PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: In the Next Room or the vibrator play Mrs. Givings' Misgivings
By Harry Haun
November 20, 2009
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."
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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 19thearly 20th century vibrators. The two vibrators used in the play are actual replicas of the real things."
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.