Home | Textual Glossary | Eurydice Images | Playwright Sarah Ruhl | Production History Highlights
(research conducted by Viktorija Kovac)
Sarah Ruhl Plays (in alphabetical order)
IN THE NEXT ROOM, OR THE VIBRATOR PLAY
MELANCHOLY PLAY: a chamber musical
ORLANDO (adapted from the original by Virginia Woolf)
THREE SISTERS (Translated from the original by Anton Chekhov)
Timeline for Sarah Ruhl
- 1974
- Born in Wilmette, Illinois
- 1994
- Starts university at Brown University, Rhode Island
- Studied English literature with the intention of becoming a poet
- Father, Patrick Ruhl, passes away
- 1995
- Wrote her first play, The Dog Play, in Paula Vogel’s class
- 1996
- Studies English literature at Pembroke College, Oxford
- 1997
- Completed her Bachelor of Arts at Brown University with play as thesis
- Taught creative writing in arts-in-education programs in New York and Providence
- A workshop production of Passion Play is produced at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island
- 2001
- Completed her Masters of Fine Arts at Brown University
- Lady with the Lap Dog, and Anna around the Neck (adapted from Anton Chekhov)
- Melancholy Play
- 2002
- Virtual Meditations#1
- 2003
- Orlando (adapted from Virginia Woolf)
- Eurydice
- Late: a Cowboy Song
- Winner, Whiting Award
- (and 2004): Passion Play
- 2004
- The Clean House
- Winner, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (for The Clean House)
- 2005
- Finalist, Pulitzer Prize (for The Clean House)
- Married Tony Charuvastra
- 2006
- Gave birth to first daughter, Anna
- Winner, MacArthur Fellowship
- Demeter in the City
- 2007
- Dead Man’s Cell Phone
- 2008
- Winner, Helen Hayes Award (for Dead Man's Cell Phone)
- Winner, PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award
- 2009
- In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)
- 2010
- Nominee, Tony Award for Best Play (for In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)
- 2010
- Finalist, Pulitzer Prize (for In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play))
- Gave birth to twins William and Hope
- Winner, Lilly Award
- 2011
- Stage Kiss
- Three Sisters (adapted from Anton Chekhov)
- 2012
- Melancholy Play: a chamber musical
- Dear Elizabeth (Adapted from Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop)
- 2014
- The Oldest Boy
- 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater
- 2016
- For Peter Pan
Why is Sarah Ruhl so compelling?
Sarah Ruhl is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Laure Pels International Foundation for Theatre Award for a distinguished American playwright in mid-career. Ruhl is a compelling playwright known for her “idiosyncratic style” and “considered a landmark talent for the modern theatre in America.” Her plays, “while diverse on the level of story,” they “share certain traits: a steely lyricism; a pronounced whimsy; a deceptive spareness, masking an almost metaphysical intensity; and a quirky, compassionate humour that often coexists with deep sadness.” In her body of work, Ruhl demonstrates how she “tackles a controversial issue without heavy-handedness,” and the ability “to drive the plot.” By drawing on different times in history she is “able to shine a light on our own present moment by allowing us to think through where we are right now."
“Sarah writes in a poised, crystalline style about things that are irrational and invisible.” Her plays celebrate what she calls “the pleasure of heightened things.” Sarah believes in “a populist, emotional, and pleasurable theatre.” Sarah defines herself as having a “visual imagination, but not a three-dimensional imagination.” She looks for a “contemporary metaphor of transportation,” as strange as it may be, and goes for the extreme as she is “interested in extreme states” and for humour to be pushed to “reductio ad absurdum”, to the “farthest ledge” where it “could be lethal.” She enjoys the “methodical work on theatre.” She believes in the exercise she was taught by her mentor Paula Vogel to “write a play that is impossible to stage,” because it requires thought to stage it.
“Genre boundaries in her plays can be equally fluid” and Ruhl “blends comedy, fantasy, and tragedy in unpredictable ways,” rejecting “despair, choosing instead the possibility of communion.” She expresses a love for Poor Theatre where she considers to have started out and where all you have is “a couple of chairs and language.” She appreciates how medieval plays worked in a similar fashion.
“Ruhl is deeply concerned with language and communication, which she finds difficult, but not impossible.” She emphasizes how punctuation and capitalization makes the experience for the reader cluttered and believes plays should be able to be read like novel or a poem. She writes with the reader in mind, equally to the future producing future collaborator of her work.
“The straightforward and the artful, Ruhl can seemingly fuse the lyrical and the starkly dramatic.” Les Waters, an early director of Eurydice says. "She's one of the few people I know who can write a form of dialogue that's poetic, where the poetry is welded to the action," and “Ruhl's fantasia on love and death left audiences sobbing in the seats, the lobby and the bathrooms.“ Ruhl’s narrative “strategy is similarly oblique and cunning, and she aspires to a kind of reportorial anonymity. She explains, “if one is unseen, one has the liberty to observe and make things up,” and “it’s very difficult to overhear a conversation if one is speaking loudly.”
“But if Ruhl’s demeanor is unassuming, her plays are bold. Her nonlinear form of realism—full of astonishments, surprises, and mysteries—is low on exposition and psychology. “I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life,” she has said. “Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. They’re pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.””
“Ruhl’s theatre aspires to reclaim the audience’s atrophied imagination. “Now, some people consume imagination, and some people do the imagining,” she said. “I find it very worrisome. That should be one thing that people know they can do.” Ruhl writes with space, sound, and image as well as words. Her stage directions often challenge her directors’ scenic imagination as well.”
Ruhl expresses she is “interested in the things theatre can do that other forms can't.” She also considers, “theatre as pure plumbing of self, in a psychological way, seems readerly to me.” The audience “is submerged in a series of unfolding dramatic moments,” and “the dialogue and the situation have precise, ironic resonances, but the audience has to work for them.” The audience is asked “to swim in the magical, sometimes menacing flow of the unconscious.” Ruhl specifies that she “prefers the revelations of the surreal moment to the narrated psychological one.””
How did Sarah Ruhl become a professional playwright?
Originally, Sarah intended to be a poet. Her collection of verse, “Death in Another Country,” was published when she was twenty. After studying under Paula Vogel at Brown University, she was persuaded to switch to playwriting. She was an English Major who asked Vogel to be her thesis adviser. Paula agreed on the condition she write a play for her thesis and showed her how to make a life out of writing for theatre. In 1995, Sarah wrote her first play, The Dog Play, for one of Vogel's classes. At Brown University she earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1997. Ruhl took several years off from University life to teach creative writing in arts-in-education programs in New York and Providence, before returning to Brown to get her Master of Fine Arts in 2001.
Ruhl's widespread recognition came from her play The Clean House (2004). It premiered in 2004 at Yale Repertory Theatre, and was produced Off-Broadway at the Lincoln Centre in 2006, and has since been produced in many theatres. For this play she won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2004 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005. Sarah has expressed that, “she feels spoiled beyond belief to be produced at the Lincoln Centre so early in her career.”
Passion Play cycle is another piece she is well known for. Ruhl began writing Passion Play at age 21, while studying with Paula Vogel. She did not finish the play until eight years later, after Wendy C. Goldberg and Arena’s Molly Smith commissioned the third act. Passion Play made its New York City premiere in 2010 in a production by the Epic Theatre Ensemble at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn. Each part of the trilogy depicts the staging of a Passion Play at a different place and during a different historical period: Elizabethan England, Nazi Germany,
and the United States from the time of the Vietnam War until the present.
In addition to her popular original work, she is also known for her innovative adaptations like Orlando, adapted from Virginia Woolf's novel (2003), and Three Sisters adapted from Anton Chekhov (2011). Her most popular adaptation is Eurydice (2004).
Eurydice she started in her final year of grad school, and came back to finish it in 2003. In 2004 it was notably produced at Berkeley Repertory Theater and further developed in New Haven under Les Water's direction. Then in 2007 it was produced Off Broadway at New York's Second Stage Theatre. Ruhl considers Eurydice a "very personal play," prompted by the death of her father. The play is written in honor of her father, as a way to “have a few more conversations with him”. The play explores the use and understanding of language, an interest she shared with her father. She considers her plays as “three-dimensional poems.”
How does Sarah Ruhl's family life influence her theatre work?
Ruhl was born in 1974 in Wilmette, Illinois. Her mother is Kathleen Ruhl, an actress and theatre director, an English teacher, who also earned a Ph.D. in Language, Literacy, and Rhetoric, from the University of Illinois. Her father, Patrick Ruhl, became a marketer of toys, with an appreciation for literature and music. Her sister later became a psychiatrist.
She grew up in “a Tudor-style suburban house,” where there was “a dark entrance hall, with its cool slate floors.” Sarah was raised Catholic, and she still identifies with the faith though she “did decline to her confirmed in eight grade due to doctrinal qualms.” Through life's hardships she was met with early on in her young adulthood, she learned that “once you're a Catholic, you're always a Catholic, in certain ways.”
Her childhood is described by her family as defined by literature. “When other kids were outside playing, Sarah would be wrapped in a comforter drinking tea and reading,” also she “stood apart and observed and made things up.” “She would tell stories and her mother would type them up for her. Storytelling worked as an antidepressant for her.” Ruhl herself claims, “If I’m sad in life, I’ll tell someone something strange and funny that happened to me to make myself feel better.”
“The thrill of transformation is something she began learning at the age of ten, through improvisational games at the Piven Theatre, a seventy-seat venue in Evanston, Illinois, whose Young People’s Company, to which Ruhl briefly belonged.” Ruhl tells about her experience, “we acted stories, myths, fairy tales, folktales, then literary tales—Chekhov, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Salinger.” Ruhl also describes how the theatre, “didn’t use props, and didn’t have sets. Language did everything. So, from an early age: no fourth wall, and things can transform in the moment.”
In 1994 at the age of 20, Sarah was forever marked by the loss of her father to cancer. In Eurydice as well as in her other works there is an underline of “her preoccupation with grief and its antidotes.” Regarding submitting too absolutely to grief she says, "to mourn twice is excessive," and "to mourn three times a sin” and to “learn the art of keeping busy."
“Humour was so important in their household in terms of coping. Her father was making them laugh until the very end in a very gracious way,” deflecting attention off of himself. After his death, Ruhl was “haunted by intense, cathartic dreams in which [she] heard his voice.” She recalls a dream that takes place in her childhood home, where her father and her “had once talked briefly about what might happen when he died.” In her dream, they “were together again in this room for the last time.” In the dream, Ruhl and her father go their separate ways as directed “gently but decisively' by her father.
“Lightness”, Ruhl claims was “probably a family style.” For her father she thinks “he should have been a history professor,” adding, “though he loved puns, reading, language, and jazz.” According to her older sister Kate, “Sarah’s appreciation of music comes from him,” and “so, too, did her fascination with language.” As children, “Patrick took his daughters to the Walker Bros. Original Pancake House for breakfast and taught them a new word, along with its etymology. The language lesson and some of Patrick’s words—“ostracize,” “peripatetic,” “defunct”—are memorialized in Eurydice”. The dead Father, reunited with his daughter, tries to re-teach her lost vocabulary.
In 1994, “because he was ill, the family had to forgo its usual summer trip,” and pretended they were away on vacation, watching summer movies, and eating food they ate as children on vacation in Cape Cod. “We were a really good foursome,” her sister comments on the family dynamic.
Eurydice is therefore one of the most personal plays for Ruhl. With the play she asks, “what if, through the force of love, the living could be reunited with the dead?” Sarah reworking the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice explores how “the living and the dead also cross paths.” “Love is, for her, the passport between these two realms. The dead in Eurydice speak a "language of stones," incomprehensible to the living, and the living write urgent letters to the dead (and vice versa).” Letters play a role “representing older, more refined methods of communication.” “All her characters face another choice, too: between forgetting and remembering. With autobiographical urgency, Ruhl is asking: How much should the living sacrifice for the dead? How much grief is, finally, too much? “
Ruhl’s mother Kathleen “added to the family’s sense of caprice.” While the children were growing up, “Kathleen was a high-school English teacher who moonlighted as an actress and a director.” Ruhl emphasizes, “We were encouraged to play at home, so that art-making didn’t seem like an escape from family or a retreat but very much a part of life.” Performance was well integrated in the Ruhl family upbringing. “They were taken on summer pilgrimages to Stratford, Ontario, to see Shakespeare. Ruhl has memories of being bewildered and furious, watching Julius Caesar (“lots of white togas”) and going backstage after The Tempest to look at the ship (“That was magical”).” Kathleen recalls taking her daughters to her own rehearsals, how Sarah “had a keen analytic eye.” At six or seven, “she got to know all the actors. By that point, people would ask her for her notes.”
Present day, Ruhl lives in East Side of Manhattan with her husband and three children. After a seven-year courtship, Sarah married her husband, Tony Charuvastra, a child psychiatrist and former UCLA resident. During his residency, they lived in Los Angeles for four years and Sarah had her first child, Anna. She comments on how “playwrights lucky enough to seize the critics' attention have a way of getting snapped up by Hollywood.” Sarah went on to give birth to twins, William and Hope in 2010. With the help of her Tibetan nanny, Yangzom, Ruhl achieves a work life balance, and writes The Oldest Boy in honor of her children and nanny.
“Ruhl, like her plays, is deceptively placid. She is petite and polite. Her voice is high-pitched, as if she had been hitting the helium bottle. She wears her auburn hair pinned back by a barrette, in demure schoolmarm fashion; in her choice of clothes, too, she favors an unprepossessing look—a carapace of ordinariness, forged out of her Illinois childhood and “the ability of Midwesterners to pulverize people who seem slightly precocious,” she explained. (“In third grade, somebody sent me a poison-pen letter,” Ruhl, who was bullied for being intelligent, said. “I corrected the punctuation and sent it back.”) Nothing in her modest mien indicates her steeliness, her depth, or her piquant wit. Ruhl is reserved but not shy, alert but not aggressive. She feels big emotions; she just doesn’t express them in a big way. “I had one boyfriend who really wished I would yell and scream at him,” she said. Even her laugh is just three short, unobtrusive intakes of breath.”
Earlier this year, Sarah's mother Kathleen Ruhl celebrated her 70th birthday. For the special occasion The Actors Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky, produced For Peter Pan written by Sarah Ruhl and directed by Les Waters. Her intention was to offer the gift of theatre, in the old-fashioned spirit of her grandmother who was famous in Davenport, Iowa for writing poetry for special occasions. In an interview with her mother Kathleen about this production, Sarah mentions reading about women and ambition in relation to how recognition is important for everyone and how historically, women have been unable to demand recognition or show desire for it. “But it's really a basic human impulse and part of why we make work and part of what sustains us,” Sarah says. Her mother Kathleen, expresses that she feels guilty in the same extent as she as ambitious. They comment on the strength of the influence being raised as Catholic. Sarah recognizes that “most family dramas are about exposing terrible secrets, not about giving a gift to someone you love.” She expresses that as part of the fun in her process was being able to ask her family questions she would not normally ask, like “Do you pray? Do you believe in an afterlife, in God? What do you think is wrong with this country?” as an excuse to have conversations with the living instead of the dead. For Peter Pan is a turn of page in getting to know her living roots.
Her most celebrated mentor, Paula Vogel advocated for her wholeheartedly: "She's going to become her own vocabulary word," predicted Paula. Ruhl's work is "taking us back to the importance of theatre as myth, the importance of theatre as community," Vogel raved. She adds,“her plays are as much her unique voice as an Emily Dickinson poem.”
How did Sarah’s father influence the writing of Eurydice?
Sarah’s father, Patrick Ruhl, significantly influenced her love for words and music, as well as the writing of Eurydice. He was an avid Jazz listener and reader who worked in marketing for toys. When Sarah was five years old, her father established a ritual with her sister Kate and her to sort through the epidemiology of words over pancake brunches. They were a close knit family who vacationed together and shared their affinity for the arts. Sadly, in 1994 Patrick died of cancer, while Sarah was in her first year of university studying English literature with the intention to become a poet. His final days were spent together as a family, where they found ways to escape together using imagination, pretending they were on their childhood vacations at Cape Cod. Her father found every opportunity to graciously make his family laugh and take the attention off of his harsh reality. Sarah struggled with grief over the loss of her father, and writing for her was an antidepressant. Eurydice includes the father character, as a way for Sarah to continue having conversations with her passed father. Sarah married her partner after seven years of courtship, almost 10 years after her father passed away, and two years after she completed writing Eurydice. It is evident that Eurydice is a deeply personal play, though her other work is also well connected to her family life.
References
Allan, Nicole. "Sarah Ruhl & Scott Bradley." The Atlantic May 2011. Canadian Periodicals Index Quarterly. Web. 17 Sept. 2016.
Gurewitsch, Matthew. "Wild woman: playwright Sarah Ruhl speaks softly an carries a big kick." Smithsonian Fall 2007: 70+. Canadian Periodicals Index Quarterly. Web. 17 Sept. 2016.
Klein, Julia M. "Sarah Ruhl's Whimsical Hauntings."The Chronicle of Higher Education20 July 2007.Canadian Periodicals Index Quarterly. Web. 17 Sept. 2016.
Lahr, John. “Surreal Life: The Plays of Sarah Ruhl.” The New Yorker, n.d. Web. 18 Sept. 2016.
Lemon, Brendan. “An Interview with Sarah Ruhl.” Lincoln Theater Blog, n.d. Web. 19 Sept. 2016.
Lincoln Center Theater. “Sarah Ruhl.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 16 April 2010. 18 Sept. 2016.
Rizzo, Frank. "Ruhl rules at Yale Rep." Daily Variety 20 Apr. 2006: 4.Canadian Periodicals Index Quarterly. Web. 17 Sept. 2016.
Ruhl, Sarah. “A Few Things About My Mother: Sarah Ruhl Interviews Kathleen Ruhl.” American Theatre.5 July 2016. Web. 18 Sept. 2016.
Samuel French. “Sarah Ruhl EURYDICE.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 29 January 2015. 18 Sept. 2016.
---. “Sarah Ruhl On Stage Directions.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 29 January 2015. 18 Sept. 2016.
---. “Sarah Ruhl on 'Poor Theatre'.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 29 January 2015. 18 Sept. 2016.
Vogel, Paula. “Sarah Ruhl” Bomb Magazine 9 Sept. 2007. Web. 17 Sept. 2016.
Wren, Celia. "The golden Ruhl: there's a mix of the mythic, the metaphysical and the mundane in the audacious plays of Sarah Ruhl." American Theatre Oct. 2005: 30+.Canadian Periodicals Index Quarterly. Web. 17 Sept. 2016.
York, Jon. “Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play.” Theatre Mirror July 2012. Web. 18 Sept. 2016.