Any play with the word vibrator in the title and Victorian ladies dropping their knickers and leaping onto the orgasm table -- namely Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) now making its world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theater -- is certain to stimulate audiences. But despite Les Waters' briskly humorous staging and a script full of puerile if funny jokes, Ruhl's examination of women's sexuality in Victorian society is not wholly satisfying.

The play, which hinges on the curious fact that shortly after the invention of electricity, the vibrator was invented, is a faux-drawing room comedy in which characters listen at the door of, conveniently forget their gloves in, and[...]