Coming attractions

It's Sister Sarah to the sexual rescue, ladies!

By now I think Sarah Ruhl's reputation as our greatest living figurehead playwright is assured, and if it's not, then In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play (now at SpeakEasy Stage) pretty much seals the deal. As a friend who saw it in its failed Broadway run assured me, it is, indeed, better than Dead Man's Cell Phone or Eurydice. It's just not all that good. It's sometimes funny, but also both predictable and meandering; despite a national reputation, a MacArthur "genius" grant, and a slew of nominations for the Tony and the Pulitzer, Ruhl has yet to produce a play like American Buffalo or Curse of the Starving Class, or really any of the plays that made the names of America's great male playwrights.

But In the Next Room is still good enough to keep her nailed to the prow of a cultural barge that somehow includes the Ivy League, the Seven Sisters, Oprah, and the Times's Charles Isherwood (who I sometimes think should have stuck to writing about porn stars). And why? Because, as usual, Ruhl earnestly connects, not with any sort of personal artistic vision, but rather with the touchstones of the liberal arts college experience (her play is even derived from a book by a Smith professor). The uptight white women who can't function sexually, and the warm, black woman who can; the distant, inadequate straight guy, and the gay, flamboyant artiste; the clichés are all there, one after the other, straight from the campus coffeehouse.

I remember when I first saw Eurydice, I innocently fumed that it played like "meandering jottings" from some college girl's journal. Little did I know that was literally true (Ruhl wrote it while at Brown) - and what's more, that was the whole point. Another of Ruhl's "college plays" (Passion Play) has likewise seen regional productions all over the country, such is the nostalgic hunger for campus culture (especially as written by a woman) on our stages. Indeed, Ruhl's career is just one facet of a larger cultural movement I've written critically about before: the steady encroachment of the academy on the arts. Professors are no longer content to analyze our theatre; instead, they presume to direct it, via repertory houses and a farm system of new play development. To them, and their former students, Ruhl seems like a singular talent; but to a skeptic, she has rather obviously been manufactured by what I call the academic-theatrical complex.

Of course Sarah Ruhl has some talent - otherwise the ruse wouldn't work;  she just doesn't have enough talent to deserve a major reputation. There are flickers of genuine feeling in almost all her scripts, including In the Next Room. And I'll admit that this time, the playwright's usual dependence on twee "poetry" (of the kind that almost made Alison Croggon "fwow up") and her penchant for metaphysical abandon are both tamped way down. Ruhl sticks roughly to "naturalism," such as it is, as she recounts her re-imagining of the introduction of the vibrator to the Victorian domestic scene (a typical advertisement, at left). Nobody pops in from another dimension, or comes back from the dead, and none of the furniture talks. But in a way, the lack of metaphysical messiness only points up that the script is nevertheless still a mess. Shorn of her flights of "poetry," Ruhl's characters are all the more obviously trite (Victorianism, vibrators, and college girls - as Freud would say, it's almost over-determined). And her structure is lousy as ever; she simply lacks the discipline to make her scenes cohere and build.

Still, I'll admit that in some ways In the Next Room is re-assuring; if Ruhl suddenly produced a great script, we'd actually be in serious trouble (the academy - and the terrorists - would have won!). But by now I don't think she ever will. You can't make the old excuses of youth and immaturity for her (Ruhl is 36 these days, not 25), nor can you pretend that financial need has engendered haste in her writing (the MacArthur made Ruhl financially independent). No, she's got all the money and time that she needs. This is as good as she's going to get.

For many people, of course, it's good enough; they're happy to ignore the truly great female playwrights of our day (Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane), who are deeply original and difficult, to embrace the feel-good campus theatrics of Ruhl. That may be a bourgeois (or rather a "bobo") preference, but c'est la National Public Radio, ya know?

And SpeakEasy Stage, as usual, serves up a tastily sophisticated version of this superficial fare. Director Scott Edmiston provides a smooth surface to the production, and finds something close to the right tone of "sad" whimsy (which is no small trick). As he always does, he makes the play cute.  The director doesn't ameliorate the script's structural and thematic problems (he never does that), but at least he has engaged two of our best actresses - Marianna Bassham and Anne Gottlieb - as the Victorian ladies who discover the wonders of the clitoris, and go at the "little man in the boat" with the comic alacrity of Lucy and Ethel (above) in sweetly dirty scenes that are often a riot (the joke is all the funnier when they do each other, at left).  In supporting roles, Edmiston has also called back from New York the wonderful Lindsey McWhorter as Gottlieb's wet nurse (and her soulfulness takes some edge off the stereotypical vibrations of the role), and cast quietly intriguing newcomer Frances Idlebrook as the physican's assistant whose magic fingers get better results than any electrical instrument could.

The men fare less well - but then we get the idea they're supposed to; Ruhl almost never conjures convincing male characters (amusingly enough, her men are often cut from the same cardboard as Mamet's women).  The guys are there to serve as targets, and maybe take their clothes off. Still, the actors do what they can, and Derry Woodhouse strikes a nervous spark or two as Gottlieb's distant husband, and sportingly grits his teeth through the requisite stretch of SpeakEasy male nudity.  (Does this theatre ever feature naked ladies?  If they're not going to in a play about vibrators, I guess they never will!).

Still, I will admit - although I feel I'm a bit of a traitor to my own cause for doing so - that this isn't the best production of In the Next Room that I can imagine. Ruhl rambles so in the second half of her script that for her finale, she simply pulls a theme out of her play like a rabbit out of a hat; the drama turns out to be, in its final minutes, about men facing up to their fear of sexual inadequacy, and connecting with their women, even if electric puppetry can overpower the penis. Fair enough; and the production could, I think, have prepared us for this dénouement - but only if Gottlieb were even better than she already is. It's really up to her to deepen her characters' awareness of her situation, and thus the atmosphere of the play (she'd have to do it pretty much without Sarah Ruhl's help, though). Hard as this may be, that's the only way to shift the play's focus toward its final resting point, and maybe give it some real resonance as well. Till that happens, In the Next Room may give off fun vibrations, but will lack real electricity.

Dead playwrights' society (or yes, Virginia, Sarah Ruhl still sucks)

A telling moment came about two thirds of the way through the first act of Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone at the Lyric this weekend. The show had been punctuated, as one expected, by a cell phone's relentless ringing - but suddenly everything went "meta" when one began to bleat in answer from the audience.

And its owner answered it. She took the call.

Now, normally, this kind of thing makes my blood boil (see note at right). But this time around, I could kind of sympathize; the call would probably prove more interesting than Ruhl's play, the woman had clearly reasoned. Indeed, I began to think about turning my cell back on and placing a call myself. I didn't think I'd miss anything.

Because once again Sarah Ruhl has produced a willfully whimsical piece of melancholic tedium masquerading as a statement. Watching it, I could hear a little inner voice murmuring "Nothing new here, Garvey, move along, move along . . ." So I'm going to spare you my usual level of chagrin at the travesty of this woman receiving a MacArthur grant (which of course means she can keep writing without any financial worries) and various other honors. Paula Vogel, the lesbian playwriting professor down at Brown, fell in love with Ruhl's work years ago and began to promote her, and Charles Isherwood, the gay New York Times second stringer, seems to have an inexplicable weakness for her twee meanderings too, so I guess Ruhl is here to stay. Maybe Charles and Paula are friends; I dunno. But there's got to be some explanation for the ascension of this mediocrity to the heights of American theatre (her next opus is slated for Broadway); I'm just damned if I know what it is.

But in case you haven't heard, the pretty-good premise of Dead, etc. is the chance encounter of a "nondescript" young woman with a glamorous businessman who drops dead next to her in a sushi place. She herself only notices he's sleeping with the fishes because his cell keeps ringing, and she's finally forced to answer it. Then she answers it again. And again. Then attends his funeral. And slowly becomes drawn into his life, that ever-jangling cell offering a magical "open sesame" to his family, lovers, friends, and business associates.

Just precisely what his unspoken business is (or was) is the rather obvious MacGuffin that Ruhl uses to tease us into Act Two. But after her big reveal - it turns out the sleaze sold human organs - she lets what loose structure she's maintained up to this point go, and just begins to play with her dramatic finger paints, as usual. Interludes from the afterlife, trips to heaven and hell, even a brief snippet of the Ice Capades (above left) - everything goes, and it's mostly pretty lame. Yes, I know Ruhl's unbound by logic or plot or psychology, and I know she's unafraid to be unpredictable, and embraces the profoundly irrational, and the irrationally profound. The only trouble is that she's unpredictably, irrationally, profoundly lame.

To be fair, as with Eurydice, there are a few bright spots here and there in all the pretentious whimsy - a few tight, pointed monologues about cell phone bondage, and a couple of weirdly bittersweet, amoral jokes about The Way We Live Now; but mostly, we sit staring, wondering what the fuck Ruhl thinks she's getting at with the latest hairpin turn in her "plot." Oh wait, don't tell me - it's like cell phones bring us together, and yet push us apart. Was that the irrationally profound part?

Sorry, I can't help snickering at this playwright and her my-journal-belongs-on-Broadway aesthetic. Because there's an intellectual error in her self-justifying prattle that's all too obvious: Ruhl assumes that she has the poetic power to take the audience along with her on her magical mystery tours. But - how to put this nicely? - she just doesn't. There's little or no resonance in Eurydice or Dead Man's Cell Phone - no weird chills like the one in Buried Child, for instance, where the corpse of the baby is mysteriously exhumed from the vanished cornfield, when the image feels strangely "right' even though we can't quite explain why. Perhaps the greatest theatre depends on such deep, irrational responses and recognitions, on a kind of shared dream between playwright and audience. But what's always at issue is that "shared" part - Ruhl doesn't realize it, but she's off daydreaming by herself, while most of her audience, the ones with no stake in her young-female-writer identity, are scratching their heads.

Still, to be honest, I can't really sneer at the Lyric's current production. It looks coolly terrific (the stylishly mutating set is by Cristina Todesco) and has been ably directed by Carmel O'Reilly, of whom I'm hardly a fan; but I have to admit this time she's assembled a strong cast, and dresses this turkey about as well as I think anyone could. I never actually bought, I admit, the talented Liz Hayes as Ruhl's mousey heroine; Hayes is just too strong and capable a presence. But she goes through the motions with commitment, and you can almost buy, for instance, that she'd let some slightly-creepy guy braid her hair in the closet of a stationery store, as Ruhl would have it. Almost. At any rate, Hayes gets a lot of help in maintaining the illusion of her supposed insecurity from the rest of the cast, in which there's not a weak link. Neil McGarry is all confident, handsome-anchorman smarm as the eponymous Dead Man, and as his distant wife, Bryn Jameson ably tosses off a weirdly amusing drunk scene which is probably the high point of the script. Meanwhile Jeff Mahoney manages to make that slightly-creepy hair-braider sympathetic (and even a little appealing), and Beth Gotha at least nails all her laughs as his erratically imperious mother (she can't really pin down a character in this pastiche of gimmicks, but who could?). The real find of the production, however, is newcomer Jessica D. Turner, who definitely knows, as her hot-to-trot character purrs, both how to enter a room and how to walk in nosebleed heels. We'll be hearing more from Ms. Turner, trust me. If only this were the last we were to hear of Ms. Ruhl.

Broken Ruhl

Eurydice (Zillah Glory) goes to hell, and you're right there with her.

There are two Sarahs stalking the American landscape right now, Sarah Palin and Sarah Ruhl, who both elicit roughly the same reaction from me: how can this be happening??? Both are incompetent impostors, playing to coteries of girl-crazy partisans (Ruhl has been short-listed for the Pulitzer, and won a MacArthur grant). But since Ruhl is a playwright, not a politician, and currently enjoying a production of her latest effort, Eurydice, at the New Rep, she falls more easily within the purview of this blog.

First, however, a note of contrition: today I have to eat my words. Yes, I'm going to say what everyone is always hectoring me to say: I admit I was wrong. I confidently predicted that How Shakespeare Won the West would prove the season's biggest "disaster," only to see Eurydice immediately push it right out of contention, and indeed perhaps re-define how bad a play can be and still garner a major production in Boston. I'm sorry, Peter DuBois! There really are worse plays out there!

But my embarrassment should be nothing compared to that of other critics. Here's the Globe's Louise Kennedy, a long-time Ruhl fanatic, on the show:

"I need a new language to talk about Sarah Ruhl's "Eurydice" . . .Ruhl's reimagining of the Orpheus myth evokes so many emotions and thoughts at once that I find myself groping for words that don't sound like hollow cliches next to its complexity and depth . . . Grief. Joy. Energy. Terror. Laughter. Tears. Comprehension. Mystery. Yes, yes, Ruhl's story . . has all that. But there's also something . . . something . . . well, there isn't a word for how it feels to feel all of these things at once. Not in the language of the living, at least."

I'm cringing as I re-read that, because it seems to me that to love Sarah Ruhl's work amounts to a self-declaration of superficiality. I can only agree with Kennedy on one point: this play made me feel that I had left the land of the living. Watching it was like being in Hell, in fact, where someday no doubt I will have to endure forever the meandering jottings of some undertalented undergraduate's journal. Because Eurydice plays like a mix of the deep thoughts that might have occurred to Ruhl when her father died, or when she (perhaps coincidentally) broke up with some dude who played guitar. Apparently somehow she then came to believe these ruminations could serve as a "re-imagining of the Orpheus myth."

If only. Those outside the Ruhl echo chamber might note there's no dead daddy in the original myth (hence the character is simply known as "Father" - what, not "Dadditreus"?). But he's the focus here (even unknowingly precipitating his daughter's death), while Orpheus is almost a footnote; indeed, Eurydice doesn't "get" her husband, as she can't handle the simplest rhythms or even carry a tune (that represents a weird subconscious admission from Ruhl, IMHO, but never mind). With Orpheus on the sidelines, we can of course forget about the struggle between death and passion the myth gives voice to, and instead concern ourselves with the poignant mini-myth of remembrance that Ruhl constructs around "Father," who's all about caring for and comforting Eurydice, and even builds her a little house of string to live in.

You can probably tell from this that he's more Hallmark card than character; still, to be fair, there's a sad sweetness to a few of his exchanges with Eurydice, and the theme of memory loss, symbolized by the river Lethe, and water in general (Eurydice leaves Orpheus at their wedding to get a drink), is definitely a poignant one. Ruhl also conjures a few striking visual gambits in her meandering magic realism; it's raining in the elevator to Hell, and that house of string, though it takes awhile to build, does have some resonance as a metaphor for the evanescence of memory. There's probably enough material here for a winsome one-act.

But the play is clogged with so much Z-grade filler that it makes you want to scream, and it's pretentious as, well, Hell. Ruhl's The Clean House, which was a hit at the New Rep last year, may have been utterly derivative but was at least beautifully crafted. Here one senses Ruhl relying on her own, rather than received, resources, and suddenly you understand why she borrowed so much before - meanwhile, any commitment to craftsmanship has all but been tossed out the window. It's as if having received a "genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation, she decided that anything she came up with must, perforce, be genius. So her Eurydice is prone to pseudo-poetic non sequiturs (at one moment she babbles about a "philosophy of hats"), there's a good chunk of stage time devoted to a trio of talking stones who exude "attitude," and Orpheus just generally sounds stoned, too. Plus the whole piece feels knee-deep in disguised narcissism.

It would be nice to believe that the play somehow has tapped into wells of grief in its fans (Charles Isherwood of the Times also gave it an inexplicable rave). The problem with this idea is that I lost my parents over the past few years (one to Alzheimer's, so I know from memory loss), and the friend I brought to the show had also lost his. Yet I found myself staring into space, counting the lighting instruments during much of the show, while he fought back the giggles. In fact, when I think of all the tears I shed for my brilliant mother and gallant father, I find myself all the angrier at the silly little poseur who wrote Eurydice. But then, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, it takes a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell. Real grief easily recognizes the kind of tender self-regard evidenced in Ruhl for what it is - an awareness seemingly rampant in the audience I saw it with, many of them elderly, most no doubt with grown children. You could see Indiglo watch faces flickering like blue fireflies during the show, and there was a good deal of yawning throughout. But my bored tolerance gave way to anger when Ruhl began quoting my favorite speech in Lear ("We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage . ."), not merely because the playwright was trying to puff herself up as the equal of Shakespeare, but because that perforce required dragging the Bard down to her own childish level.

As for the production itself - well, I'm not sure how better to apply lipstick to this particular pig. Director Rick Lombardo clearly senses the script's weakness, as he has cast three little girls to play those wise-cracking stones and distract us with their cuteness (oh, snap!). But he's also encouraged the talented Zillah Glory to overplay Eurydice (she's always gushing, and often even up on her tippy-toes) and he doesn't get much out of Brian Bielawski as Orpheus (but then what is there to get in the role as written?). The reliable Ken Baltin does much better by cagily underplaying "Father" (indeed, his final dip in the River Lethe almost made me forgive the playwright). The design is strong, but not outstanding; Janie E. Howland imagines Hell as a kind of blue martini, with glowing olives on giant swizzle sticks, which are lit evocatively by Deb Sullivan; Frances Nelson McSherry's costumes are even better, with a scarlet wedding gown for Eurydice (it's exactly the color of Orpheus's guitar), a little Jackie Kennedy ensemble for her arrival in Hell, and some fairly amusing punkette duds for those not-rolling Stones.

Still, it would take truly brilliant design to float this stinker. Something tells me that, MacArthur or no, Eurydice may mark the beginning of the end of the hype of Sarah Ruhl. Her rise seems to have been fueled by a certain kind of feminist politics, which is always looking to crown a new Sylvia Plath, as well as long-term trends in the academic theatre (Ruhl essentially puts right in the text the kind of surreal "poetry" that directors such as Robert Wilson used to 'violate' traditional dramas with). But can provocation survive being so boring? The crowd at the New Rep left the theatre talking openly of how mystifyingly dull the show had been. Luckily, when the critics lose their way, there's still word-of-mouth.

DJ drama

Who cares about cancer when you've got Häagen-Dazs? Paula Plum, Nancy Carroll, Bobbie Steinbach, and Cristi Miles get their groove back in The Clean House.

There's a kind of preternatural sparkle to Sarah Ruhl's widely-produced (and praised) The Clean House, now in a smart, shiny new production at the New Rep. The play is all but spotless; it practically gleams, like some finely-tuned theatrical machine, with a display of craft unusual in a young playwright. The only problem with this dramatic vehicle is that it's running on empty; there's no real pain in its "tragedy," and its "comedy" is superficial and derivative: it's actually hard to think of a single character or situation in The Clean House that isn't second-hand. Indeed Ruhl's great achievement is the seamless integration of so many received cultural touchstones into a convincing simulacrum of a real play.

I can already hear the howls of execration: who wants reality (and no, I don't mean realism) when a dramatic theme park is so much more fun? In truth, I believe I may be the only one who still cares about this particular point - I sometimes see myself as a kind of pale, word-processing Will Smith, wandering an evacuated cultural landscape full of latte-sucking zombies. But then, this is my blog - so here goes nothing -

Ruhl strikes me as primarily interesting because she exemplifies (indeed, perhaps encapsulates) a trend I see more and more in postmodern culture - call it the dj-ification of the arts. Like Paul Thomas Anderson (whose There Will Be Blood I critiqued below), she seems driven not by inner ghosts, or visions, or demons, but by a compulsion to better manage the culture she was born into. The Clean House, for instance, is more like a perfect mix tape than a play. What's weird is that I'm not sure Ruhl is aware she's a kind of multi-cultural drama jockey, spinning a sleek mix of high-end chick lit and arthouse hits. Does she realize she borrowed her joke-so-funny-it-kills from Monty Python, her dirt-obliterating-a-white-living-room from Tommy, her adulterous-apples-popping-up-in-other-people's-lives from John Updike, her medical horrors from John Irving, her chicks-bonding-over-chocolate from some Susan Sarandon movie, and her saucy Latin maid from too many 70s "foreign films" to count? Somehow I actually think she imagines this is all her own stuff. Which is a little scary.

What's scarier is the critics seem only too happy to cooperate with her delusions. To them, Ruhl rules. And in a way, I understand why: she's a dazzling technician. The beats all land precisely where they should, there's a clever, constant shift between "comedy" and "tragedy," and weirdest of all, Ruhl conjures truly original stage metaphors - perhaps the best of these was her way of leaving the jokes from her Portuguese maid untranslated, while offering us projected explanations of unspoken interactions between her characters (life is like an untranslated joke - get it? - so you may as well laugh as cry). The trouble is not her form, but her content - she's like half of the greatest writing partnership ever.

Still, if you've been in a coma for the last quarter century, you'll think The Clean House is utterly amazing and "true," and it's certainly being served up immaculately by the New Rep. Perhaps, as Louise Kennedy (who's something of an expert on this play) opines, this version gives the show's undergraduate "tragedy" short shrift. But then director Rick Lombardo is always superb at articulating comedy, and here he's working with a dream trio of local comediennes, so everyone is playing to their strong suit. Nancy Carroll once again proves she can do more with less than anyone else in Boston - here she brings down the house with little more than the flicker of an eyelid. And Bobbie Steinbach's warm, expansive brassiness is the perfect complement to her sorrowful, self-aware strings, while Paula Plum manages to find fresh, personal spins to such clichéd tropes as laughing-through-your-tears (or is it crying-through-your-chuckles?). As the sexy Latina (another character direct from central casting), Cristi Miles isn't really to the comic manner born, but she's energetic and appealing, and certainly earns her laughs with a fully realized performance. Ditto Will Lyman, who's almost believable as the husband who finds his soulmate in one of his patients - okay, the role is a certain kind of female fantasy, but Lyman is light on his feet and knows precisely when to let the funny girls take over. Kudos also to the production team - Cristina Todesco's set is perhaps more porn-star mansion than yuppie showplace, but it still looks great, and Jamie Whoolery's evocative projections subtly re-inforce the sense we're actually watching a movie we've seen before.

As for the "plot" - here's the set-up: uptight control-freak, neurotic sister, soulful, sexy maid, free spirit, errant husband, perfect living room. Can't you write the rest yourself? Feel free to throw some cancer and a "curve ball" in there to make it look original. Sure, it won't be as polished as The Clean House. But then few real plays are.