Obie-winning director Les Waters, who staged the world premiere of In the Next Room at Berkeley Rep, helms the work about an 1880s doctor (Cerveris) whose noisy therapeutic efforts in his home office arouse the curiosity of his wife (Benanti). Previews began Oct. 22.

The Lincoln Center Theater production marks the Broadway debut of playwright Ruhl, whose works Eurydice, The Clean House and Dead Man's Cell Phone have been staged Off-Broadway in recent seasons. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Clean House, for which she won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

Benanti (Gypsy, Why Torture Is Wrong) and Cerveris (Road Show, Hedda Gabler), lead a cast that includes Obie and Clarence Derwent Award winner Quincy Tyler Bernstine (Ruined), Ruhl veteran Maria Dizzia (Berkley Rep world premiere of In the Next Room, Eurydice), Thomas Jay Ryan (The Temperamentals, Passion Play), Wendy Rich Stetson (LCT's Big Bill) and Chandler Williams (Mary Stuart, Crimes of the Heart).

Here's how Lincoln Center characterizes the play: "Set at the dawn of the age of electricity and based on the bizarre historical fact that doctors used vibrators to treat 'hysterical' women (and some men), the play centers on a doctor and his wife (Laura Benanti and Michael Cerveris) and how his new therapy affects their entire household."

Sarah Ruhl most recently adapted Chekhov's Three Sisters for a new production at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, under the direction of Tony winner John Doyle (Sweeney Todd, Company, A Catered Affair).

The company's understudies are Nathan Darrow, Emily Dorsch, Donnetta Lavinia Grays, Paul Niebanck and Erica Sullivan.

Tickets are currently on sale through Jan. 10, 2010. For tickets visit LCT.

The Lyceum Theatre is located in Manhattan at 149 West 45th Street.

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LCT dramaturg Anne Cattaneo provides the following program note in the Playbill for In the Next Room:

"How much of In the Next Room or the vibrator play belongs to the realm of history and how much is rooted in Sarah Ruhl's imagination? The old adage that truth is stranger than fiction certainly applies here. In the play's stage directions, Ruhl tells us, 'Things that seem impossibly strange in the following play are true — such as the Chattanooga Vibrator, which was used on male hysterics — and the vagaries of wet-nursing.' Set at the dawn of the electrical age, Ruhl's characters embrace the miracles that this magical force brings with it: the making of light with the push of a button. The electric appliance.

"One appliance advertised with as much enthusiasm as the newly invented vacuum cleaner was the electric vibrator. It was enthusiastically marketed both to physicians and to the general public. The devices were considered unremarkable and unembarrassing; they belonged to a practical realm far removed from sex. In her book, The Technology of Orgasm, a springboard to Ruhl’s creation of the play, Rachel Maines notes that while the turn-of-the-century medical establishment was roiled by inventions such as the tampon and the speculum, the vibrator remained innocuous. As Maines wryly observes, physicians held firm to 'the comforting belief that only penetration was sexually stimulating to women.'

"'What men do not observe because their intellect prevents them from seeing would fill many books,' observes Dr. Givings in the play. Medical wisdom could not begin to find a cure or a cause for the general female malaise common at this time. Caring doctors, husbands and wives alike struggled to understand the “disease.” Each age has its signature illness: in the nineteenth century it was 'hysteria' from the Greek word 'hysterikos' or 'womb.' Women were its primary — though by no means its only — victims. Its causes were unknown. Treatments ranged from precipitating 'paroxysms' by electricity to (some decades later) the talking cure of Freud (who treated patients with vibrators early in his career) and the enforced rest so often prescribed to well-to-do women of the era. Concerned physicians resorted to therapies described in medical literature that were millenniums old — the 'manual treatment' was described by ancient Greek writers.

"In the Next Room is a play of revelations, and perhaps none is more profound than the elusive nature of sexuality itself. We live in a modern age, and we live in an age where, for instance, vibrators are still forbidden for sale in several states. And young women with access to encyclopedias of sexual information still struggle to please themselves.

"'"What do women want?' asked a baffled Freud. The characters — both male and female — that Ruhl has created in her play seek self-awareness and fulfillment: both sexually and in their family, professional and romantic relationships. For audiences today, more than a century after the era depicted in the play, timeless parallels resonate. The discovery of the self — whether as mother, artist, wife, husband, and lover — is as present for us today as it was for the Victorians."