By Jim Gilles
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 3/19/22 – Just opening at the Atwater Village Theatre in Los Angeles on March 18 is Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play, a funny and intriguing play staged by the Open Fist Theatre Company and directed by Lane Allison. Set in the 1880s at the dawn of the age of electricity, and based on the little-known historical fact that doctors used vibrators to treat “hysterical” women (and some men), the play centers on a doctor and his wife and how this new therapy affects their household. Dr. Givings (Spencer Cantrell) is obsessed with the marvels of technology and what they can do for his patients. His wife, Catherine (Dionna Veremis), is only a bystander in her husband’s world, listening at the door from the next room as he treats his female patients. Dr. Givings is not sure exactly how the vibrator helps the women he treats – but they do keep coming back.
“When I discovered how the vibrator was invented and used medically in the 19th century, I was astonished,” Ruhl said in an interview. Ruhl stumbled across her subject matter when a friend gave her a copy of a scholarly work by Rachel P. Maines titled The Technology of Orgasm. “A strange little book about the history of the vibrator. I just couldn’t believe my eyes.” she says. “Treating women with a vibrator was not considered sexual because women weren’t supposed to experience sexual desire or pleasure. Doctors thought it was releasing fluid that had built up and was causing the womb to be flooded, giving the woman hysterical symptoms. Which in a way is quite accurate.” Ibsen had Nora dancing a defiant tarantella; Ruhl has women discovering the power and solace of orgasm, and acknowledging their desires.
The performances are uniformly excellent, but Dionna Veremis’ portrayal of the doctor’s sexually unfulfilled wife, who eavesdrops as her husband treats others, is particularly gripping. She has that wild edge to her, like Ibsen’s Nora, but here it is smartly translated into self-discovery a vivacious and talkative woman who seems stuck in a romantically unfulfilled marriage and trying to grapple with being the mother of a newborn girl and yet concerned that her breast-milk is inadequate for her child. This sense of inadequacy about a woman’s role in motherhood floats underneath the larger vibrator theme of the play. Eventually Dr. Givings agrees to hire a wet nurse to breastfeed the baby. The wet nurse (Monazia Smith) happens to be the black maid of Mrs. Daldry (Stephanie Crothers), one of his anxious, depressed and “hysterical” patients.
In The Next Room, or The Vibrator Play is directed by Lane Allison, whose interpretation of the play illuminates the play of electricity and electric-powered devices in our lives. “It’s very telling that, when inventors got to thinking about which items should be prioritized for an electric upgrade, the machines used to treat hysteria were in the top five, just behind the sewing machine, fan, kettle and toaster,” says Allison. “The buzz they created is still reverberating today – unintentionally sparking an indelible awareness of the varied and rich complexities of repression due to one’s gender, ethnicity, class, education and sexual identity, thus illuminating a path for change.” Of course, the Daldry’s have no children of their own, although the prospect of motherhood somehow interests Mrs. Daldry.
The treatments in Dr. Givings’ “operating theatre” take place under decorous white sheets, in a private medical clinic above a plush Victorian sitting room. Concealment is a strong theme, reflected in lush Victorian design in which doors, screens, corridors and curtains frame every interaction. We simultaneously see what is happening in the doctor’s “operating theatre” and in the sitting room below; the contrasts give the play some of its most affecting, as well as funny, moments. Mrs. Daldry (Stephanie Crothers) is a challenging patient for Dr. Givings but his treatment with the electric vibrator seems to hit the spot and suddenly she seems less agitated and her body language more relaxed. All this eventually piques the interest of Dr. Givings’ wife Catherine whose curiosity about the treatments in the “operating theatre” drive her to find out how the electric vibrator actually works.
In The Next Room, or The Vibrator Play draws inspiration from a stimulating source – the 19th-century medical practice of using a vibrator to masturbate women diagnosed with hysteria. The play is not crude or full of adolescent style humor, but attempts to deal with a very adult concern about women and their limited knowledge of their own bodies in the late 19th century. The second act of the play veers more into farce with the introduction of Leo Irving (Bryan Robert Bertone), a Bohemian painter who had recently been in Italy but seems to have an artistic block with his work. He arrives in Dr. Givings’ house and “operating theatre” for a treatment of his artistic blockage which seems directly related to erectile dysfunction. The humor associated with Dr. Givings’ choice of an anal stimulation device seems to do trick for Leo Irving, who is a comic stereotype of the late 19th century Bohemian artist. As Dr. Givings explains regarding possible male “hysteria,” “artists are a bit like women.”
The sexual tensions in the play are explored in a variety of ways – to showcase male assumptions about women, their bodies, and their roles in the social hierarchy at the time. Curiously enough, Dr. Givings’ faithful female assistant, Annie (Jennifer Zorbalas), provides another window in late 19th century Victorian sexual notions about women. Annie is a middle-aged midwife who knows plenty about women’s bodies, including older forms of female stimulation that preceded the discovery of uses for electricity by Thomas Edison. Her dry focus on medical practice belies her own repressed desires, with a nod to unspoken aspects of female sexuality at the time.
Sarah Ruhl, who hails from Chicago and a product of the Piven Theatre Workshop and wrote this play in 2009 when she was only 34, much influenced by playwright Paula Vogel. Ruhl was acutely aware of the danger of salacious preconceptions. “I didn’t want it to be sensationalist and I was always very clear that all the naughty things you might wanna see take place under a sheet,” she says. “Because that doesn’t really interest me – what interests me is questions about intimacy and marriage, the relationship between bodies and minds, how you separate them and bring them together. It’s not a pornographic interest in watching somebody get off onstage.” The current production of In The Next Room, or The Vibrator Play by the Open Fist Theatre takes its subject seriously and foregrounds the realistic concerns of women and their place in a larger dialogue about women’s bodies.
In the Next Room, or the vibrator play premiered at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2009 before opening on Broadway later that year. Sarah Ruhl’s other plays include The Clean House (Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Pulitzer Prize Finalist); Passion Play, a cycle (Pen American award, Kennedy Center’s Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award); Dead Man’s Cell Phone (Helen Hayes Award); Melancholy Play; Eurydice; Orlando, Demeter in the City (NAACP nomination), Late: a cowboy song, Three Sisters, Stage Kiss and Dear Elizabeth. She is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.
In the Next Room, or the vibrator play runs March 18 through April 23, with performances taking place on Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 6 p.m. General admission is $25, with $15 tickets available to students, seniors and veterans with valid ID. Atwater Village Theatre is located at 3269 Casitas Ave in Los Angeles, CA 90039. Parking is free in the ATX (Atwater Crossing) parking lot one block south of the theater. For reservations and information, call (323) 882-6912 or go to www.openfist.org.