In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play, Sarah Ruhl

 This is a fun, witty play. I borrowed it from the library because, having read Ruhl's essays, I was curious about her plays, and it didn't disappoint. It's simultaneously daring and kind of quaint, in a really interesting way — the tone teeters between irony and wide-eyed sentiment. I think this is in part because the subject matter — the use of vibrators to treat hysteria — unavoidably involves a certain amount of dramatic irony. We know what's really going on here (sex!), except we also sort of don't, because it's so difficult to really understand how people at the time experienced this kind of thing (or at least it is for me). Is it really possible to be so disconnected from your own sexuality? I know it is (and I know I'm very lucky to find it so hard to fathom), but then what does this mean for your sense of your body, for instance?

The brilliance of Ruhl's play is the way it activates multiple meanings of electricity, and the thrills and dangers attendant to it, and subtly plays with our sense of the Victorian era and its moral milieu. There is a faint suggestion, for instance, that sexual identity is more fluid, precisely because less explicitly categorized. There's also an interesting way that the play activates contemporary taboos by confronting us with the "innocence" of certain aspects of the Victorian era, like the racial politics, or the all-knowing authority of medical discourse, without a clear commentary to comfortably situate it in relation to current norms (is the doctor sexually abusing his patients? is the treatment of the African American character racist? The answers will seem obvious to many viewers, but the play withholds comment). This inevitable sense of then-vs-now is neatly echoed in the way the play is staged, with action taking place in two spaces simultaneously, the division between them alternately fixed and porous.

It would be really neat to see it staged, but it was a pleasure to read as well. In one of her essays, Ruhl says something like, stage directions should be meaningful, they carry important ideas and tone, etc, and this is very true here, such that you feel like you're being let in on a secret, in a way, by getting to read them. And you realize with particular clarity that any staging of this play is going to be a particular interpretation (most intriguingly, in the directions to the actors for the sounds they are to make during orgasm). 

It's a really sweet, enjoyable text, I'm looking forward to reading more of her stuff (and hopefully seeing it performed someday!).