac-wellman-pushing-boundaries. Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Translated by G. Stanley Hall. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 1913. Translated by A. A. Brill. Dover Thrift Editions. Mineola: Dover, 2015. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” 1917. In On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, Vol. 14, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1914-1916). Translated and edited by James Strachey, 237–58. London: Hogarth Press, 1957. Gargagliano, Alexis, ed. “How to Transcend a Happy Marriage.” Lincoln Center Theater Review 68 (Winter 2017): 1–20. Gilman, Richard. “Introduction.” In The Playwright as Thinker, edited by Eric Bentley, xvii–xxiii. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Graham, Ruth. “Lettering the Stage.” Poetry Foundation, December 18, 2012. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/245178. Green, Jesse. “Sarah Ruhl Gets Into Polyamory, Maaan.” Vulture, March 20, 2017. http://www.vulture.com/2017/03/theater-review-sarah-ruhl-gets-intopolyamory-maaan.html. Green, Jesse. “Sarah Ruhl, Seeking Something New in The Oldest Boy.” Vulture. com, November 3, 2014. http://www.vulture.com/2014/11/theater-review-theoldest-boy.html. Greene, Alexis. “New Voices: An Interview with Sarah Ruhl.” In Women Writing Plays: Three Decades of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, edited by Alexis Greene 219–40. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Greene, Morgan. “Sarah Ruhl wrote ‘For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday’ for Her Mom as a Hedge Against Getting Old.” Chicago Tribune, April 21, 2017. http:// www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/ct-sarah-ruhl-mother-ae0423-20170420-story.html. Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968. Gurewitsch, Matthew. “Wild Woman: Playwright Sarah Ruhl Speaks Softly and Carries a Big Kick.” Smithsonian 38 (Fall 2007): 70–72. Heath, John. “The Failure of Orpheus.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 124 (1994): 163–96. Hetrick, Adam. “Sarah Ruhl’s Melancholy Play, With New Score by Todd Almond, to Feature David Greenspan, April Mathis.” Playbill.com, June 7, 2012. http:// www.playbill.com/article/sarah-ruhls-melancholy-play-with-new-score-bytodd-almond-to-feature-david-greenspan-april-mathis-com-194439.

205

Bibliography Holland, Norman. The Dynamics of Literary Response. New York: Columbia University Press, 1968. Hurley, Erin. Theater & Feeling. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Isherwood, Charles. “Always Ready with a Joke if not a Feather Duster.” New York Times, October 31, 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/theater/ reviews/31clea.html. Isherwood, Charles. “A Comic Impudence Softens a Tale of Loss.” New York Times, October 3, 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/theater/reviews/03eury. html?_r=0. Isherwood, Charles. “Humana Festival, Turning 40, Looks at Mortality, Dystopia, and Change.” New York Times, April 11, 2016. https://www.nytimes. com/2016/04/12/theater/humana-festival-turning-40-looks-at-mortalitydystopia-and-change.html?_r=1. Isherwood, Charles. “ The Intersection of Fantasy and Faith.” The New York Times, May 13, 2010. www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/theater/reviews/13passion. html. Isherwood, Charles. “A Nagging Call to Tidy Up an Unfinished Life.” New York Times, March 5, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/theater/ reviews/05cell.html?_r=0. Isherwood, Charles. “Proof that Virginia Woolf Did Have a Light Side.” New York Times, January 25, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/theater/ reviews/26fres.html. Isherwood, Charles. “A Special Child: What’s a Mother to Do?” New York Times, November 3, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/04/theater/the-oldestboy-by-sarah-ruhl-opens-at-lincoln-center.html. Isherwood, Charles. “They’re Carrying On as if It’s in the Script.” New York Times, March 2, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/03/theater/stage-kiss-asarah-ruhl-comedy-at-playwrights-horizons.html?_r=1. Isherwood, Charles. “Who’s Afraid of Fluid Gender and Time?” New York Times, September 23, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/theater/ reviews/24orlando.html?_r=0. Jackson, Kevin. “The Triumph of the Stage Direction.” American Scholar 68, no. 4 (1999): 59–67. James, William. Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Modern Library, 1902. Janiak, Lily. “Berkeley Rep’s ‘For Peter Pan’ Never Takes Off.” SFGate, May 28, 2016. http://www.sfgate.com/performance/article/Berkeley-Rep-s-For-PeterPan-never-takes-7951725.php. Jenkins, Carrie. What Love Is: And What it Could Be. New York: Basic Books, 2017. Jones, Chris. “‘Melancholy Play’: An Unfashionable Emotion Takes Center Stage.” Chicago Tribune, May 4, 2015. http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ theater/reviews/ct-melancholy-play-musical-review-20150504-column.html. Jung, Carl. The Collected Works. Edited by Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler. Translated by R. F. C. Hull, Leopold Stein, and Diana Riviere, 20 vols. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953–91.

206

Bibliography Kaplan, Lila Rose. “In Dialogue: Inhabiting The Clean House with Sarah Ruhl.” Brooklyn Rail, October 1, 2004. http://brooklynrail.org/2004/10/theater/ndialogue-inhabiting-the-clean-house-wi. Kelly, Katherine. “Making the Bones Sing: The Feminist History Play, 1976–2010.” Theatre Journal 62, no. 4. (2010): 645–60. Kraszpulska, Ola. “Visual Explorations of Metaphysical Ideas in the Works of Sarah Ruhl.” In Old Stories, New Readings: The Transforming Power of American Drama, edited by Miriam López-Rodríguez, Inmaculada Pineda-Hernández, and Alfonso Ceballos Muñoz, 213–29. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. Lahr, John. “Good Vibrations.” The New Yorker, November 30, 2009. http://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/30/good-vibrations-2. Lahr, John. “Mouth to Mouth.” The New Yorker, May 30, 2011. https://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/30/mouth-to-mouth. Lahr, John. “Surreal Life.” The New Yorker, March 17, 2008. http://www.newyorker. com/magazine/2008/03/17/surreal-life. Lear, Jonathan. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Lee, Owen. “Orpheus and Eurydice: Some Modern Versions.” The Classical Journal 56, no. 7 (1961): 307–13. Leydon, Joe. “Late: A Cowboy Song.” Variety 13 (2005): 47. General OneFile. Accessed October 27, 2016. Lysy, August. “Review of Eurydice, directed by Charles Riffenburg, BoHo Theater, Chicago.” Chicago Critic, May 22, 2016. http://chicagocritic.com/eurydice-2/. Martin, Michel. “Female Sexuality Takes Center Stage with The Vibrator Play: Interview with Sarah Ruhl.” NPR, December 7, 2009. http://www.npr.org/ templates/story/story.php?storyId=121152241. McGeachy, Matt, “Encounters with Grace: Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play in Toronto’s East End.” HowlRound, July 11, 2013. http://howlround.com/encounters-withgrace-sarah-ruhls-passion-play-in-torontos-east-end. McInroy, Mark. Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses: Perceiving Splendour. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. McInroy, Mark. Email correspondence with the author, October 25 2017. Minor, E. Kyle. “Sarah Ruhl Play on Stuart, Bush Political Dynasties Opens Yale Rep Season.” New Haven Register, September 30, 2016. http://www.nhregister. com/arts-and-entertainment/20160930/sarah-ruhl-play-on-stuart-bushpolitical-dynasties-opens-yale-rep-season. Minor, E. Kyle. “Sarah Ruhl’s Scenes from Court Life a Real Treat at Yale Rep.” New Haven Register, October 10, 2016. http://www.nhregister.com/arts-andentertainment/20161010/theater-review-sarah-ruhls-scenes-from-court-life-areal-treat-at-yale-rep. “Mission & Programs.” Clubbed Thumb, n.d. http://www.clubbedthumb.org/themission/mission/. Muse, Amy. “Sarah Ruhl’s Sex Ed for Grown-ups.” In Text and Presentation 2013, edited by Graley Herren, 173–83. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2014. 207

Bibliography

Myers, Victoria. “Crosspost: Tony-Nominated Writer Sarah Ruhl on Plays about Motherhood and Challenging Theater’s Male Domination.” Indiewire. com, October 14, 2014. http://www.indiewire.com/2014/10/crosspost-tonynominated-writer-sarah-ruhl-on-plays-about-motherhood-and-challengingtheaters-male-domination-205621/ Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015. Orel, Gwen. “Sarah Ruhl.” The Writer 122, no. 8 (August 2009): 66. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated and edited by Charles Martin. New York: Norton, 2004. Oxman, Steven. “Passion Play: A Cycle in Three Parts.” Variety, September 25, 2007. http://variety.com/2007/legit/reviews/passion-play-a-cycle-in-threeparts-1200555931/. Palmer, Tanya. “A Passion for Theater: An Interview with Sarah Ruhl.” Goodman Theatre OnStage, September/December 2007, 2–5. Perel, Esther. Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence. New York: Harper, 2007. Phillips, Adams. “Interview.” Paris Review 208 (2014): 28–54. Pikras, Max. “In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) Review.” Studio M, November 22, 2015. https://blogs.miamioh.edu/arts/2015/11/in-the-next-room-or-thevibrator-play-review/. Pinter, Harold. “Writing for the Theatre.” In Harold Pinter: Complete Works, Vol. 1, 9–16. New York: Grove Press, 1976. Pressley, Nelson. “Backstage with Jesus and Hitler in Ruhl’s epic Passion Play.” The Washington Post, March 25, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ entertainment/theater_dance/backstage-with-jesus-and-hitler-in-ruhls-epicpassion-play/2015/03/25/5a15b42e-d2e0-11e4-8fce-3941fc548f1c_story.html. Pressley, Nelson. “Review of Late: A Cowboy Song at No Rules Theater Company at Signature Theater (Arlington, VA).” Washington Post, January 7, 2014. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/theater-review-late-a-cowboysong-staged-with-bluesy-whimsy/2014/01/07/29ee4520-77b7-11e3-a647a19deaf575b3_story.html. Read, Alan. Theatre, Intimacy, and Engagement: The Last Human Venue. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Reid, Kerry. “Unafraid of Virginia Woolf.” Chicago Reader, March 24, 2011. https:// www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/virginia-woolf-orlando-court-theatre/ Content?oid=3475064. Richman, David “Directing Freshwater.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 2 (Spring 1974): 1–2. Rilke, Rainer Maria. “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.” Translated by A. S. Kline. Poetry in Translation. http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/ MoreRilke.htm#anchor_Toc527606964. Robertson, Campbell. “Nine Writers See if the Fate of the Earth Can Be Any More Dramatic.” New York Times, April 19, 2008. http://www.nytimes. com/2008/04/19/theater/19climate.html.

208

Bibliography Rooney, David. “The Oldest Boy: Theater Review.” Hollywood Reporter, November 3, 2014. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/oldest-boy-theaterreview-745916. Royce, Graydon. “Welcome to the new Jungle: Sarah Rasmussen takes over the Minneapolis theater.” StarTribune, February 11, 2016. http://www. startribune.com/welcome-to-the-new-jungle-sarah-rasmussen-takes-over-theminneapolis-theater/368488341/ Rowen, Bess. “Ruhls of Play: An Interview with Sarah Ruhl.” Huffington Post, February 17, 2014. http://www.huffi ngtonpost.com/bess-rowen/ruhls-of-playan-intervie_b_4805944.html. Ruddick, Lisa. “The Unnamed Work of English.” ADE Bulletin 151 (2011): 29–35. Ruddick, Lisa. “When Nothing is Cool.” The Point, n.d. https://thepointmag. com/2015/criticism/when-nothing-is-cool. Ruhl, Sarah. 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write. New York: Faber & Faber, 2014. Ruhl, Sarah. “Artist Interview with Sarah Ruhl.” Playwrights Horizons website. https://www.playwrightshorizons.org/shows/trailers/artist-interview-sarahruhl/ Ruhl, Sarah. “The Baltimore Waltz and the Plays of my Childhood.” In The Play That Changed My Life, edited by Ben Hodges, 119–27. New York: Applause Books, 2009. Ruhl, Sarah. “By the Book.” New York Times, February 25, 2016. https:// www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/books/review/sarah-ruhl-by-the-book.html. Ruhl, Sarah. “The Clean House.” In The Clean House and Other Plays, 1–116. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006. Ruhl, Sarah. Dead Man’s Cell Phone. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008. Ruhl, Sarah. Dear Elizabeth: A Play in Letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and Back Again. New York: Faber and Faber, 2014. Ruhl, Sarah. Dog Play. Unpublished manuscript, courtesy of the author, 1998. Ruhl, Sarah. “Eurydice.” In The Clean House and Other Plays, 325–411. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006. Ruhl, Sarah. “A Few Important Emails Between Max Ritvo and Sarah Ruhl.” Berfois, March 1, 2016. http://www.berfrois.com/2016/03/max-ritvo-sarah-ruhl/ Ruhl, Sarah. For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday. New York: Theatre Communications Groups, 2018. Ruhl, Sarah. How to Transcend a Happy Marriage. Unpublished manuscript courtesy of the author, March 12, 2017. Ruhl, Sarah. In the Next Room or the vibrator play. New York: Theatre Communications Groups, 2010. Ruhl, Sarah. The Lady with the Lap Dog and Anna around the Neck: Two Stories by Anton Chekhov, Adapted by Sarah Ruhl. Unpublished manuscript, courtesy of the author, 2000. Ruhl, Sarah. “Late: A Cowboy Song.” In The Clean House and Other Plays, 117–220. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006. Ruhl, Sarah. “Melancholy Play.” In Sarah Ruhl: The Clean House and Other Plays, 221–324. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006. 209

Bibliography

Ruhl, Sarah. “On Kisses and Chemistry: A Discourse on Stage Kiss.” Playwrights Horizons, n.d. https://www.playwrightshorizons.org/shows/trailers/kisses-andchemistry-discourse-stage-kiss/. Ruhl, Sarah. The Oldest Boy. Ruhl, Sarah. Passion Play. Ruhl, Sarah. “Re-runs and Repetitions.” Contemporary Theatre Review 16, no. 3 (2006): 283–90. Ruhl, Sarah. “Sarah Ruhl on Stage Kiss: The Metaphysics of Backsides.” Playwrights Horizons, November 2013. https://www.playwrightshorizons.org/shows/trailers/ sarah-ruhl-stage-kiss/. Ruhl, Sarah. Scenes from Court Life or the whipping boy and his prince. Unpublished manuscript, courtesy of the author, October 9, 2016. Ruhl, Sarah. “Six Small Thoughts on Fornes, the Problem with Intention, and Willfulness.” Theatre Topics 11, no. 2 (September 2001): 187–204. Ruhl, Sarah. Snowless. Unpublished manuscript, courtesy of the author, 2007. Ruhl, Sarah. Stage Kiss. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2014. Ruhl, Sarah. “Theater Talkback: A Time and Place to Experiment.” New York Times, July 20, 2012. https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/theatertalkback-a-time-and-a-place-to-experiment/?ref=theater&_r=0. Ruhl, Sarah. “When Woolf Saw Chekhov, something of an introduction.” In Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Woolf’s Orlando: Two Renderings for the Stage, ix–xiii. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2013. Ruhl, Sarah, and Erik Ehn. “Dirty Thoughts About Money.” HotReview.org, January 2003. http://www.hotreview.org/articles/dirty-thoughts.htm. Santos, Sherod. “The Story of Poetry and Poets.” The Kenyon Review (New Series) 18, no. 1 (1996): 4–16. Schmidt, Heidi. “Review of In the Next Room or the vibrator play, dir. Les Waters, Lyceum Theater, Lincoln Center, New York City, 20 November 2009.” Theatre Journal 62, no. 4 (2010): 669–70. Scott, Jill. Electra After Freud: Myth and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading: or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You.” In Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1–37. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Sehgal, Parul. “Arundhati Roy’s Fascinating Mess.” The Atlantic 320, no. 1 (2017): 36–38. Shay, Jonathan. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Sheward, David. “Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play.” Backstage.com, May 12, 2010. https:// www.backstage.com/review/ny-theater/off -broadway/sarah-ruhls-passion-play/. Sponsler, Claire. Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Stevenson, Jill. “Passion Playing: An Interview with Sarah Ruhl on the Shaping Influence of Oberammergau.” In The Oberammergau Passion Play: Essays on 210

Bibliography the 2010 Performance and the Centuries-Long Tradition, edited by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., 168–75. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017. Stossel, Sage. “Flashback: The Difficult Grandeur of Robert Lowell.” The Atlantic. June 18, 2003. https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/ robertlowell.htm. Svich, Caridad, and Sarah Ruhl, eds. Popular Forms for a Radical Theatre. South Gate, CA: NoPassport Press, 2011. Tang, Oriana. “Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl discusses Scenes from Court Life.” Yale Daily News, October 5, 2016. http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2016/10/05/ pulitzer-prize-finalist-sarah-ruhl-discusses-scenes-from-court-life/. Tippett, Krista. Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. New York: Penguin Random House, 2016. Travisano, Thomas, ed. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York: Penguin, 2015. Vogel, Paula. “Artists in Conversation: Sarah Ruhl by Paula Vogel.” BOMB 99 (Spring 2007): 54–59. http://bombmagazine.org/article/2902/sarah-ruhl. Waters, Steve. The Secret Life of Plays. London: Nick Hern Books, 2010. Wattenberg, Richard. “‘Melancholy Play’ is High-energy, Fun-filled Surreal Romp.” The Oregonian, April 18, 2010. http://www.oregonlive.com/performance/index. ssf/2010/04/theater_reviews_melancholy_pla.html. Weckwerth, Wendy. “More Invisible Terrains.” Theater 34, no. 2 (2004): 28–35. Westgate, J. Chris “Review of Dead Man’s Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl.” Special issue on theatre/state and law, Theatre Journal 61, no. 3 (2009): 481–83. Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, edited by Jeanne Schulkind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1956. Wren, Celia. “The Golden Ruhl.”American Theatre 22, no. 8 (2005): 30–32, 146. Yardley, A. B., trans. Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries. New York: Palgrave, 2006. York, Jon. “Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play.” The Theatre Mirror. 2012. http:// www.theatermirror.com/JYpassionCIRCUIT.htm. Žižek, Slavoj. Event: Philosophy in Transit. London: Penguin Books, 2014.

211

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Thomas Butler Professor of English and Theatre at Eastern Kentucky University, where he regularly teaches classes on drama and literary theory. His most recent publications include “Friends Dying before Our Eyes in Annie Baker’s The Aliens ” (Text & Presentation, 2014) and “Sarah Ruhl’s Dear Elizabeth and the Mourning of Friends” (Journal of Dramatic Literature and Criticism, 2014). Christina Dokou is Assistant Professor of American Literature and Culture in the Faculty of English Studies at the University of Athens, Greece. She has published articles on comparative literature, psychoanalysis and/as literature, American folklore, Pop Americana (especially graphic novels and comics), and gender studies (especially androgyny), and is the coeditor of two anthologies, The Periphery Viewing the World (2004) and The Letter of the Law: Justice, Literature and the Other (2013). She serves on the boards of the Hellenic Association for the Study of English and the Fulbright Alumni Association of Greece. Jill Stevenson is Professor of Theatre Arts at Marymount Manhattan College. She is the author of Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York (2010) and Sensational Devotion: Evangelical Performance in 21st-Century America (2013; released in paperback in 2015). She coedited the collection Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture (2012) and has published articles in various journals and anthologies. She is currently working on her next book project, tentatively entitled Reenacting the Future: The Rhetorics of Threat in End Times Performance.

INDEX

Note: Ruhl’s works are entered under their titles, with sustained discussions in bold type. 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write 25, 98, 100, 123, 133, 177 terms “whimsy” and “quirky” 28, 60–1, 155 Adorno, Theodor 160 aesthetic fabulation 25, 28, 61, 64, 155 Almond, Todd 30, 39 Al-Shamma, James 73, 74, 146, 170, 193 n.24 Anna around the Neck (adaptation of Chekhov) 4, 7, 9–10 Baillie, Joanna 94 Beckett, Samuel 4, 29, 99, 160, 175 Bennett, Alan 52 Bogart, Anne 77 Brecht, Bertolt 60, 65, 88 Brook, Peter 97, 98. See also Holy Theatre Buber, Martin 98 Butler, Thomas 12, 28, 64, 116 Calvino, Italo xiv, 40, 156–7. See also lightness, concept of Carlson, Marvin 127 Chekhov, Anton adaptations by Ruhl 7–12, 24, 157 influence on Ruhl 1, 3, 23, 81, 130, 134, 138, 175 Churchill, Caryl 45, 130, 132, 138 The Clean House 55, 64–70, 85, 95 as commercial success 64 Pulitzer finalist 28 use of jokes 65, 66, 69, 162–3 Cornerstone Theater 35–6, 38, 130 cummings, e. e. 3, 119, 121, 125 Dead Man’s Cell Phone 2, 42, 76–81, 155, 175

Dear Elizabeth 3, 15–23, 24 Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller) 46 Demastes, William xiii, 176 Demeter in the City 28, 35–8, 60, 61, 130 Dickinson, Emily 69 Dog Play xi–xii, 23, 33, 111, 114, 175 Dokou, Christina 35 Durham, Leslie Atkins 65, 104, 158, 194 n.34 Eagleton, Terry 158 Ehn, Erik 99, 138, 193 n.18 The Ethical Slut 119, 125 Eurydice xi, 28–35, 38, 109, 111, 133–4, 138 development of 129, 130, 132 father-daughter relationship in 164–74 Fausto-Sterling, Anne xi, 70, 74 Feingold, Michael 28, 77, 191 n.43 Felski, Rita 63, 177 Finn, Hayley 29 Fornes, Maria Irene 63, 94 For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday xii, 114–18, 127, 139, 156, 160–2 Freud, Sigmund 35, 117, 164–6, 168, 170 Gilman, Richard 7 Green, Jesse 110, 122, 195 n.40 Holy Theatre, concept of 97, 98 Hopper, Edward 77 How to Transcend a Happy Marriage xiii, 118–26, 127, 131, 175, 176 Hurley, Erin 3

Index In the Next Room or the vibrator play 54, 55, 67, 81-9, 118 ending 139, 176 Jungle Theater production 129 Lincoln Center production 136 Isherwood, Charles on The Clean House 68 on Dead Man’s Cell Phone 77 on Eurydice 28, 32, 33 on The Oldest Boy 110 on Orlando 13 on Passion Play 101, 149, 152 on Stage Kiss 89, 92 on To Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday 115 James, William 98 Jung, Carl 117, 164 Jungle Theater, Minneapolis xiv, 83, 110, 111, 129, 130, 136–7. See also Rasmussen, Sarah Kaplan, Lila Rose 65, 130 Kushner, Tony 60, 99, 127 The Lady with the Lap Dog (adaptation of Chekhov) 4, 7, 8–9 Lahr, John 1, 26, 88, 29, 118 Late: A Cowboy Song 64, 67, 70–6, 85, 95 Lear, Jonathan 158 Letters From Max 175 lightness, concept of xiv, 12, 25–7, 28, 38, 40, 155–63 McInroy, Mark 126–7 Maeterlinck, Maurice character in Snowless 4, 6–7 influence on Ruhl 1, 23, 97, 99, 138 Melancholy Play 38–45, 61, 64, 156 moments of being, concept in Dear Elizabeth 3, 16, 19, 24 essays as 25 inspired by Woolf 2, 23, 24, 89, 175 in In the Next Room 89 in The Clean House 65 Nelson, Maggie 74 The Oldest Boy 98, 109–14, 127, 129, 135 O’Neill, Eugene 27, 114

214

Orlando (adaptation of Woolf) 12–15, 24, 65 Otto, Rudolf 98 Ovid 25, 119, 134, 159

7, 8,

Passion Play 28, 98, 99–109, 127, 138, 141–54 Pinter, Harold 26, 133, 185 n.9 Piven Theatre Workshop 7–8, 12, 181 n.5 Pressley, Nelson 76, 151 Rasmussen, Sarah xiii, 26, 83, 98, 110–11 Rilke, Rainer Maria 30 Ritvo, Max 175, 195 n.43 Rothko, Mark 70, 73 Ruddick, Lisa 63 Ruhl, Sarah American politics 45–61, 106, 175 attentiveness 34, 63–4, 94, 98, 176, 191 n.51 Catholicism, influence on 97, 112, 126, 139 death of father, influence on xi, xii, 29, 115–18, 166, 17, 195 n.43 memory 24, 69, 76, 79, 116, 123 music, role in plays 21, 29–31, 39, 69, 80, 110, 126–7, 134, 151 (see also Almond, Todd) plays (see individual titles) poetry 175, 181 n.5 Pulitzer Prize xiii, 28, 64, 81 soul 1, 4, 138–9 stage directions as love notes 25, 27 Steinberg Distinguished Playwriting Award xiii, 180 subtext 25, 26, 133 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize xiii, 64 Said, Edward 175 Scenes from Court Life or the whipping boy and his prince 28, 45–60, 61, 124, 175 Sedgwick, Eve 63, 74 Shaw, George Bernard 98 Smith, Molly 100, 142 Snowless 4–7, 24 Sponsler, Claire 145, 149 Stafford-Clark, Max 45, 60 Stage Kiss 89–93, 95, 101, 114, 118, 119

Index Stevenson, Jill 102, 106 Strindberg, August 94 Svich, Caridad xiii, 180, 182 n.9 Taichman, Rebecca 12, 111 Thebus, Jessica 13 Three Sisters (translation of Chekhov) 7, 10-12, 157–8 Tippett, Krista 114, 118 Turkle, Sherry 76

4,

Vogel, Paula 27, 130, 131, 134, 135, 138 on Ruhl xi, 3, 23, 81 Ruhl on xii, 97 as Ruhl’s mentor xii, xiv, 70, 100, 177

Waters, Les 12, 115, 116 Waters, Steve 3 Weckwerth, Wendy 97 Weil, Simone 95 Wellman, Mac 29, 130, 133, 138 Wilder, Thornton 46–7, 135 Williams, Tennessee 27, 88, 99 Wing-Davey, Mark 100, 101, 142, 149 Woolf, Virginia 1, 13, 23, 132, 175. See also moments of being, concept Younger, Kelly

27

Zebuhr, Laura

94

215