4.+Ruhl

//Please discuss this statement in GROUP 1 discussions ONLY.//
James Al-Shamma (Belmont University)

=Sarah Ruhl's //In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play)//=

 Just Provocative Enough for Broadway

In //In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play)//, Sarah Ruhl pursues what could be considered a feminist agenda as she challenges patriarchal Christianity and rewrites the discovery of (sexual) knowledge in the Garden of Eden as redemptive. Furthermore, she stages women playing together with a sex toy and sharing an illicit kiss, and a doctor sodomizing a male patient with a vibrator. While this might sound somewhat edgy for mainstream entertainment, this play will mark Ruhl's Broadway debut in November 2009. Part of what makes this work palatable to a wider audience is the playwright's handling of sexuality. The Victorian-era female characters are ignorant of pornography, and apprehend the vibrator as a clinical rather than sexual device. Furthermore, their relations with their husbands have failed to introduce them to the experience of orgasm. Thus, they approach the vibrator from a state of innocence, or at least sexual ignorance. The heterosexual coupling that serves as the happy ending only increases the play's commercial appeal, both in spite of and because of its discreet male nudity. The work titillates without offending.

The setting of //In the Next Room// invites the construction of dualities, consisting as it does of two adjoining rooms, an operating theater and a living room. The most obvious of these are the opposing spheres of work and home, but the playwright has woven many others into the text as well, including male/female, white/black, love/sex, therapy/pleasure, science/art, and heterosexual/homosexual. The dissolution of the two rooms into a winter garden, enclosing a scene of sexual ecstasy, suggests a deconstruction of sorts. The home that appeared solid turns out to have been as insubstantial as stage scenery, and the conflicts that played out in it vanish as well. The artist, Leo, has fled to Paris to escape the racial intolerance of late 19th century America, and Mrs. Daldry and Annie, after sharing a kiss at the piano, have vowed to never see one another again. The replacement of home with garden in fact introduces yet another duality, that of nature/culture. Nature is the favored term, as the couple experiences a "natural" sexuality presumably superior to an artificial one dependent upon the technology of the vibrator. Ruhl disengages (female) sexual pleasure from religion and pornography, imbuing it with a sense of innocence. As she does so, she once again favors the first term of nature/culture, since pornography is, by definition, a mediated experience.

Ruhl suggests a matriarchal Christianity that would replace Jesus with the Virgin Mary as the sustainer of life. Leo envisions his painting of Madonna and Child as revolutionary, not only in depicting a black Mary with a white baby Jesus, but also in showing the infant actually nursing. When he wonders why the latter is so rare, Mrs. Givings speculates that, "We are to think of Him feeding us, I suppose. Not the other way round" (99). As she grieves her deceased infant, the wet-nurse Elizabeth imagines God's cabinet filled with "babies who get returned," who are inconsolable even within the arms of God the Father, crying for their earthly mothers (130). Unable to produce milk for her baby, Mrs. Givings ponders nursing and childbirth:  Isn't it strange about Jesus? That is to say, about Jesus being a man? For it is women who are eaten -- who turn their bodies into food -- I gave up my blood -- there was so much blood -- and I gave up my body -- but I couldn't feed her, could not turn my body into food, and she was so hungry. I suppose that makes me an inferior kind of woman and a very inferior kind of Jesus. (42)

Or perhaps, by implication, the maleness of the Father and Son makes them inferior kinds of mothers, a role better left to the Virgin Mary.

Ruhl not only suggests a gender reversal for the primary symbol of Christian spiritual sustenance, she reimagines the Garden of Eden as the site at which innocence is restored through the acquisition of knowledge, specifically that of sexual pleasure. The female figure, Catherine, is surely the temptress, but she lures her male counterpart not out of a heavenly paradise, but rather into an earthly sensual paradise. She conveys him to a state of grace, rather than one of sin. The religious symbolism is undeniable: in a beautiful, otherworldly garden, together they make an angel in the snow, and the last line, uttered by Catherine, is "Oh, God. Oh, God, Oh God" (141). Orgasm is conflated with an experience of the divine, a moment of total absorption, of //jouissance//.

It is a beautiful conclusion that will likely sell tickets on Broadway. The stage snow that covers the scene blankets the transgressive sexualities and racial conflicts as well. In spite of its feminist reimagining of Genesis, the utopia depicted here is a resolutely bourgeois one between a doctor and his wife. As in a traditional comedy, or a Disney musical, a coupling restores the social order and the disturbing elements fade into the background. The ending differs markedly from that of Ruhl's //Late: A Cowboy Song//, in which a woman leaves her husband for the other woman. Certainly //In the Next Room// is a more mature work, but one wonders if it would have found its way to Broadway if the conclusion focused on the forbidden love between Annie and Mrs. Daldry, rather than the sexual healing that occurs between Dr. and Mrs. Givings. Ruhl certainly addresses female concerns here, and devotes stage time to same-sex attraction and racial issues, doing so with charm, tact, and her trademark whimsicality. Her unique voice has contributed to her success in a field still dominated by men. Her work is also less confrontational than some of the others included in this working session, and that no doubt factors into her widespread appeal.

Works Cited Ruhl, Sarah. //In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play)//. Unpublished script, 2009.