About the Play:

Finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony Award nominee for best new play

In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) is a full-length dramatic comedy by Sarah Ruhl. Set in the 1880s, when enthusiasm for the electric light bulb gave rise to a handy new instrument to treat "hysteria" in women: the vibrator. In the Next Room centres around a doctor, his wife, the patients, and their respective households through an exploration of this new invention that has the potential to change everything.

In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) is set in the 1880s when Thomas Edison was creating all sorts of electrical devices, and based on the little-known historical fact that doctors used vibrators to treat women's "hysteria" – depression caused by sexual frustration – by means of the newly invented vibrator. The play centers on a doctor and his wife and how his new therapy affects their entire household. In a seemingly perfect, well-to-do Victorian home, proper gentleman and Gynecologist Dr. Givings administers "electrical massage" to repressed housewives, while his own spouse Catherine is unfulfilled as both sexual partner and mother. Adjacent to her husband's operating theatre, his young and energetic wife tries to tend to their newborn daughter – and wonders exactly what is going on in the "next room" of the title as his patients moan in ecstasy. When a new "hysterical" patient and her husband bring a wet nurse and their own complicated relationship into the doctor's home, Dr. and Mrs. Givings must examine the nature of their own marriage, and what it truly means to love someone. In the Next Room is a heartfelt, provocative, funny, intriguing comedy that takes a highly entertaining look at sex, intimacy and gender equality.

In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play premiered in 2009 at at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and subsequently marked Sarah Ruhl's Broadway debut later that same year at the Lyceum Theatre in New York City. The play has been performed in regional, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 4 female, 3 male

What people say:

"Best Broadway Play of 2009 ... Ruhl has defied gender and genre orthodoxy to give us a hilarious and moving meditation on the many factors that complicate communication between (and within) the sexes." — USA Today

"In the Next Room is Ruhl's best play to date. Her play-writing is inspired." — New Yorker

"Insightful, fresh and funny, the play is as rich in thought as it is in feeling...one of the most gifted and adventurous American playwrights to emerge in recent years ... In the Next Room is a true novelty: a sex comedy designed not for sniggering teenage boys – or grown men who wish they were still sniggering teenage boys – but for adults with open hearts and minds. Insightful, fresh and funny, the play is as rich in thought as it is in feeling." — The New York Times

"It's safe to say that In the Next Room goes where no Broadway show has gone before. Ruhl presents something a lot more daring than nudity: women's discovery of their own bodies and their own pleasure ... A play that's smart, delicate and very, very funny." — New York Post

"Sarah Ruhl ... has written a smart, charming, iridescently funny-serious jewel ... 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." — Bloomberg

"The playwright 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....The play beautifully balances its humor and pathos." — Hollywood Reporter

"A breathtakingly inventive addition to Ruhl's singular body of work." — Los Angeles Times

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.