By Harry Haun
20 Nov 2009

Maria Dizzia, an ex-Eurydice here playing a casualty of bad martial sex, is on her way to becoming a Ruhl expert. "That wouldn't be a bad career," she remarked, turning the idea over in her head, "only this is just my second Ruhl play. But we mounted Eurydice three times, and I was part of this production of In the Next Room twice, so it feels as if I have worked with her five times."

Like the rest of the cast, she did her homework. "We all read about the invention of that vibrator and about the way in which women's orgasms were hidden. There's a real innocence about the discovery. It took a while for them to figure out it was sex."

She enjoys riding out the wild audience swings. "It changes all the time, and, even within an audience, there are different pockets of responses. So that's very exciting.

"It's not hard to act because Sarah's work really guides you through it. There's something really amazing about Sarah's language. I feel what I learned a lot of the time in rehearsal is if I just backed off of something and just said it, then the emotion of what was going on would just happen. It was a lot better than when I was doing my crazy Victorian acting, which was something I felt was my first stab at it."

As her husband, the ever-capable Thomas Jay Ryan makes the most of a modest opportunity. "I'm a huge fan of Sarah's writing," the actor confessed. "It's spare, but it doesn't ever seem that it's intellectual. It always seems like there's an emotional base, and, even with my limited stage time, she has given my character the same longings that everybody else has. If you just listen, it's a thing of great beauty."

Ryan will next be seen in another play on vintage sex when Jon Marans' acclaimed opus, The Temperamentals, settles into New World Stages Feb. 28 for an open-ended engagement Off-Broadway. (The title is a 1950s euphemism for homosexual, and he plays the communist Harry Hay.) "That's right," he hooted. "If people would just come to plays that I'm in, their whole sexual lives will be solved."

Quincy Tyler Bernstine, who won an Obie and a Clarence Derwent Award for playing what was arguably the most devastated of the brutally abused characters in Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize-winning Ruined, hit the stage running when she was cast as the Givings' wet-nurse whose baby had recently died.

"I had a ten-day break between plays," she said. "It was a bit of a challenge because I was so exhausted, but coming into this role — Elizabeth is beautiful in her own way."

The male version of the vibrator is called the Chattanooga Vibrator, and Dr. Givings cranks it up for an artist with a recently broken heart. Chandler Williams brings to the part his best Broadway British (Translations and Mary Stuart) — plus grandly overripe gestures. "It was always there. I just never had the chance to use it. Everybody thought I was a dramatic actor, and that was it. But an actor who can make people cry is always longing to make people laugh. Always, I think." He liked that both elements jostle for position in the play. "That's the wonderful thing about Sarah's writing. It totters back and forth. There are farcical elements, and then it gets very serious. And that's a thrill to play as an actor."

The midwife assisting the good doctor, Wendy Rich Stetson, turns out to look much younger off-stage. She laughed at the compliment: "That's because I'm tall," she said with a smile. "Ever since I was in middle school, I have been cast as the old lady because I was the tall one. But Annie is actually written to be my age.

"Dr. Givings says that Annie is the soul of tact and reserve, and, when I read that, I thought 'Oh, what a wonderful thing for someone to say about you — particularly someone who is a midwife, who would know everything that is going on.'"

A string of Lincoln Center playwrights (b>A. R. Gurney Jr. and John Weidman) and a run of lady directors (Leigh Silverman as well as Susans Schulman and Stroman) led the guest list for opening night.

"Ugly Betty" star Michael Urie sat at the Lyceum behind Driving Miss Daisy's Alfred Uhry — no relation, although both are busy nowadays: The former will join Ryan for the open-ended run of The Temperamentals, and the latter is adapting Marie Brenner's "Apples & Oranges" for Manhattan Theatre Club.

Also attending were Michael Rabe, rocker Adam Duritz, Tony winner Marian Seldes, Oscar winner Frances McDormand, Obie winner Kathleen Chalfant, Ragtime tunesmiths Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, composer Mary Rodgers and actress-turning-director (with Zero Hour at the Theatre at St. Clement's) Piper Laurie. Benanti's husband, Stephen Pasquale of "Rescue Me" was there, as was Ruhl's playwriting teacher, Paula Vogel.