The occasional world war, economic meltdown, or ecological collapse notwithstanding, bourgeois society is a fabulous thing. It’s given millions upon millions of average people luxuries they couldn’t have contemplated under more primitive arrangements, including clean water, plentiful food, warm shelters, store-bought clothes, imported rugs, and a reasonable expectation that they won’t get stoned to death by a mob.
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A nominee for the 2010 best-play Tony Award—and, in my opinion, Ruhl’s strongest work so far—In the Next Room is set in the 1880s, sometime soon after Joseph Mortimer Granville invented the electric vibrator. Granville’s idea was to relieve muscle aches. But Ruhl’s earnest Dr. Givings has developed a thriving practice in a “prosperous spa town outside of New York City” by using the vibrator to treat hysteria—a “madness of the womb” that’s said to express itself in all kinds of unpleasant physical and emotional symptoms. Sounding more like a medieval alchemist than a modern doctor, Givings explains that hysteria is triggered by excess liquids in the uterus; sessions with the vibrator—which looks like a hand-held orbital sander and gets placed, as discreetly as possible, on the patient’s vulva—”invite the juices downward” and out of the body. Just the thing for exquisitely repressed Victorian women of means, for whom an orgasm is the spasm that dare not speak its name.
Into Dr. Givings’s home consulting room comes one such woman, Sabrina Daldry, wearing widow’s weeds even though Mr. Daldry still lives. Her complaints include sensitivities to light and cold, weeping spells, and ghosts in her green parlor curtains. The doctor diagnoses hysteria and starts his treatments. Sabrina’s mood and fashion choices brighten up immediately.
Sandy Shinner’s staging is just about perfect, down to the charmingly coy differences in how Kate Fry’s Catherine and Polly Noonan’s Sabrina come. (For Sabrina, it’s all in the spine; Catherine does a sweet thing with her foot.) Joel Gross is more than a romantic figure as Leo—he’s a principled profligate, expressing the often-ignored ideals that accompanied 19th-century bohemianism. Patricia Kane imparts a similar richness to Dr. Givings’s assistant, Annie. And as Givings himself, Mark Montgomery bears a hilarious resemblance to Eliot Spitzer—not only physically but in his nerdish seriousness.
