NEW YORK (AP) — The dawn of electricity and the quest for sexual fulfillment. Who knew the two could be linked so satisfactorily on stage?
But then Thomas Edison gets profusely thanked in Sarah Ruhl's "In the Next Room or the vibrator play," a perceptive comedy about female liberation of a very specific kind.
This provocative, often quite funny play, which Lincoln Center Theater opened Thursday at Broadway's Lyceum Theatre, is Ruhl's most entertaining work to date. Not only because of its sexual subject matter but because she has created a parade of appealing, fully drawn characters, starting with the husband and wife at the center of her play. And Ruhl is dealing with some serious issues, too, most prominently the often difficult relationships between men and women and their misreadings of each other.
Dr. and Mrs. Givings are the epitome of proper, prosperous late 19th century American society.
Dr. Givings is a specialist in gynecological and hysterical disorders; Catherine, his wife, is a dutiful, devoted helpmate and a caring mother to their newborn daughter, even though she has trouble nursing the infant.
As the good doctor, the excellent Michael Cerveris personifies solicitousness, ever sympathetic to his patients' problems but unaware of his own wife's unhappiness. She's a woman who confesses at one point in the play, "I don't know what kind of person I am," and Laura Benanti perfectly captures her tremulous uncertainty.
Dr. Givings at least has a solution for his patients: "therapeutic electrical massage" to relieve a woman's nervous condition. It's accomplished with an electrically powered contraption located in his "operating theater," found in the room next to his home parlor.
"In the Next Room," which has been directed by Les Waters, also chronicles the change in Sabrina, one of Givings' patients. She's a frigid, fidgety woman who is transformed — the woman even begins playing the piano again — after sessions with the doctor's machine. Maria Dizzia accomplishes this blossoming with considerable emotion.
The doctor's wife is less successful at overcoming her own frustrations, especially after she starts listening through the parlor door to the sounds coming from her husband's operating theater.
In addition, the couple finds a wet nurse, who has recently lost her own child, to do duty for Catherine. She proves so successful that it sends Catherine further into a depression. The role is played by Quincy Tyler Bernstein, an actress of quiet power. She delivers an impassioned, heartbreaking speech about the woman's own dead child, and it's one of the play's highlights.
But matters get worse for Catherine with the arrival of a handsome, hedonistic English painter (Chandler Williams) who awakens even more ardor in the woman. He, too, is a patient of the doctor. But it is this artist who correctly identifies Catherine's problem, saying "Your soul is locked somewhere inside your body — so I cannot see it."
It's a longing her husband — so good at helping other woman — can't see in his own wife. She takes matters into her own hands, finally, in the play's last scene which features a passionate embrace in the falling snow.
The moment is a reminder that many of Ruhl's best known plays, such as "The Clean House," ''Eurydice" and "Dead Man's Cell Phone," have often been more fanciful. But none has been so sensual and dare we say it, surprisingly romantic, particularly in that wintery tableau.
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