Sarah Ruhl's "In the Next Room' at the Wilma (2nd review)

One of the best parts about reading a Sarah Ruhl play is the way so much of her pert and sassy dialogue inspires multiple elucidations. Blanka Zizka, directing the Wilma's production of Ruhl's In the Next Room, seems not to meet the challenges Ruhl has given her.

Don't get me wrong. In the Next Room is an amusingly nostalgic look at a repressed society seemingly liberated by Thomas Edison's newfangled electrical power-driven gadgets. But there ought to be more we can grasp about the characters than what was presented.

Wilma's production is surely a beautiful affair. The actors are effectively positioned and evenly balance their simultaneous performances within the four rooms presented on a single stage (a Ruhl innovation). The costumes designed by Oana Botez-Ban are used in an intuitive way to reflect the perverted restraints of Victorian society. Set designer Alexis Distler cleverly placed the über-Victorian decorated stage in the middle of a two-sided audience (a device that's not always viewer comfortable but in this production improves one's theater experience).

Well-bred women's agitations

Dr. Givings (Jeremiah Wiggins), a man of science, has seen fit to turn his professional services into a mercy mission for women who suffer hysterical fits. He has determined that the reason for well-bred women's agitations is a buildup of fluids. Accordingly, all that's needed to unleash the repressions of a young matron of the 1880s is to enable her fluids to flow outwards from her vagina— a goal that can easily be accomplished with the aid of an electrically endowed dildo.

The doctor's wife (Mairin Lee), who has just given birth to a daughter she cannot suckle, is, as directed by Zizka, a woman in waiting for some stimulus. Her immediate nursing need, though, can be met by the hiring of a wet nurse, Elizabeth (Opal Alladin, played stoically as the earth mother). Elizabeth recently lost her third-born, so she has much milk to give and no time for histrionics. Having thus taken care of things on the womanly home front, Dr. Givings presumes he can then concentrate on his medical art.

Manual stimulation

Meanwhile, Elizabeth's primary employer, Mr. Daldry (portrayed by John C. Vennema as the epitome of Victorian priggery) is upset because his wife Sabrina is no longer the sprightly young spirit he married and is prone to outbursts of despair, particularly when she's in Mr. Daldry's presence. Kate Czajkowski's rendition of Sabrina's metamorphosis from a woman afraid of the light to haunting piano player, however, doesn't reach completion until she, by happenstance, finally receives adequate treatment when the electricity goes off and she must be manually stimulated by Givings's nurse, Annie.

Under director Zizka's hand, Nurse Annie becomes the most repressed woman on the stage. Yet Krista Apple's Annie manages to loom as an independent figure anyway because, as she suggests to the audience, she can do it her way.

Sexiest actor on stage

To add pepper to the salted brine of this Victorian mishmash tale, Dr. Givings is visited by an artist, one Leo Irving (Luigi Sottile, the sexiest actor on the stage), who seeks relief for his inability to paint after the hot tot he met in Tuscany dumped him. Dr. Givings, as a man of science, believes he can treat both genders with his theory of draining bodily fluids and proceeds to insert a device to clear Irving's remains.

At this point I was glad I was on the backside of the stage because— well, I won't spoil the moment.

All's well that ends well, though, because, despite her lack of medical training, Mrs. Givings manages to persuade her husband that it's therapeutic for him to romp naked in their snowy back yard. Personally, I would have found it more restorative to see Leo in the buff.♦


To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.