Why Stageworks, Jobsite and theaters all over the world are doing plays by Sarah Ruhl

It may be a coincidence that two plays by Sarah Ruhl are running in the Bay area within a few weeks of each other, but it’s the kind of coincidence that only happens when a dramatist happens to be hot. And Ruhl — whose Eurydice ends its run at Stageworks May 30 (see review opposite page) and whose Dead Man’s Cell Phone opens at Jobsite Theater on June 3 — is presently burning up the American theater.

Her three-act Passion Play is about to take the stage in New York City, where In the Next Room (or the vibrator Play) is up for a 2010 Tony. Her breakthrough comedy The Clean House was nominated for a Pulitzer and has been translated (along with her other plays) into German, Polish, Korean, Russian and Spanish. Only 36 years old, Ruhl has already received a MacArthur “genius” grant along with a Helen Merrill award and the Whiting Writers’ Award, and has in a very few years become a critical darling. Charles Isherwood of the New York Times, John Lahr of The New Yorker, even Paul Harris of Variety have celebrated her “beguiling… hallucinatory” work that “blends the mundane and the metaphysical,” her “original and audacious voice,” her ability to “swim in the magical, sometimes menacing, and always thrilling flow of the unconscious.”

Hype is indigenous to the theater, but usually the critics go overboard for one play only and then start calling back their bets on the next couple of clunkers. This time they seem to be ecstatic about a (small) body of work. Which brings me to the key question: Is Sarah Ruhl as good as her reputation?

I think so. Ruhl brings to the American stage a unique, unprecedented dramaturgy, one that doesn’t resemble anyone else’s (though there may be traces of Giraudoux, Cocteau and Maeterlinck). Where most successful modern plays rely on dialectical power for their effects — on argument, conflict, Willy Loman against The System, Li’l Bit against her abuser Uncle Peck — Ruhl’s plays depend on a lyrical surrealism that seems, regardless of how many characters she employs, to emanate from a single consciousness, much as abstract painting does, or a complicated jazz arrangement.

Consider the heroine of The Clean House, a Brazilian housecleaner who hates to clean, and whose real quest in life is to find the perfect joke. She begins the play with a joke in Portugese — one that’s never translated — and ends the play wondering if “heaven is a sea of untranslatable jokes.” Between these two events we find a humorous meditation on love triangles, cleanliness, illness and forgiveness which never coalesces into some nameable, paraphrasable “meaning,” but caroms off our consciousness with an inspired unpredictability.

Or consider Eurydice, in which the title character falls into hell, nearly loses all of her memory, and then has to be reacquainted with the most simple facts by her also-dead father. As Orpheus, back on earth, writes letter after letter to his missing lover — he gives one to a worm to transport to the underworld — and as a chorus of infernal Stones try petulantly to acclimatize Eurydice to Hades, we in the audience are treated to some of the most poetic, charming, somber, brilliant reflections on existence that one can find on the modern stage.

And in Dead Man’s Cell Phone, a woman takes it upon herself to mend the relations between a dead man and the people he mistreated during his lifetime, falling in love as she does with the dead man’s brother, and learning that, to the dead, all the conversations in the world are as available as messages on a vast, unquietable answering machine.

What Ruhl brings to all these plays is a quirky, whimsical sense of humor, an ease with surrealist imagery and language (in one of the plays a character is “sucked into a cosmic pipeline attached to his mother’s hell”), and a will to interrogate the undiscovered significance of being human. As Orpheus says, “Then the whole room started to float and I thought: what are people? Then my bed clothes smiled at me with a crooked green mouth and I thought: who am I?”

These are the big questions, the ones most writers don’t dare to confront. That’s the other thing about Ruhl: as small as her canvas may sometimes be, she’s wonderfully ambitious. Her subjects are the fundamental ones, life and death, love and loss.

Bay area playgoers now have the opportunity to see what all the shouting is about.

This article appears in May 27 – Jun 2, 2010.