Samuel French, Inc. The House of Plays & Musical Plays for Over 175 Years

In the Next Room or the vibrator play
[29515]

$9.95

[Performance licensing rights may be restricted in your area. Please, email info@samuelfrench.com for up-to-date licensing information and availability.]
ISBN 978-0-573-69813-2

Sarah Ruhl

Dramatic Comedy

3m, 4f

Interior

Logo Pack Available for this title! Click HERE.

In the Next Room or the vibrator play is a comedy about marriage, intimacy, and electricity.

Set in the 1880s at the dawn of the age of electricity and based on the bizarre historical fact that doctors used vibrators to treat 'hysterical' women (and some men), 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 scientist Dr. Givings has innocently invented an extraordinary new device for treating “hysteria” in women (and occasionally men): the vibrator. Adjacent to the doctor’s laboratory, his young and energetic wife tries to tend to their newborn daughter—and wonders exactly what is going on in the next room. 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.

This laugh out loud, provocative and touching play premiered at Berkeley Rep and subsequently marked Sarah Ruhl’s Broadway debut opening at the Lyceum Theatre on November 19th, 2009.

Winner! 2010 Will Glickman Award for Best New Play to Premiere in the Bay Area!

“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.” –The New York Times

“A play that's smart, delicate and very, very funny!” –New York Post

“If Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde had decided to collaborate on a post-modern drawing-room comedy, the hotsy-totsy twosome surely would have turned out something very much like Sarah Ruhl's genuinely hysterical new work” –TheatreMania

“Sarah Ruhl, whose previous work I execrated, 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

FEE: $125 per performance
[Performance licensing rights may be restricted in your area. Please, email info@samuelfrench.com for up-to-date licensing information and availability.]

Click below for additional materials:
In the Next Room or the vibrator play (Logo Pack)

Character Descriptions:
DR. GIVINGS – A man in his forties, a specialist in gynecological and hysterical disorders.
CATHERINE GIVINGS – His wife, a woman in her late twenties.
SABRINA DALDRY – His patient, a woman in her early thirties.
ANNIE – A woman in her late thirties, Dr. Giving’s midwife assitant.
LEO IRVING – Dr. Giving’s other patient, a Englishman in his twenties or thirties.
ELIZABETH – An African-American woman in her early thirties. A wetnurse by default.
MR. DALDRY – Sabrina Daldry’s husband, a man in his forties or fi fties.

Other Sarah Ruhl titles available from Samuel French include:
The Clean House
Dead Man’s Cell Phone
Eurydice
Passion Play

Quantity:

Customers who bought this product also purchased

Relatively Speaking	Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays, The	David's Mother
Paganini	Death Takes a Holiday (Musical)	Diaries of Adam and Eve, The