Laura Benanti, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Michael Cerveris, Maria Dizzia, Thomas Jay Ryan, Wendy Rich Stetson, Chandler Williams
directed by
Les Waters
In accordance with the old adage that the grass is always greener on the other side, Sarah Ruhl’s latest play (and her first on Broadway), aptly titled In the Next Room or the vibrator play, makes skillful use of the concept of misinformed expectations in its treatment of post-Civil War sexual revelation in America.
Set in both the medical operating room and the neatly-decorated sitting room of Dr. Givings’s home in a spa town outside of New York City, the play opens with the arrival of a new patient, Mrs. Daldry, whose history of hysteria is sure to be cured by Dr. Givings’s magnificent new device, what is essentially an old-fashioned electric vibrator, used to induce an orgasm and therefore relieve unwanted mental stress – which the doctor believes takes the form of various blockages and fluids.
Though the doctor has found much success in his field, his wife, Mrs. Givings, knows little to nothing about what goes on in the titular next room. She’s just given birth to their first child but seems to know almost nothing about sex. Later in the play, she admits that she’s not seen her husband naked, as he makes love to her hastily as her eyes are closed.
Though Dr. and Mrs. Givings initially seem perfectly happy, the arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Daldry and, later, the wet nurse Elizabeth and the doctor’s male patient Leo Irving, eventually jolt the Givings into realizing that perhaps they didn’t know quite what they thought they did about the workings of love and sex.
To be certain, In the Next Room is not a particularly somber play, though it deals often enough with difficult realities. Ruhl balances, perhaps more skilfully than in any of her other plays to date, the dramatic elements of the story with moments of levity that relieve the audience’s tension, providing forgive me for saying a sort of orgasm of laughter to relieve our mounting hysteria.
Les Waters keeps the evening moving swiftly toward its conclusion, though at times the play seems mysteriously poised between embracing a modern vernacular (particularly in the bouncy, manic, and ultimately satisfying performance of Laura Benanti as Mrs. Givings) and the solemn demeanor of late-nineteenth-century speech, which the ever-solid Michael Cerveris, as Dr. Givings, has down to a T.
In supporting performances, Maria Dizzia as the increasingly well Mrs. Daldry, Chandler Williams as charismatic painter Leo Irving, and in particular Quincy Tyler Bernstine as Elizabeth, all impress. Bernstine, playing the Givings’s wet nurse, still haunted by the loss of her own infant son, makes an indelible impression, bringing into the Givings’s upper-middle-class home a sense that those with less money and fewer opportunities in life often understand more about its simplest bodily workings.
Aesthetically, In the Next Room couldn’t be more pleasing. Rounding out the solid Lincoln Center production are scintillating period costumes by David Zinn and detailed sets by Annie Smart which make a beautiful eleventh-hour transformation with satisfying results.
All in all, Ruhl’s vibrator play is perhaps her most well-structured, most satisfying play to date. Including so many characters who seem so utterly uninformed about the way our bodies work keeps an audience on its toes as modern-day ideas that we typically take for granted present, in their lives, major revelations which advance her well-oiled plot.
