Women's Voices on American Stages in the Early Twenty-First Century

Sarah Ruhl and Her Contemporaries

L. Durham

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137287113
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

Women are at the center of American theatre and have the potential to shape the cultural imagination of theatre-goers as a complex new era unfolds. Sarah Ruhl, one of the twenty-first century's most honored playwrights, is read in concert with her contemporaries whose writing also wrestles with the vexing issues facing Americans in the new century.

Chapter 1

Educating Sarah Ruhl

In a 2006 essay, Sarah Ruhl recounted the experience of an aggravated dramaturg who was struggling to placate her theater’s subscribers: “The subscriber said, ‘I’m sick of seeing plays that I’ve seen before. And I’m also sick of seeing plays that are totally unfamiliar to me.’ The theatre had no choice but to throw up its hands in frustration.” Ruhl’s own thoughtful response to the quandary went as follows: “And yet—what if this audience member was making a deeper point? Maybe what’s missing in the American theatre is a kind of primal familiarity wedded to the newness of soaring insight.”1 As she launched her playwriting career, it seems that Ruhl had the plight of both the dramaturg and the audience member in mind. In her early plays, Ruhl turned to classic texts, not merely to reframe them, but to animate them with her own particular, developing theatrical insights.

At the time she was writing “Re-Runs and Repetition,” her play Eurydice, a retelling of the classic Orpheus and Eurydice myth from the female character’s perspective, was, after 13 readings, finding its way to the stage in regional theaters—at the Madison Rep, Berkeley Rep, and Yale Rep—before its New York debut at Second Stage in 2007. But two of her even earlier plays, Orlando and Lady with the Lap Dog provide a map for the ways some of her later work will develop. For that reason, I will analyze these early plays before I put Ruhl’s most popular plays into conversation with the work of other female playwrights who are her contemporaries.

As she reflected back on her work adapting these texts as Orlando was heading for its New York City premiere in 2010, Ruhl said,

I am not really interested in doing an adaptation of a writer who I don’t bow down to in my head. So working on Chekhov or Woolf is like being a student and kneeling at the feet of a master. I mean, it’s just getting their language in my head and trying to be clairvoyant and trying to think about what they were thinking and what their intentions might have been. So I’m really not trying to put a stamp on it as much as I am trying to think how to make it live theatrically in this particular moment in time—and in English in the case of Chekhov. But I don’t really approach it the way I would approach my own original work.2

While she may approach adaptation in a way that differs from original composition, these adaptations, and the “masters” who taught her in the process, did, I will argue, have a major impact on the work that would make Ruhl famous within the next five years. As she got their “language in her head” and performed them as writers—she uses the language of the actor when she talks about “intention”—she reinforced elements of her own emerging style.

The Piven Theatre and Joyce Piven

In 1998, the Piven Theatre Workshop produced Ruhl’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and then in 2000 the Piven included her adaptations of the Chekhov short stories “The Lady with the Lap Dog” and “Anna Around the Neck” in Chekhov: The Stories. Since one company was so crucial in propelling Ruhl to the stage early in her career, I’d like to look at the importance of the Piven Theatre in forging Ruhl’s dramatic persona and of planting the language of the actor in her head, before I analyze two of the plays.

Ruhl’s study with the Pivens began more than a decade before the premiere of Orlando—in her childhood. She grew up in Wilmette, Illinois, not far from Chicago and even closer to Evanston, where the Piven Theatre Workshop is located. That a quiet, bookish child like the young Ruhl found herself in acting workshops is due in large measure to the inspiration of her mother, Kathy Ruhl. Before she gave birth to Sarah (in 1974) and her sister Kate, Kathy Ruhl was an actress in alternative Chicago theaters, performing early work by David Mamet and Maria Irene Fornes, the mentor with whom her younger daughter would one day work. As she discovered the need to combine mothering with performing, Kathy Ruhl shifted her attention to community theater (and channeled her creativity into doctoral study and teaching as well). Both Ruhl and her mother mention in interviews and essays that as a child, Sarah often accompanied her mother to rehearsal; before she could write, Sarah was making and giving notes to her mother’s cast mates.

In his interview with Ruhl for Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Playwrights Horizons artistic director Tim Sanford asked Ruhl about this past experience of taking notes on her mother’s work and being in the theater with her. He asked if that was how she knew “how actors and texts are supposed to interact.” She replied, “Yes, that feels very natural to me … I’d also studied at the Piven Theater Workshop with Joyce Piven from a young age.” Her comment led him to the following realization: “When I used to think you were a poet-turned-playwright, I wondered how you had developed such finely tuned antennae about shaping moments with the actors. But now it all makes sense to me. It’s inside of you.”3

The theatrical sensibility inside Ruhl (that coexists with the poetic sensibility she cultivated as an undergraduate at Brown University prior to meeting Paula Vogel, whom I will discuss later in the chapter), is the direct result of her mother’s influence and Joyce Piven’s particular style of improvisational work.

The Piven Theatre Workshop was founded by husband-and-wife collaborators, Byrne and Joyce Piven. After graduating from the University of Chicago, they cofounded The Playwrights Theatre Club with Paul Sills—who later cofounded Second City. At the Playwrights Theatre Club and then at the Piven, the ideas of Viola Spolin were at the heart of what they call “The Work.”

In a piece for Northshore Magazine, Peter Gianopulos interviewed Joyce Piven, Ruhl’s classmate and frequent collaborator, Polly Noonan, and Ruhl herself about what “The Work” entails. Both Piven and Ruhl refer to “The Work” using the term ritual. Ruhl explains further, “I grew up watching the rituals of the [Catholic] church, which are very theatrical. The rituals of the theater are sacred in the same way.”4

Through Spolin-inspired improvisational work, Ruhl and her classmates were asked to experience in the present moment in its multidimensional fullness, to feel in their bodies what it meant to play and to transform, and to translate the everyday into remarkable ritual. One of the key coaching calls the Pivens would use was the phrase “Explore and heighten!” Noonan adds further of Ruhl, “When I see her plays or am part of her plays … I see the kind of play and impulse taught at the Piven workshop. That lightness, the effortlessness, the humor, the discovery.”5

As influential as Joyce Piven has been in developing the lightness in Ruhl, she has also had an effect on the darker counterpoints in her work. In her introduction to her 2009 adaptation of The Three Sisters, Ruhl talks about how important conversations over tea with Piven were in helping her create this recent adaptation. Ruhl describes Piven’s work in the 1960s with the Russian acting teacher, Mira Rostova. Rostova introduced Piven to idea that speech might be developed into five melodies, or “doings.” She goes on to explain that for Rostova and Piven “the defy,” in addition to “the lament,” “looms large.”6 Though she is speaking specifically of the Three Sisters, this sentiment applies much more broadly to Ruhl’s work: “To look for the act of defiance in the sisters rather the elegy; to find the philosophical lament with humor rather than the complaint … this was my hope in the translation, and also my hope with the actors who ultimately do the production.”7

Bringing professional actors into Ruhl’s process is another crucial gift that Joyce Piven gave Sarah Ruhl. After she earned her undergraduate degree from Brown University—which occurred with interruption due to the death of her much-beloved father from bone cancer when she was twenty years old8—Ruhl stayed in Providence for a year, briefly teaching at Wheaton College there. After that, she moved back to Chicago. Ruhl says, “I went back to Chicago and wrote an adaptation of Orlando for Joyce, and that was my first production outside of college … She commissioned it, and I said sure. She’d been my teacher, so that was big leap, to go from her being my teacher to sitting in the room collaborating with her.”9 The work with Piven and her actors, even if it wasn’t critically embraced, and even if it had moments of difficulty,10 helped her gain crucial experience with professional production. Shortly thereafter she returned to Brown to study again and in greater depth with Paula Vogel as well as Mac Wellman and Nilo Cruz, and there she started writing the plays for which she would soon become famous.11

Adapting and Studying Woolf

When Orlando was remounted by New York City’s Classic Stage Company in 2010, many reviewers commented on Ruhl’s faithfulness to Woolf’s text.12 Charles Isherwood’s remarked in The New York Times that Ruhl had in fact been too faithful: “If Ms. Ruhl’s ‘Orlando’ does not escape all the pitfalls of transforming a work of deeply imagined prose into a fully animated play, she cannot be accused of taking any undue stylistic or thematic liberties. In fact, the production’s main flaw is a reliance on third-person narration to denote much of the action, which derives directly from Woolf’s description-rich, dialogue-light book.”13

And while Ruhl herself notes that she omitted “huge swaths and chunks”14 from the book—such as the literary allusions that Woolf uses to characterize each section, the critic Nick Greene who like Orlando crosses centuries, and colorful episodes such as Orlando’s sojourn with the gypsies, I’m most interested in neither the parts of the book that Ruhl preserved in their original form nor the parts she excised entirely. Instead, I will use the elements of Woolf’s “fairytale-a-clef”15 that Ruhl transformed and theatricalized, in a dramatic analogue to Piven’s theatrical games, to explore how the adaptation of the book trained Ruhl for the major plays she would compose later in the decade.

It must be noted that transformation and if not theatricalization precisely, then its close relation performativity, undergird Woolf’s Orlando. The first thing Woolf transformed was genre. Woolf titled the book Orlando: A Biography, but it is hardly typical of that form. While Woolf does tell the story of the daily life and wild adventures of the noble Orlando and claims through her first chapter to have fulfilled “the first duty of a biographer, which is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth,”16 Orlando travels from male to female and lives in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Orlando is not a historical figure (though she occasionally encounters the likes of Queen Elizabeth, William Shakespeare, and Alexander Pope). She is instead an amalgamation of bits and pieces of Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West, to whom Woolf dedicated the book. Photographs supplement the text at various points in the manner typical of biography, but three of these are Sackville-West snapped on random occasions but labeled as Orlando in various time periods. Woolf hardly limits herself to the tone of biography either. Through Orlando’s failed literary aspirations—her poetry travels with her throughout the centuries without ever improving dramatically—she satirizes the literary and social manners of each age while she also dramatizes the gendered boundaries of existence, for her title subject “knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each”17 sex.

It is in her treatment of gender and its parameters that Woolf’s performativity and postmodernity appear—like Orlando herself—out of time,18 since the book was published in 1928. As Laura Marcus has observed, “Orlando is … postmodern in its production of performative identities, and its radical undermining of fixed gender identities.”19 And Christy L. Burns writes, “The effects of Orlando’s transformation through the ages—marked especially by his/her changes in clothing—execute a parodic deconstruction of essentialist claims tentatively offered in the text … Woolf plays on a twentieth-century conception of truth, derived from the Greek notion of alethea, unveiling. In her novel truth is destabilized and turns into parody through an emphasis on period fashions, cross-dressing, and undressing of ‘essential’ bodies.”20 When Orlando is lamenting the gender he has left, or testing the gender she has found, clothing does serve to reveal more than it conceals. For example, as she’s sailing to England, the narrator muses, “It is a strange fact, but a true one that up to this moment she had scarcely given her sex a thought. Perhaps the Turkish trousers, which she had hitherto worn had done something to distract her thoughts … At any rate, it was not until she felt the coil of skirts about her legs and the Captain offered, with great politeness, to have an awning spread for her on deck that she realized, with a start the penalties and privileges of her position.”21 The skirts are like coils of rope, binding her and constraining in the way her breeches and Turkish trousers never did. While the skirts may be modest, revealing little of her new physical shape, they make clear to Orlando what the social consequences of that shape will be. They help her perform her role as woman and reinforce the codes associated with that role at the same time.

Woolf’s genre and gender bending presage the compatibility she would have with Ruhl some seventy years after Orlando was published. And while Ruhl does perform these aspects of Woolf’s writing as she’s developing as a writer—adaptation for the stage in and of itself is a kind of genre bending, and gender bending will reemerge in Passion Play as the same performer plays Queen Elizabeth, Hitler, and Reagan—she also plays with conventional understandings of time (a device that will appear again later, most obviously in Passion Play but also in The Clean House and Dead Man’s Cell Phone) and shares Woolf’s “incandescent” use of language.22 But Ruhl is at moments a rebellious student. Even as she’s penning this first adaptation, from a writer and work she’s admired since her youth,23 she intervenes in the text at key moments, finding ways to enhance Woolf’s theatricality and in so doing to nurture her own emerging independent style and persona as a writer.

In both Woolf and Ruhl, a shared language ignites the intimacy between Orlando and Sasha, the Russian princess who would both capture and break his heart. But in Woolf, the language is actual French. When Sasha speaks French to the young courtiers around her at a banquet table, it is only Orlando who can understand her and respond. She then asks impertinent questions about those around her—including the king and queen. Orlando answers her with equal brazenness and “thus began an intimacy between the two which became the scandal of the court.”24

Ruhl maintains the shape of the scene, but where she differs is in what comes out of the mouths of Orlando and Sasha. Her stage directions in the scene read, “Sasha speaks gibberish French to Orlando; i...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Context for Ruhl and Her Contemporaries, or Women’s Playwriting: Strictly Prohibited in the New Century?
• 1: Educating Sarah Ruhl
• 2: Emotional Journeys
• 3: Caring Labor
• 4: Theatrical Devotion
• 5: Mobile Lines
• 6: Natural Forces
• Epilogue: “The Curtain Goes Up”
• Notes
• Bibliography