"In the Next Room' at the Wilma (reading)

Quick question to the Philadelphia theater community: How does a staged reading at the Wilma offer a better night of theater than most of the full productions I've seen this season?

Like reading a play at home without the intermediacy of a production, a staged reading can't destroy my direct sense of a play by interfering with what my imagination can too often do better. (Though stage manager Patreshettarlini Adams did use the one prop to a delicious effect, and when you get to the full title of the play, you'll know the prop.) As for the actors working under Blanka Zizka's direction, the almost all-Equity cast impressed; and personally, I would rather see Julianna Zinkel or Sarah Sanford give a staged reading than watch most other Philadelphia actresses perform.

But Sarah Ruhl's recently penned script In the Next Room (or, The Vibrator Play), is, of course, what made the entire evening. Berkeley Repertory—where the play will receive its world premiere next month—commissioned Ruhl to write a play about the history of the vibrator, a device first used for medical purposes to release up "pent-up emotions in the womb" by inducing "paroxysms" (orgasms) in hysterical women. Taking advantage of the new age of electricity, scientists invented this new marvel in the 1880s because— as the Wilma's literary manager Walter Bilderback so eloquently put it— "the doctors' and nurses' hands and fingers kept getting tired."

Multiple orgasms, multiple jealousies

In Ruhl's play, the inventor is the appropriately named Dr. Givings (Ross Manson), who, assisted by a former midwife (Mary McCool as Annie), operates a clinic in a prosperous spa town near New York. He's visited by patients like Sabrina Daldry (Sanford), whose husband (Ben Lloyd) has brought her in to cure her "women's problems." Givings's prescription: daily releases of nerves that result in the most number of simulated orgasms I've ever seen (or would want to see) on stage.

Givings's wife Catherine (Zinkel) grows jealous— initially at the bonding between their baby and the wet-nurse Elizabeth (Miriam Hyman), later at her husband's greater interest in providing relief to these women than providing attention for her. So she attempts to seduce the young painter Leo (Luigi Sottile)— the rare case of a man having vibrator-requiring hysteria— in order to provoke some sort of emotional response from her husband.

Meanwhile, Sabrina becomes attracted to Annie (even asking for the device-free "Annie method" in therapy), which leads to a situation that the stage directions describe as, "We wonder if we're about to witness three women play with a vibrator."

That line is the best joke of the play, and through most of the "treatments" (that is, applications of the device), the audience's laughter made it very difficult to hear the lines of Ruhl's incredibly hilarious first act. The women, especially McCool's deadpan, "I'll wash my hands now," and Sanford's childlike innocence about her paroxysms, diminish any suggestive quality, and keep the awkward clinical situation just uncomfortable enough that if we didn't laugh, we'd feel grossed out.

"'Why does Jesus get eaten?'

This is a play that's almost entirely concerned with women's needs for intimacy, their jealousy, awkwardness about asking for what they want, and family neuroses— and I loved it. But these issues merely provide a springboard for the richly integrated, deeper questions about race and class, the strange patriarchy of religion (cleverly asking at one point, "Why does Jesus get eaten when women breastfeed"), sexual politics inside the family, and the value of love versus sex. Ruhl's play operates and engages intellectually and emotionally, and her brilliance explodes the hysteria surrounding these themes with humor, making all of it entertaining, and best of all, palatable to both imbibe and discuss.

But surprisingly, the conclusions Ruhl draws are reactionary in their tone (far more so than the daddy-clinging that drove the theme and plot of her recent Eurydice). Catherine's jealousy turns her into a sexually frustrated housewife who questions her husband's adequacy. She begs him to use the device on her (he won't, finding it unseemly to "experiment" on his own wife), and when she breaks into his operating theatre and tries it herself (with Sabrina's assistance), it makes her "excitable" and she begins craving the feeling like an addiction.

To be sure, plenty of evidence supports Ruhl's viewpoint. Though scientists began using the vibrator-induced orgasm as a "cure-all" for hysteria, commercial applications quickly followed, as the device became a popular amenity at luxury resorts (imagine seeing one in your hotel room), and the fifth home appliance to become electrified. But Ruhl's theme— mostly delivered through Leo, the only fully rounded male character— is clear: After showing us where this road to pleasure leads, she stamps her judgment on the lure of easy sexual pleasure versus the fruits of relationships built on compromises.

Echoes of Ibsen

How does Ruhl end the play? By asserting— contra women's magazines and bedroom feminism— that women really want an emotional connection, and the best way to keep your wife from becoming hysterical is simple: Pay her some attention and respect— and most important, love her, you idiot.

Strangely enough, Ibsen made the same point in A Doll's House, written during the same period in which Ruhl set her new play. I realize that Ruhl had to completely infantilize her female characters (except the wise, noble, African-American, which in one instance, invokes a racist stereotype still common in our time) in order to find the humor of the innocence in using a vibrator. But Ibsen's Nora didn't evince this level of childishness in order for her to become "liberated."

In her recent Eurydice, Ruhl engenders a similar reactionary effect, as Eurydice, rather than return to her tumultuous and uncertain relationship with Orpheus, clings to the safe, easy, constant love that her father (as protector) provides her in the underworld. What next? A Stepford Wives-style play where the robots gain consciousness but discover they're happier in their delusions?

Is it possible that the hottest female playwright in the country got there by embracing fathers, prioritizing love, infantilizing women and dismissing (the now passé) liberating form of feminism?