Sarah Ruhl

Author(s): Paula Vogel and Sarah Ruhl

Source: BOMB, No. 99 (Spring, 2007), pp. 54-59
Published by: New Art Publications
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40427855 .
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ourteachers'thoughts. Unless
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shareourstudents, bringthe
workhome,mention theirnames
overthedinnertableuntilthey
becomehouseholdwords.
Andso inmyhouseholdthere
is a name:Sarah Ruhl.She came
intomyintensive advancedplay-
seminar some 15years
writing
ago. sophomore, I thought
A but
atfirstshe was a senior:she was
quietand serious,butso obvi-
ouslypossesseda mindthat
cameat aesthetics froma unique
angle.I assignedan exercise:to
writea shortplay witha dogas
protagonist.Sarah Ruhlwrote
ofherfather'sdeathfromthat
uniqueangle:a dogis waiting
bythedoor,waiting forthe
familytocomehome,unaware
thatthefamilyis at hismaster's
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
funeral,unawareoftheconcept springat SecondStagein K £ Z
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becomeSarah Ruhl in a waythat in New Yorkand Los Angeles UJ t_ I
has madean impacton thenext overwine- a hungry exchange >
generation all overthecountry: ofviewpoint and experience, <
5
herPassionPlay,doneat Brown, rushedforlack oftime,between
ArenaStage,England,and twoplaywrights in thefield,
Germany; herplaysLateand and nowI turntoSarah as a
Melancholy Play,doneall over trusted and belovedcolleague
thecountry; herexquisiteplay whostillhas one ofthemost
Eurydice,donecoasttocoast uniquemindsin theaterI've
(BerkeleyRep,Yale,and in the encountered.

PAULA VOGEL
We're coming in the midst of a discussion. . . .
SARAH RUHL
The longer I do theater, the more shocked I am that
you can get the play's punctuation, the story, the
casting, even the director right. Still, you have to
deal with variables like: Is this the rightaudience?
Do I have the right month of the year, the right
city? Is the right reviewer coming? So much of it
is chance in terms of how the aesthetic object is
received. Sometimes it makes you just want to
write a slim volume of poetry.
PV The architecturaldesign of the theater will impact the
perception and the choices in directingyour play. So,
yeah, the variables are intense.
SR As my grandmother used to say, "You play the hand
you're dealt." In that sense, I love the materialityof
the theater; you have a set of material givens and
you work with them. For example, the Newhouse
Theater is three quarters, and in some ways the
intimacy of the audience wrapping around the
stage is good for the play, but it's very hard to play
a comedy in three quarters. It's hard to have visual
surprise. It's hard to do subtitles.
PV There is a perceptual switching of framingin your
plays that is pre-twentiethcentury.In Clean House,
or Passion Play or Eurydice,you can see the structural
bones of a differenttheatrical relationshipwith the
audience, be it medieval, Jacobean, or impressionist.
Clean House worksverywell withina prosceniumarch,
which predates the twentiethcentury.What's excit-
ing about yourworkand that of the other risingplay-
wrightsin yourgeneration is that there's a reclaiming
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T
of theaterout of that mishmashof assumptions made H
about realism.Assumptionsthat were not even theat- E
rical issues in previouscenturies. A
SR I think our generation has to look at Freud and T
Freud's impact, and many of us say, Oh, maybe E
Freud didn't have it right. Something that he ivas R
right about he got from literature: the Oedipal
complex, from the Greeks. So maybe we ought to
go back to the Greeks instead of back to Freud on
the Greeks.
PV When you put a chorus on stage, as in Eurydice,
there's a focus on the theatricality.There's no way
that you can be in that intimate,fourth-wallrealism
once that happens. Freud's legacy in America is anti-
realism. Thinkabout those extraordinary, wild flour-
ishings of the Provincetown Playhouse that are in
conversation with Freud. Your Melancholy Play is in
conversationwith Freud,and yet it does not lead to a
surface realitythat clings to the Stanislavskymethod
of performance.
SR For me, it's putting things up against Freud. In
Melancholy Play, one character is so depressed
that she turns into an almond, (laughter) It's a
more medieval sensibility of the humors, melan-
cholia, black bile and transformation. If you exca-
vate people's subjectivity and how they view the
world emotionally, you don't get realism.
PV Has anythingprepared you forthis moment in time?
The impact of success is actually a shock.
SR Hmm, yes and no. Every production prepares you
for the next production, and in that sense it's
cumulative. We think: Oh, New York is definitive.
In a way, it's just another production of one of my
plays in another city. I've worked so much region-
ally that it gives me less of a sense of living or
dying by one interpretation.
PV Good, because in essence, the vocabulary of the
Sarah Ruhlplay is formedby layersof productionand
a national sense of what those plays mean.
SR The New York model is an old one: You premiere in
New York, and if it does well, it'll be done region-
ally. If it tanks, its life is over. Now people are start-
ing to premiere things regionally and build up the
momentum and then take it to New York. New York
theaters are so scared of the press that fewer risks
are being taken.
PV I thinkthat in New York,we are still experiencinga
kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. And it's a
stress level for critics and audiences as well as the
artist.When you'restressed, you don't want to be told
a storythat is going to disturbyoursleep, or make you
think.And theater really is communal; an audience
comes into a public space, and then must be open or
receptive. It's part of the ritual.
SR I come into the theater wanting to feel and think
at the same time, to have the thought affect the
emotion and the emotion affect the thought. That
is the pinnacle of a great night at the theater.
PV The shift in your writing embraces the emotional 5
vocabulary of theater, which a lot of plays avoid. 5
s
A We're used to plays that build into their structure
R a kind of rational mousetrap, but you're exploring
A emotional resonance without embarrassment. There
H is an impulse to be ashamed of emotions in theater,
which is ratherodd because one would thinkthat's
R whywe have theater.
U SRI love that term, rational mousetrap. Ten years ago,
H if you were writing,as e. e. cummings would say,
L about such trite themes as love and death, you
were considered a hack. I felt that theater was
actually a place where the voice could be attached
to emotion. Theater is still a living tradition of
speech and emotion. It's something that deeply
attracts me.
PV Now, you've worked in many,many productionswith
many directors and actors. What are your actors
teaching you? What kindof impact does that have on
yoursense of the characters you're now writing?
SR Tve worked with so many actors with differ-
ent methods and vocabularies. In almost all the
productions I've had, it's been the usual mode:
You cast the play out of L.A. and New York, and
the actors meet each other on the first day of
rehearsal. I've been very pleased and honored and
moved by the integrityof all the productions. But
I'd like to discover what would happen if I worked
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with the same actors and designers over and over
in a concentrated way. If the actor and I were able
to know exactly what we meant if I said, "Give this
line a little more space." As opposed to one actor
who thinks space is a subtext and another who
thinks space is a technical pause.
PV Have you experienced performanceswhere you think,
A: Oh, I never saw it that way; or B: [gasp] That was
the image in myhead that I'd forgotten?
SR I had a remarkable time going to the Goodman
production of The Clean House, directed by Jessica
Thebus. It was exactly the play and yet more so,
because there were elements I would never have
thought of that were so sublime. For instance,
there's a scene where Lane, a doctor married to a
doctor, imagines her husband kissing the breast of
his new lover,who is one of his patients. The stage
direction says, "Ana wears a gown. Is it a hospital
gown or a ballroom gown?" Well, Marilyn Dodds
Frank,who plays Ana, walked out in a renaissance
ball gown made of lavender hospital-gown mate-
rial. It had a train that was about 20 yards long. So
she begins walking out in this purple gown, and it
just keeps coming and coming and coming. I would
never have thought of that. That was a high point of
my life really,watching that production and think-
ing: They really read my mind. Also, the livingroom
was very architectural, spare and abstract. There
had been a beautiful skylightin Act One and in the
second act it cantilevered down and became the
balcony. It was so shocking- you wouldn't think
that it could just come out of the air like that. The
designer completely understood abstraction and
transformationof space.
PV The productionof Eurydiceat Yale also has a transfor-
mation of space. It seems to me your work actually
calls that out of designers and directors.Whereas the
theater of the rationalmousetrap,when it insists that
characters change, it means the furnitureremains
stable, (laughter) I get so visually bored when the
emotional space doesn't change, that thrill,as you
describe it in your article on Maria Irene Fornes,the
embrace of the state of being. Where the emotional
state changes, but not the psychological character. IL
Some of the descriptions in Melancholy Play produce Í ¿I "
those resonances. Music always does that. g .. s
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SR If you transformspace and atmosphere, you don't Mis
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have to connect the dots psychologically in a linear w ° m
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way. It reminds me of an essay I've been wanting - < 2£
to write, about the death of combat and duels on
im
stage. We used to go to the theater for bloodlust,
to watch people kill each other on Shakespeare's lili .
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stage and see a good fight. The advent of guns
stopped that: You can't really have a good gunfight ï < I U- N
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on stage. We've replaced that physicality with the « £ Xg g
idea of drama as conflict, with people bickering on ï•- " o < °-
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stage. I'd rather watch a clash of swords. I mean,
an argument, the idea of opposition and dialectic, ¡§M§
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is very important to me, but the bickering I could §¡¡35
do without. Í I SI 1
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stage, we sit down and have a chat. You know,"Mrs.
< u) Tesman, let's have a littlechat."
2 [I § S S SR Do you ever tell your students to write a play in
è o i o 5 which there are no chairs?
gSSgg PV No, but that's a great idea. I'm going to do that.
O w ui ü ? SR I think Eurydice has no chairs. Maria Dizzia, who
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£* 2 1 s behind." And there are no chairs to sit on.
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moments;
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in a logical sequence of events. You have to jump in
the cold, deep end of the pool.
SR That's how I experience emotions. They come at
you so suddenly sometimes. I watch my daugh- SR That trunk, and the idea of gift-giving,interests
ter, who's in the middle of crying,and then you do me. What do you do when a critic changes your
a little dance for her and she starts laughing. Not life for the better? Can you send them a bottle of
that we're all infants- champagne and a letter thanking them? Charles
PV Yes, we are. (laughter) Isherwood changed my life for the better. I find
SR I don't thinkthat our emotions are easily bendable myself wanting to send him a crate of citrus for
to dramaturgical reason. Emotions can come out of the winter months, but I know that I can't; it would
thin air in my work and it can be difficultforactors, compromise his next review of my work. Ben
especially iftheir trainingdoesn't allow that. Brantley probably changed your life for the better.
PV I think of each production as a Tower of Babel. But you can't thank them, can you? And when a
Everybodycomes in with differenttraining,speaking critic destroys you, there is no recourse. You can't
differentlanguages, and you have fourweeks to speak tell them, You destroyed that play. That was seven
the same language. Here's a question foryou: How do years of my life. I think in a town like Chicago crit-
we get critics or audience members to ask the right ics and playwrights are more likely to meet each
questions? Is it simply by writingplay after play and other, but I could imagine going a lifetimewithout
creatinga body of workthat breaks out of the rational meeting a critic in New York.
mousetrap? PV You cannot affordto waste any resources if you're
SR Well, in life, how do we get people to ask the right livingin a smaller town. Anyonewho loves the theater
questions of us? A love interest, for instance. How has to be your friend,your community,includingthe
do you get them to ask you the right question criticifyou're a playwright,or the playwrightifyou're
about yourself or about your day? Part of it is train- the critic. Speaking of Chicago, the most interesting
ing. In Thai marriage vows (my husband is half- theater people come fromChicago. What is itgrowing
Thai), training is one of the precepts. But you don't up in Chicago? What is in the drinkingwater?
have breakfast with critics. There's such a gulf SR I think what's in the drinking water is baseball
between critics and playwrights right now; I know and theater, the fact that in one body might live a
it's necessary for objectivity, but I don't think it's a passion for both baseball and theater. The city is
very good gulf. What do you think? connected to theater in a grassroots kind of way.
PV Well,it'san ongoingdebate I've had. I verymuchrespect You're rooting for people on the home team, you
a lot of the critics'writing.Forexample, Linda Wineris feel as though you know them and might run into
a passionate, caringcritic.The problemrevolvesaround them at the store. It's that kind of proximity.
this notionof objectivity.I had a privatetourof O'Neill's PV What plays have you seen lately?
house when I was visitingthe lovelyWendyGoldberg, SR I saw The Internationalist, which I was really
who is doing an amazing job of turningaroundthe drift excited about, by Anne Washburn. I was delighted
of the O'Neill Theater. Upstairs in his study,the cura- by it, by the design and the execution, and by this
tor pointedto a trunkand said, "That was given to the idea that she could precisely denote a made-up
O'Neillsas a giftfromthe criticBrooksAtkinson,before language and you could understand exactly what
they took their European trip."I felt stabbed through was going on in the play. That's one of my peculiar
the heart. There was a time in New Yorkwhen critics monomanias- people speaking other tongues in
and playwrightsand actors and directorsdrankat the the theater and the audience understanding them.
same bar,got into theirfist fights,had affairs,kissed I saw your ex-student Quiara Hudes' play Elliott (A
and made up, stormed at each other,but they did it Soldier's Fugue), which I was so moved by. There's
face-to-faceand occasionally, critics would ask to be this incredible monologue that begins: "If your son 5
cast in plays. It was a worldthat we shared together. goes to war, you plant wild." 7

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s
A SR Twenty-one, maybe. I wrote the first act when I
R was at Brown with you. I wrote the second act
A there too, but a draft that was fairlyunintelligible
H at the time. So I spent a lot of time rewritingthe
second act, and then Molly Smith at Arena Stage, >m
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along with Wendy Goldberg, commissioned the

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L act. I need to rewrite that, so that's the primary
thing we're going to look at, and how the three
acts all fittogether.
PV And you'redoing this with Mark?
SR Yes, Mark Wing-Davey, who did a really beauti- ut 2
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ful bare-bones production of the first two acts in Es*
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London. Actually,the firsttwo acts of Passion Play
might not have chairs, (laughter) o 7 £
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PV There was one chair in the second act. They sit at the O
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father'sbedside. to o vo
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SR That scene's cut.
[gasp] No chairs in the second act! (laughter) I'm
Üe
PV
reallyglad you'regoing back to Passion Play,because I z S °
love the scope of the play. It has an incrediblehuman-
5Si
ity,heart,that reallygrabs me.
SR See if I'm ever done with Passion Play. Act four! _l > CD

PV Wouldn't that be great? Well, now that Suzan-Lori

PV What playwrightsin the theater should we know?
SR Well, Anne, Quiara, and I love my class at New
Dramatists, Jorge Cortinas, who also went to
Brown. I studied with Jorge in Mexico with Maria
Irene Fornes years ago, and just at the pure level
of the sentence, he's so good. Julia Cho has such
a poetry of the everyday, telling stories that have
not been told before with a lot of grace. There are
so many incredible writers out there rightnow, and
much of it, Paula, is due to your teaching. There's a
renaissance going on.
PV The renaissance is happening from a number of
places. I just tryto stay out of the way forthe ones
that come across my path and help speed them on
theirjourney.There's extraordinarywritingout there.
In groups likeThirteenP,whichyou'rea member of,or
places likeClubbed Thumb,the workthat I see at Ohio
Theater,or St. Anne's. . . . I'm not bored. I'm always
surprised. I come out feeling a differentemotional
state than when I went in, and the writersdon't ask
that you understandit logically,theyask that you take
the journey of the experience. I thinkit's a stunning,
fabulous time forthis generationof writers.
I understand you're going back into the room on
Passion Play.
SR On Monday. Ten years later.
PV I don't thinkpeople know how long it takes to write
such a big play.And the differentsteps.
SR It's not only the physical writing, but the time in
between each draft,when you become a different
person as a writer.You know things that you didn't
5 know five or ten years ago.
8 PV So you started it when you were twenty?
Parks has throwndown the gauntlet-
SR Oh my God, has she.
PV We're talking about the remarkable 365, a cycle of
plays for each day of the year, produced by Bonnie
Metzgar. 365's such an ambitious reframing of
how you produce theater, and it makes me think,
again: How do we get an audience to ask the right
questions?
SR They could start by not asking the wrong ques-
tions, in terms of dramaturges leading talk-backs.
Here's a note to dramaturges: You should not begin
a talk-back by saying, Now, was everything abso-
lutely clear to you? It's not a useful paradigm. It
trains audience members to be like schoolchil-
dren reading a poem and then deciding they hate
poetry. What about asking: What ivas clear to
you? What was so schematic that it bored you out
of your gourd? What was beautiful but you didn't
know why?
PV Maria Irene Fornes gave that opacity to American
theater. That's a huge gift,when you feel something
but don't understand it. And as writers,we ask, "How
did she do that?" Why am I suddenly scared? Why
am I crying?Whydid I findthat funny?It's ratherlike
when you're seeing a dance concert and the whole
audience laughs- what was funnywithoutwords?
SR This is why I love having a baby. Anna laughs
at things, even though she doesn't understand
language. I think that at the most primal level,
the intention to be funny,to share wit, is beyond
language. When I wrote The Clean House and began
it with the joke in Portuguese that probably no one
would understand, that was part of the impulse.
But people do laugh. Some nights they don't; that's
a night when we're in trouble.

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PV Do you want to talk about the new play?
SR It's about the history of the vibrator. This unique
moment at the dawn of the age of electricity when
doctors, who had actually been manually stimulat-
ing their patients to cure them of hysteria, could
suddenly use the vibrator.So what had taken hours
before, now took a matter of minutes. Well see.
PV You must have read that book on the vibrator,The
Technologyof Orgasm.
SR It was my inspiration. One physician quoted in the
book argued that at least three-fourthsof women
had ailments that could be cured by the vibrator.
Which is kind of stunning. The economy for vibra-
tors, even then, was vast; I mean, it was a million-
dollar enterprise.
PV Luckyperson who had the patent on that, (laughter)
So that's what you're working on now, in between
rewritingPassion Play, in between productions,and
the birthof your daughter with your husband, Tony,
and seeing the occasional play and makingdinner.
SR I haven't made dinner in a while. I'm longing to have
some normal time. It's bad when you no longer feel
the connection to a piece of garlic or ginger. My
life's been all out of whack for a couple of months.
PV That's always my great concern in this field: How do
you get balanced? So that we're not feelinglikewe're
livingout of a suitcase in hotel rooms, and your own
house can become a hotel because of this dimension
of time shrinking.
SR For me the work emerges out of the ordinary. I
mean, of course work emerges out of extraor-
dinary moments of loss and ecstasy and all that,
but it also emerges from day-to-day observations,
having time to stare out the window. And I think
that many, many people right now are losing the
ordinary,we're so plugged in all the time.
PV I believe that's why the theater is actually going to
grow in the twenty-firstcentury,because it forces us
to slow down. The circadian rhythmsare being lost,
technology is speeding up, so we have to go some-
where and literallyhave a one-to-one relationship
withthe tick-tockof the clock.
SR The theater's the only time when I turn my cell
phone off. The other play I should be working on
is called The Dead Man's Cell Phone, and it's about
this issue of cell phones and feeling constantly
plugged in.
PV Do you have any desire to directagain?
SR I would like to. I find it physically exhausting and
it's hard to do rewrites while you're directing, so it
would have to be a second production, if I'd already
finished rewrites.
PV Or you could directanother playwright'splay.
SR I want to direct The Long Christmas Ride Home.
PV You've got a blankcheck forthat. We have to go back
to the way in which theater was produced in other
centuries.
SR The group theater, Moscow art. I would love to
have a long process where everyone has a chance
to look deeply at all the theatrical choices that we
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T
make by rote now, that we take for granted. For H
example, one thing that bores me lately: scene E
endings. The lights change and there's a sound A
cue, and we've just accepted that. It's as simple a T
device as a velvet curtain opening. Nothing's wrong E
with it. But I find that it's technological, so it pulls R
me out of the play, but not in the Brechtian sense
of, "You're at the theater!" Instead, it lulls me in a
kind of televised way. In the next play, I'm curious
to look at what the director does with scene transi-
tions. We don't say we want to illuminate a transi-
tion or explore it- we say we want to "cover" it.
PV So you're saying, what if you wrote a play without
furniture;what does that force you to do? One of
the great things about the Elizabethan stage is that
they didn't have lighting.So people just came on
with lanterns when it was night.Maria Irene Fornes
wrote Danube as outdoor theater; it was meant to
be performedduringthe day, so she had to thinkof
how to change the scenes, using puffsof smoke. Of
all of the groups that I miss from the '90s in New
York,certainlythe Circle Rep, but I miss EnGuardeven
more. That site-specificchallenge of writingworkfor
an abandoned cancer ward, or on the elevated West-
Side highwaythat's about to be demolished, or in a
Lower East Side tenement,the lake in CentralPark:all
of those productionschallenged our theatricalhabits.
Now, let's talk about Mac Wellman for a second,
because we just have to, as we have been paying
homage to Irene. WithoutMac and his critiqueof the
psychological-
SR Mac has this great essay about what he calls non-
Euclidean character. He says psychology is not a
rounded state- that it's less real to round people
out, to smooth people's edges. Character is what
people say; it is not the things that they don't say.
And so he has these great indulgences in language,
this great frenzyand excess and pleasure that has
inspired a whole generation of playwrights.
PV Yes. Mac has given permissions that theater artists
desperately needed. In the same way, Anne Bogart
has given us differentvocabularies with which to
break the habitual method acting.
SR I love Anne Bogart. One of the great productions I
never got to see is her Baltimore Waltz.
PV That was the firsttime I felt: I saw heaven tonight.
Anne Bogart has done for directors what Mac has
done in terms of writers.Theyare deeply revered.
SR I remember being inspired by seeing Anne Bogart's
students make things out of nothing at her
summer institute. The lightingwas done with clip
lights, the costumes were made of paper, and they
had 24 hours to do it. It was so magical. And talk
about new ways of making scene transitions; there
wasn't a lightboard, so they did it in totally inven-
tive ways. Take people's money away and give
them back their imagination. Q
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