In the Next Room or the vibrator play
Tickets and Information
SHOW INFORMATION
CURRENTLY CLOSED
Opened Nov 19, 2009
Closed Jan 10, 2010
Opened Nov 19, 2009
Closed Jan 10, 2010
Directions & Map
Running Time:
2hr. 25min.
(includes 1 intermission)
2hr. 25min.
(includes 1 intermission)
Visit the In the Next Room or the vibrator play website:
http://www.lct.org
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WHAT IS IT ABOUT?
Laura Benanti and Michael Cerveris lead the cast in this provocative, funny, touching and marvelously entertaining story about a young doctor and his wife set at the dawn of the age of electricity in the 1880s. Back then hysteria was a real diagnosis, and women were commonly treated with electrical stimulating machines to ease their condition! Playwright Sarah Ruhl wondered what exactly doctors were thinking when they used vibrator therapies on their female patients. And what did women think was happening to them? In the Next Room or the vibrator play looks at a young technology-obsessed doctor and the devoted wife who longs to connect with him -- but not electrically.
This comedy about marriage, intimacy and electricity had its world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
The play marks the Broadway debut for Ruhl, who has won numerous honors, including a MacArthur "Genius" grant. Her other plays include The Clean House (a Pulitzer Prize finalist), Dead Man's Cell Phone, Passion Play, and Eurydice.
WHAT ARE CRITICS SAYING?
What are other members saying?
Such a shame it closed. It was great!
I agree with the others: This was a funny, intelligent and thoughtful play about a very strange chapter in American medical history. Great costumes, great acting.
Too bad it closed. What an anti-climax.
Reviewed by mickiet
on Monday, Jan 11th, 2010
In the next room
Dont be fooled by the sub-text title. This is not a sexy play or one by which most reasonable people would be shocked or offended. It is a funny, thoughtful and interesting play which cleverly shows the mores of the time and delivers a message which may not be too clear but if one thinks about it, it is also relevant today.
The acting and staging are very good as are the period costumes. This may not be a smash hit but it is well worth seeing as a very worthy straight American-written play.
Reviewed by MACNBOB
on Wednesday, Nov 25th, 2009
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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
In the Next Room or the vibrator play, now being presented by Lincoln Center Theatre at Broadway's Lyceum Theatre.
Setting her play at the time Ibsen and Wilde were writing, Ruhl has no compunction about the dramatic propriety of vibrators, an appliance only used back then to treat women diagnosed with hysteria (or as the play puts it "congestion in the womb"). She's convinced -- and she's not alone here -- that the so-called condition was just another 19th-century tactic to r[...]