THE VICTORIANS CONFRONT SEXUALITY
                        A Play---or Work-in-Progress?  
                                              By Carol Benet
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area theater
                                                                 Weeks starting Feb. 16, 2009
                                                                 Vol. 11, No. 64
         BERKELEY--- Sarah Ruhl’s very candid "In the Next Room (or, the vibrator play)" is the 50th world premiere presented by Berkeley Rep, several of which have then gone to New York. 
            It features normal themes of Victorian times: relationships between wives and husbands, the role of a new mother, the misunderstanding or refusal to recognize the role of sexuality, the changes happening because of Thomas Edison’s introduction of electricity, and other such subjects are played out here. 
            And beyond the everyday aggravations of the characters there is a spiritual awakening that takes place within all the characters.  The actors, all of them, are so good at showing these transformations.
            Summing up Ruhl’s "In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)" is easy.  It’s all in the title.  Staged during the Victorian Period, it is about Dr. Givings (Paul Niebanck) who has his office at home ”in the next room,”  so that people in the parlor can hear noises of the patients.  Mr. Daldry (John Leonard Thompson) brings his wife Sabrina (Maria Dizzia) to the doctor because she is depressed and irritable.  Even the electric light, a new invention during this fin de siècle setting, gives her headaches. 
            Dr. Givings has a new electric machine that will cure her, one that we would now call a vibrator.  He administers this to his patient, with the help of his nurse Annie (Stacy Ross) and Sabrina has a paroxysm, what we would currently call an orgasm.
            The doctor’s wife hears these strange noises, but she is involved with her own female problems. She has a new baby and her milk is not flowing properly so they find a wet nurse Elizabeth (Melle Powers), a beautiful African American, and the baby thrives.  Only the mother starts to feel left out and she complains of her husband’s distraction and coldness.  She too would like to be “cured.”  
            Into the story comes a handsome, bohemian artist, Leo (Joaquín Torres), who suffers similar complaints as the first patient, Sabrina. He can no longer paint, feels lethargic, has headaches.  Dr. Givings has just the machine for him, but he has added a part that makes it appropriate for curing men rather than women. (Let your imagination wander until you see this play, when it is graphically explained).
            The play needs both re-writing and workshop performances.  Some of it seems profound, other parts are mundane. Others are to shock.
            If you are squeamish about sexuality on stage and would object to some nudity as well, stay home with a good book or DVD. <> 
            Wow, did the Berkeley Rep. spend money on this production!  The set is beautiful and functional.  At the end, it turns from back to front on huge platforms so that the outdoors the winter garden to which they refer as a getting-away-from-it-all-space comes stage front in a very clever manner.  Two parallel sets are constructed and placed next to each other, the office and the parlor, so that two stories can simultaneously occur.
            The colors of the upholstery and wall paper complements David Zinn’s costumes which are so lavish and sumptuous that you welcome every time the two bourgeois women come in wearing entirely new, multilayered, multi-colored dresses with bustles and underskirts, shawls, stoles, hats, purses, gloves and everything that these well-off women would wear. 
            Sarah Ruhl is one of the young stars of the theater world.  She has won many theater awards and is  a MacArthur genius award winner.  Earlier her retelling of Eurydice played in Berkeley and now ”the vibrator play,” the name by which this one will be remembered has a full staged and very costly production.
            Sarah Ruhl’s “In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)” plays through March 14 at the Berkeley Rep, 2020 Addison St., Berkeley. For info: (510) 647 2949, or go online. 

                                    #
        © Carol Benet 2009
        Carol Benet is a regular theater reviewer for artssf.com.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly)focus on theater, dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into recordings by local artists, and a few departures into books (by authors of the region)as well.
                      #
                    Return to main menu