A woman sitting on her own is irritated by persistently ringing phone of the stranger seated at a nearby table. She investigates to find that the stranger in question is dead. It's a really clever springboard for a play that Sarah Ruhl completely fails to deliver on in  Dead  Man's Cell Phone.At least, that's how I remember it when I saw a valiant attempt at making it work executed by Pin...

Last weekend, I went to the Oriental Theatre to see Hysteria, a movie that covers the same ground as Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) and Rachel Maines' book The Technology of Orgasm (read my comments on the Milwaukee...

Once we as audience members get past the initial shock and titillation of Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), we see that the messages from its 19th-century setting remain timeless in 2012—the pursuit of love at its most intimate...

I’ve never been terribly impressed with Sara Ruhl as a playwright. Whether it’s The Clean House or Eurydice or Dead Man’s Cell Phone, he work always comes across like a writing assignment. Find the topic, do the necessary research to write the script and then develop it. As nice as it is, its never terribly inspired work. Thankfully, for In The Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), the script ...

The Milwaukee Rep closes its Stiemke Studio season with a production of a historical comedy by popular contemporary playwright Sarah Ruhl, In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)...

    With the economy being such as it is, big donations from big individual donors are likely to be down as things progress into the next several years. Smaller companies continue to find funding with the people who buy tickets. Smaller productions all over the country have been helped-out through the use of Kickstarter.com—a site that allows individual productions to find the funding they...