By Sarah Ruhl, Directed by Les Waters. At the Lyceum Theater. (CLOSED)
It's odd that a playwright as good natured as Sarah Ruhl would end up being so controversial, but perhaps this is what happens when you're given a MacArthur "Genius" Award before making your New York Debut. In The Next Room or the vibrator play is Ruhl's first play written post-MacArthur (both Passion Play and Dead Man's Cell Phone were written just prior) and this time she's on the Great White Way with a comedy about the medicinal uses of the vibrator in the 19th Century. The play earns generally high marks, with critics admiring the way she and director Les Waters have simultaneously pulled off a hilarious comedy and a probing look into female sexuality and our relationships with our bodies. John Simon, who normally hates Ruhl, is shocked (shocked!) to find himself thoroughly charmed by the play. Not everyone is so content... Matthew Murray finds the play overstuffed, Linda Winer finds it overly slight and Terry Teachout hates it so much, he impugns the taste of anyone who likes it (leaving out his F- grade, the score jumps to B+).
Hollywood Reporter A
(Frank Scheck) The playwright, responsible for such works as The Clean House and Dead Man's Cell Phone, mines her subject for suitably bawdy humor without resorting to vulgarity. But what really gives the work its distinction is its sensitive exploration of the physical and emotional repression suffered by the women of the era, which has yet to disappear entirely. Nor does Ruhl neglect the male side of things, as evidenced by the beautifully staged final scene in which Mrs. Givings provides her husband with a lesson about the beauty of his own body. The play, seen at the Berkeley Rep, has been given a pitch-perfect Broadway staging that beautifully balances its humor and pathos. Under the sensitive direction of Les Waters, the ensemble delivers sterling performances, with Benanti a particular delight as the woman for whom electricity turns out to be a marriage saver.
New York Times A
(Charles Isherwood) In the Next Room, a Lincoln Center Theater production, is directed by Les Waters with a fine sensitivity to its varied textures. Insightful, fresh and funny, the play is as rich in thought as it is in feeling. It is also Ms. Ruhl’s most traditional work, taking place as it does in a single setting (realized with warmth by the set designer Annie Smart) and hewing closely to naturalism. Nonetheless, admirers of Ms. Ruhl’s fanciful imagination and flair for surreal imagery, given free rein in plays like The Clean House and Eurydice, will be gratified to know that she imbues her heroine, Mrs. Givings, with a penchant for flights of lyric fantasy and a tendency to speak her thoughts almost before she has formulated them.
NY Post A
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) Ruhl presents something a lot more intimate and a lot more daring: women's discovery of their own bodies and their own pleasure. It may be the first time we've seen characters repeatedly reach orgasm on a mainstream stage -- in a Lincoln Center Theater production, no less -- and it happens in a play that's smart, delicate and very, very funny...As well written as the play is, it could easily have gone astray in the wrong hands. But director Les Waters and his cast proceed with great sensitivity. Cerveris' earnest, slightly stiff physicality is put to good use here, while Benanti and Dizzia brim with a contagious glee in their shared scenes. Excited and curious, they giggle, whisper and intrigue. After all, their characters are on the cusp of a marvelous discovery: They were already adults. Now they can become women.
TheaterMania A
(David Finkle) If Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde had decided to collaborate on a post-modern drawing-room comedy, the hotsy-totsy twosome surely would have turned out something very much like Sarah Ruhl's genuinely hysterical new work In the Next Room or the vibrator play, now being presented by Lincoln Center Theatre at Broadway's Lyceum Theatre... Handed material that theatergoers stuck in a bygone age might find unsavory, director Les Waters has honed it to a fare-thee-well. (He also helmed the piece for its Berkeley Repertory Theatre debut.) And his actors are certainly a game lot. Dizzia, Benanti, and Williams are obliged to present several approaches to orgasms, a requirement that may have evoked second thoughts on initial readings of the lubricious script. But they leap in. Cerveris, as a detached man of science, is adept at stripping his emotions bare and then some. Bernstine gets to deliver the play's longest speech -- a confession of her resentment at wet-nursing an infant after her own son died at 12 weeks -- and she breaks hearts with it. Ryan's thick-skulled Mr. Daldry and Stetson's secretly unhappy and longing Annie are additional assets.
Bloomberg A
(John Simon) Wonders will never cease. Sarah Ruhl, whose previous work I execrated, has written a smart, charming, iridescently funny-serious jewel, In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play...As Ruhl traces it with wit and insight, and without the slightest prurience, the birth of this new era gives rise to colorful events, astute psychological revelations and endearingly apt dialogue. A parallel plot line centers on the black wet nurse, Elizabeth: Catherine is as jealous of her success with Lotty as her husband is of his male patient Leo Irving, a bohemian, Paris-based painter with whom Catherine is unrequitedly smitten.
Time Out New York A-
(David Cote) This premise could easily devolve into a silly sex farce or a strident feminist critique; in fact, Ruhl samples from both without becoming indebted to either. In a way, In the Next Room is unabashedly antiscience; Ruhl has noted in interviews that she’s not impressed by psychological realism or rationality in contemporary plays. In the battle between reason and wonder, she comes down firmly on the side of dreamy awe. By restricting her genre to aphorism-peppered 19th-century drawing-room comedy, Ruhl tempers her tendency toward twee whimsy and delivers a compelling yarn with engaging characters who evolve. And director Les Waters doesn’t gild the lily of Ruhl’s heightened but period-respectful dialogue, setting a comical but grounded tone.
Associated Press B+
(Michael Kuchwara) 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
Variety B
(David Rooney) Victorian repression gets a rude poke in Sarah Ruhl's typically idiosyncratic rumination on women's struggle to understand and explore their sexual selves, In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play. While the signature 19th century ailment being treated is "hysteria," the chief weakness is the bipolar disorder of the inconsistent second act, which shifts uncertainly between serious developments and the more farcical business of romantic cross-currents. But there are so many lingering moments of emotional truth, and even more of daring comedy, that the play amuses and charms even if it doesn't quite satisfy.
NY Daily News C+
(Joe Dziemianowicz) In the Next Room clicks, or hums, when it's at its silliest and most titillating. As characters shed corsets and knickers for some good vibrations, the play surges with laughter. The merriment ceases in the second half, larded down by so many themes concerning life, light, love, lactation, lesbianism - and that's just the L words.
Newsday C-
(Linda Winer) In the Next Room or the vibrator play is a great big idea with a mildly amusing play tacked onto it. The comedy is more substantial and less self-consciously whimsical than the three previous Sarah Ruhl plays that also have been luxuriously produced in New York in the past three years. But I still wish I understood the appeal.
TalkinBroadway C-
(Matthew Murray) Unfortunately, even these added layers of context and depth make the story difficult to sustain over two and a half hours. Sight gags about the stimulating devices - including the horrific “Chattanooga vibrator” to which Leo is subjected - and Catherine’s borderline conspiring to treat herself when her husband refuses may satisfy in the short term. But because the side plots and subsidiary characters aren’t especially compelling, you focus on the play’s coarser aspects more than they’re capable of bearing - and ultimately, they’re not much more than the sort of lame sex jokes most people get tired of after middle school. Counting adultery, classism, lesbianism, racism, artistic inspiration, the disintegration of social prudishness, the landscape of scientific progress, and a modern history of wet nursing in addition the dual-headed main story of vibrator theory and the accidental collapse of a marriage, Ruhl has loaded In the Next Room with too many expansive topics to do any of them justice. Neither she nor her director, Les Waters, is capable of drawing your attention to the threads of greatest importance, which instead of elevating everything only increases the insignificance of each individual portion.
The Faster Times D+
(Jonathan Mandell) All this is so clearly put forth that we get it within the first 15 minutes of the play — a half hour, tops. The problem is that the play is two and a half hours long. In that time, we watch nearly a dozen sessions with a vibrator (or maybe the better verb is hear, since they are conducted under discreet covering.) There are variations to be sure — one time it’s a man, a couple of times it’s two women. There are also tiny subplots, frustrated little efforts among various of the characters to make connection, and a fanciful ending that is at odds with the tone of the rest of the play, intentionally so. But much time is taken with the smug little joke that these naifs did not even understand that what they were experiencing was sexual pleasure, which might have been better-told as a 12-minute skit; allow the two musically-talented leads the chance to sing, and it would have been firmly in Monty Python territory. Instead, In The Next Room, or the vibrator play is a tease without titillation; it has the rhythm of pornography without the pleasures of pornography; most theatergoers would probably not find it very shocking, but for all the expressed intention to offer insights into attitudes towards sex and electricity, it is also not all that stimulating.
Wall Street Journal F-
(Terry Teachout) Believe it or not, this is actually a pretty good idea for a play, one that might have been both smart and provocative had it been treated in the astringent manner of "Topsy-Turvy," the 1999 film in which Mike Leigh showed us Victorian England through the eyes of Gilbert and Sullivan. "In the Next Room," by contrast, is a sentimental wallow studded with sniggering jokes that too often appear to be made at the expense of Ms. Ruhl's innocent characters, none of whom is believably Victorian in speech or carriage. The result is the theatrical equivalent of a jelly doughnut with vinegar-flavored frosting, a dish fit only for the tasteless.
HR A 13; TM A 13; NYT A 13; NYP A 13; BB A 13; TONY A- 12; AP B+ 11; V B 10; NYDN C+ 8; TB C- 6; ND C- 6; TFT D+ 5; WSJ F- 0; TOTAL: 123/13=9.46 (B-)
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