By Harry Haun
20 Nov 2009

In the Next Room's Laura Benanti, playwright Sarah Ruhl and Michael Cerveris; with guests Mary-Louise Parker, Michael Urie and Jill Clayburgh
photo by Aubrey Reuben

In the Next Room or the vibrator play, the Sarah Ruhl play that bowed Nov. 19 at the Lyceum Theatre, wavers between comedy and drama over the trials and errors of Victorian sex therapy.

Aye, that's the rub — moving tentatively from the old-fashioned manual manner of achieving the big O to electronic contraptions as a way of relieving pent-up repressions and hysteria in patients (mostly, but not exclusively, women). Here, as practiced in upstate Saratoga Springs of the 1880s when characters still marvel at being able to turn on and off the electric light, Rube Goldberg could be in charge.

In truth, his name is Dr. Givings, an earnest scientist who treats the tightly-wound of both genders with the appropriate his-or-her vibrator in his office, or "operating theatre," while in the adjacent parlor his wife knits and frets over his love of work.

This becomes, in time, the tale of the sex-therapist's wife. Not only does she begin to feel shut out of her husband's life, a wet-nurse must be brought in for their new baby.

Laura Benanti, who earlier this year was bumping and grinding and shedding clothes on the St. James runway as a Tony-winning Gypsy Rose Lee, is here imprisoned in a Victorian corset and high-collar. Talk about your change of pace!

"I want to confuse people, keep them on their toes," she laughed later at the after-party held conveniently across the street from the theatre in the Millennium Hotel.

"I do get to sing a little bit in this, but I am trying to stretch my wings and my creative muscles because I want to do this forever — musicals, straight plays, theatre, film, all of it. I don't want to be in a box. I feel like I've really learned and grown as a performer through this process — which is why I did it. I enjoyed every minute of it."

Mrs. Givings is a role that gives her a shot at comedy and drama, sometimes simultaneously given the awkward tentativeness of Victorian sex investigations. "I think it's a dramedy. I think it's very funny, but I ultimately think it's very moving.

"I love her innocence, her optimism. I love her ability to meet people and instantly want to be friends with them. She sees the good in them. And I love to be able to take her on a journey where she too learns and grows and where she has to go through a series of so many different emotions. I did a lot of trying different things during previews — erring on one side and then the other side in order to try to find a balance of her. For me, this experience has been very rewarding — and exhausting."

Benanti need look no further than the man playing her husband, Michael Cerveris to see the wisdom of working both sides of the musical/nonmusical fence. A true hyphenate, he sings or acts as the occasion demands and stays busy.

His hairline varies as well. Usually he sports his signature bald pate, but occasionally he dons a wig. Here, in profile, with a blond sweep of hair, he looks exactly like Yul Brynner in "The Sound and the Fury" — a movie he missed, but the illusion was not lost on hair designer Paul Huntley. "I always thought that when I put him in a wig he look liked Yul, who occasionally wore a wig in a film, " said Huntley, whose all-time favorite wig remains the hair-and-beard combo that Brynner removed in one felled swoop for the one Broadway performance of Home Sweet Homer.

In his 19th century neglect of his wife, Dr. Givings resembles the Jorgen Tesman that Cerveris played earlier this year to Mary-Louise Parker's Hedda Gabler. He is not even making his "19th century nude deboo" with this role. "When I first got to New York, I did a play called Total Eclipse" — he played Arthur Rimbaud to Peter Evans' Paul Verlaine — "and that had some nudity."

Parker, who is heading to Canada to film "Red" with Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman, was one of three Ruhl actresses in her corner on opening night. "I think Sarah is the best that we have," trumpeted the star of Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone. "I could listen to her words every night. She's a genius."

The other two actresses cheerleading for her were sisters in Lincoln Center's previous brush with Ruhl, The Clean House — Blair Brown and Jill Clayburgh. "I loved the play," trilled the latter. "It's just female in some profound way that no one else seems to go near. It's genuinely from a woman's point of view."

Ironically, or perhaps appropriately in light of the subject matter, Ruhl arrived at the party for her Broadway debut very large of child — in fact, children (she's expecting twins). Her husband, Tony Charuvastra, is a child psychiatrist in New York.

She was particularly pleased to be in the venerable Lyceum: "I think one of the most wonderful things is being in an architectural space from the 19th century and having a play that fits so beautifully in that space," she said with a fine sense of symmetry.

What was her inspiration for a play so far off the beaten track? "The initial spark was from this astounding book called 'The Technology of Orgasm' by Rachel Maines, and she looked at the whole history of the vibrator. I was just astonished. I didn't know that doctors treated women with hysteria with vibrators. Nor did I know that, before they invented the vibrator, they just treated them manually for hysteria. That was the jumping-off place, but I think the play became much larger than just that. I researched it for about a year, and then, when I started to write it, I just tried to put the research away, and I wrote it when I had a kid, who was nine months old."

View the Entire Photo Gallery Michael Cerveris, playwright Sarah Ruhl and Chandler Williams Photo by Aubrey Reuben

Also marking his Broadway bow is director Les Waters, who helmed Ruhl's Eurydice at Second Stage here and directed the world premiere of In the Next Room at Berkeley Rep where it had been a commissioned play. He couldn't personally think of a better way to make a Main Stem debut. "The Lincoln Center people have been the most wonderful producers. It's been a delightful experience."

By his count — and he can name them, if pressed — there are nine orgasms during the course of the play (one is a failed orgasm). "I don't mind most of the laughter," Waters freely admitted. "I think that it's tentative when it begins because I don't know a play where anybody has done this before. There's a kind of — not unease, but a kind of holding of breath, like 'how are they going to do this on the stage?'"

Considerable research had been done on the primitive sexual contraptions of that vintage, he said. "We looked at endless photographs of late 19th–early 20th century vibrators. The two vibrators used in the play are actual replicas of the real things." Continued...

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