About the Play:

How to Transcend a Happy Marriage is a full-length comedy by Sarah Ruhl. Two couples invite a mysterious young woman and her two live-in boyfriends to a dinner party. Throughout the course of the evening, the limits of friendship, marriage, and parenthood are tested. How to Transcend a Happy Marriage asks: what are the limits of friendship, and what happens when parents let their wild sides come out of hibernation?

How to Transcend a Happy Marriage explores the boundaries of monogamy and the limits of friendship. At a dinner party in the wilds of New Jersey, two lively, attractive couples are gossiping about the new temp working in Jane's office. Pip is young woman in a polyamorous threesome with two men. At least as unnerving to the well-educated, ostensibly happy friends is that Pip also hunts and slaughters her own meat. Fascinated, they invite Pip and her two live-in boyfriends to a New Year's Eve dinner party. The discussion turns to action and the exploration of unexplored desire turns animalistic, and then Jane's daughter sees it all. Sarah Ruhl poses the question: in order to function well in the institution of marriage and the raising of children, what parts of our animal nature do we sacrifice? What part of ourselves do we atrophy or simply cut off to be reliable, constructive spouses and parents? How to Transcend a Happy Marriage blurs the lines of monogamy and asks how deeply friends, lovers, and strangers connect.

How to Transcend a Happy Marriage premiered in 2017 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in Lincoln Center off Broadway in New York City. Since then the play had regional premieres at professional theatres across the US.

Cast: 4 female, 4 male

What people say:

"How to Transcend a Happy Marriage has a charming phantasmagorical finish that points out the conflict between our animal nature and the societal norms we create to control it." — BroadwayWorld

"Audiences are receiving a comprehensive education in the polyamorous lifestyle in Sarah Ruhl's whimsical and spiritual domestic drama, How to Transcend a Happy Marriage ... for those willing to take the ride, the play is a provocative and poetic meditation on being caught between reasonably happy domesticity and untapped, unacknowledged desires." — AM New York

"This new play is a subversive enchantment. It is part absurd domestic serio-comedy, part erotic magic realism, unflinching about taboos and about questioning that, just maybe, monogamy isn't enough." — Newsday

"…provocative and enlightening ... How to Transcend a Happy Marriage abounds with situations that lead its characters to say the most quotable things, all of which should be experienced live in the theater and not in any critic's review. They're that memorable." — The Wrap

"How to Transcend a Happy Marriage is the love and mating ritual we all need." — San Francisco Chronicle

About the Playwright:

Sarah Ruhl is an award-winning American playwright, author, essayist, and professor. Her plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalists The Clean House and In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), also nominated for a Tony Award. A MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship recipient, she is known for charting complex currents of desire and broaching weighty topics such as bereavement with a light, whimsical touch. Her plays have been produced on Broadway and across the US as well as internationally, and translated into fourteen languages.