In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)
2010 Tony Award Nominated - Best Play
By Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Scott Edmiston
Featuring Marianna Bassham and Anne Gottlieb
September 17 - October 16, 2010
Runtime: 2 hours and 30 minutes including one 10-minute intermission
"A Superb Production! ...[In the Next Room] produces the kind of electricity that only human beings – and great theater – can generate." —Boston Globe
"Exquisitely Funny! ...A cross between I Love Lucy and Desperate Housewives." —Boston Phoenix
"A Stellar Production! [In the Next Room] is a riotously funny, poignant tale." —Boston Metro
This laugh-out-loud, provocative and touching play is a comedy about marriage, intimacy and electricity. Set in the 1880s 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 and how his new therapy affects their entire household.
September/October 2010
| SUN | MON | TUE | WED | THU | FRI | SAT |
| SEP 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 8:00 PM |
18 4:00 PM 8:00 PM |
| 19 3:00 PM |
20 | 21 | 22 7:30 PM |
23 7:30 PM |
24 8:00 PM |
25 4:00 PM 8:00 PM |
| 26 3:00 PM w/talkback |
27 | 28 | 29 7:30 PM |
30 7:30 PM |
OCT 1 8:00 PM |
2 4:00 PM 8:00 PM |
| 3 3:00 PM w/Spirituality & Arts talkback |
4 | 5 | 6 7:30 PM |
7 7:30 PM |
8 8:00 PM |
9 4:00 PM 8:00 PM |
| 10 3:00 PM w/talkback |
11 | 12 7:30 PM |
13 7:30 PM |
14 7:30 PM |
15 8:00 PM |
16 4:00 PM 8:00 PM |
Cast Biographies
MARIANNA BASSHAM* (Sabrina Daldry) SpeakEasy: Blackbird (Elliot Norton Award) and Reckless (IRNE Award). Local: Little Black Dress (Boston Playwrights' Theatre); Othello (Commonwealth Shakespeare); The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Love's Labor's Lost, and The Merchant of Venice (Actors' Shakespeare Project, Resident Acting Company member); A Streetcar Named Desire, Silence, Tartuffe, Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Quills (New Rep); Miss Witherspoon and Talley's Folly (The Lyric); Antigone and Not Enough Air (The Nora). Outside Boston: Gloucester Stage, Wellfleet Harbor Actors' Theater, Great Lakes Theater Festival, Oldcastle Theatre, Stoneham Theatre, New Century Theatre, and St. Michael's Playhouse. Up next: afterlife: a ghost story (New Rep).
CRAIG WESLEY DIVINO* (Leo Irving) SpeakEasy: Debut. New York: King John (workshop); The Two Noble Kinsmen (Guerrilla Shakespeare Project); Romeo and Hamlet (Gayfest 2010). Regional: Arcadia, Rx, The Winter's Tale (Chautauqua Theater Co.); A Christmas Carol (Trinity Rep); In Spite of the Devil (B/T Playwrights Rep); Henry V (Rites and Reason); Pericles, The Learned Ladies, The Cure at Troy, Camino Real, Angels in America: Perestroika (Brown/Trinity Consortium). Film: Girlfriend, The Replacement Child. MFA: Brown University/Trinity Rep Consortium.
ANNE GOTTLIEB* (Catherine Givings) is delighted to return to SpeakEasy, having played Etty Hillesum in The Wrestling Patient and Mary Haines in The Women. Anne recently appeared in Blithe Spirit for the Lyric Stage and as Sophie Treadwell in the Nora Theatre Company’s production of Not Enough Air. Other favorite credits include, Emma in Betrayal and “C” in Crave (Nora Theatre Company), Stevie in The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia? (Gloucester Stage Co.); Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra (Boston Theatre Works); and Celia in As you Like it (Shakespeare & Company). Anne formed Forty Magnolias Productions five years ago and co-produced the world premiere of The Wrestling Patient with SpeakEasy and Boston Playwrights’ Theatre in 2009. Her original adaptation of the myth of Gilgamesh toured to the Roy Hart International Centre in Southern France. Anne teaches with the Michael Chekhov Association. She is a Resident Scholar in Collaborative Theatre at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. In memory of Penny Lewis.
FRANCES IDLEBROOK (Annie) is excited to be making her SpeakEasy debut. A native of Maine, Frances was most recently seen in To the Moon with The Theater at Monmouth. Other past roles include Adam in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) at The Dorset Theatre Festival, Romaine Patterson and Aaron Kreifels in the Maine Humanities Council tour of The Laramie Project, Frenchy in Grease, Sarah Siddons in The Actor’s Nightmare, and Rosalind in As You Like It with Ten Bucks Theatre. She thanks her daughter Clara for letting her go play.
LINDSEY MCWHORTER* (Elizabeth), giving glory to God, is overjoyed to be making her SpeakEasy debut! She received her MFA in Acting from Brandeis and her BA in Theatre Arts from Alabama State. Lindsey began at the Hangar Theatre where she later appeared as Elise in The Overwhelming. Lindsey previously appeared as Patricia in Good Goods at Yale. In Boston, Lindsey has appeared as Abigail in In the Continuum (Up You Mighty Race) and Hymen in As You Like It (CSC). She has also performed with Montana Repertory Theatre, Berkshire Theatre Festival, Idaho Summer Repertory, and Double Edge Theatre Company.
DENNIS TRAINOR, JR.* (Mr. Daldry) is happy to be making his SpeakEasy debut. Boston-area credits include The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (Gloucester Stage); Picasso at the Lapin Agile (New Rep); The Pain and The Itch (Company One); The Rainmaker (Foothills); November (Lyric Stage); The Seagull (The Publick); and MacBeth (North). Selected New York Credits: The Winter’s Tale (SoHo Rep); Waiting for Godot (Expanded Arts), Mac Wellman’s Cellophane (The Flea) Loose Ends. Dennis is also a writer, whose plays include I Coulda Been a Kennedy (NYC Fringe Festival), Plug (Inaugural production, Rude Mechanicals) and the independently produced TV pilot, Consenting Adults (Artful Dodger Productions). He is the writer and sole performer for the political comedy online video series The Hermit with Davis Fleetwood (well over 200 episodes), which earned a 2007 Best of YouTube nomination and led to a stint as a writer and media consultant for Dennis Kucinich's 2008 presidential campaign. He holds an MFA in Acting from American Conservatory Theatre and is a proud member of Actors' Equity.
DERRY WOODHOUSE* (Dr. Givings) is thrilled to return to SpeakEasy having played Mr. Lockhart in The Seafarer, for which he shared an Elliot Norton Award for Best Ensemble and an IRNE nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Derry has worked extensively in the Boston area with the Súgán Theatre, Tír na Theatre Company, Public Theatre, Gloucester Stage, Stoneham Theatre, and Wellesley Summer Theatre. Other credits include productions of Molly Sweeney in LA; Stones In His Pockets in Cincinnati, New Hampshire, New York, and Belgium; Mojo Mickybo in New York, and The Beauty Queen of Leenane in Florida. Film credits include: Deportation, Blue Monday, and The Departed.
*Member of Actors' Equity Association (AEA), the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States.
Playwright Sarah Ruhl
In a recent New Yorker profile, John Lahr wrote: “Sarah Ruhl writes in a poised, crystalline style about things that are irrational and invisible…Her form of realism is full of astonishments, surprises, and mysteries.” She explains, “I’m interested in the things theatre can do that other forms can’t. I like plays that have revelations in the moment, where emotions transform almost inexplicably…Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned.”
Born in 1974, Ruhl grew up in Wilmette, Illinois, the product of a father who marketed toys but had a love for the intellectual belying his profession and a mother who was a school teacher by day and a community theatre actor/director at night. Ruhl and her older sister gained an appreciation for music and language from their parents during their Saturday morning pancake breakfasts featuring a new vocabulary word and its etymology along with the maple syrup. Her father died of bone cancer when she was twenty, and Ruhl took a year off from undergraduate studies at Brown University. During that time she published a book of poetry called “Death in Another Country.”
When she picked up her studies again at Brown, Ruhl signed up for a playwriting class with Paula Vogel. Her first play, a ten-minute exercise to write something from the point of view of a dog, was a kabuki-style drama featuring a dog baying on the front step because his master has died and is not coming home. Vogel has said that she was so moved by the short play that she offered to work with Ruhl on the spot, but Ruhl stated her intention was to be a poet, not a playwright.
When Ruhl returned from a year of studying abroad, she asked Vogel to be her advisor for a thesis paper about actresses in the 19th-century novel. Vogel agreed, but only if she wrote a play instead. The result was Ruhl’s first full length work, Passion Play, which Vogel submitted to Trinity Rep’s New Play Festival where is was directed by Peter DuBois. About that experience Ruhl has said, “At a visceral level, watching the play, I thought, ‘This is it.’ Some people stood. It was momentous and strange.”
She took two years off before returning to Brown for an MFA in playwriting, dividing her time between New York and Chicago teaching and doing some writing. During that period she collaborated with Joyce Piven on an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando for Piven’s theatre in Evanston, Illinois. Ruhl had taken classes there as a child and credits Piven with instilling in her “the thrill of transformation” as they used only language to bring fairy tales, myths and stories to life with no props or sets.
During her two years of graduate work Ruhl wrote three more full length plays: Eurydice, Melancholy Play and Late: a cowboy song (all published in 2007.) She stayed in Providence for another year, teaching at Wheaton College and sending her plays out, before moving to Los Angeles for a four year stint while her future husband, child psychiatrist, Tony Charuvastra, did his residency there.
Eurydice was given thirteen staged readings all over the country before Madison Rep decided to mount a full production. As frustrating as it was to participate in endless staged readings and “development” sessions, Ruhl’s work was becoming known by artistic directors far and wide. She received a commission from Playwrights’ Horizons in 2002 and another from the McCarter Theatre which enabled her to write the first act of The Clean House.
The Clean House had four regional theatre productions, firmly establishing Ruhl’s reputation as one of America’s most exciting young playwrights. It earned her the 2004 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and was a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist. The Lincoln Center Theatre production opened to critical acclaim in 2006, a year that also made her a mother (daughter Anna was born in April) and a McArthur Fellow. Her next play, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, premiered at Playwright’s Horizon in 2008 starring Mary-Louise Parker.
In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play was produced by Lincoln Center in 2009. According to Ruhl, the inspiration for the play came from reading Rachel Maines’ book, The Technology of Orgasm, but, as she wrote for broadway.com:
Though the vibrator may have been the play’s starting point, ultimately it is the silence between people, and how they manage to shatter it, that draws me to these characters. And I think as sophisticated as we moderns are, we certainly understand silence between people—and the comedy (or tragedy) that results when two people in adjacent rooms are unable or unwilling to speak.
In the Next Room was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and nominated for the 2010 Tony Award for Best Play. The New York Times proclaimed it, “Insightful, fresh and funny, the play is as rich in thought as it is in feeling…It is a true novelty: a sex comedy designed not for sniggering teenage boys – but for adults with open hearts and minds.”
—Suzanne Bixby
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Basic Show Information
In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)
By Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Scott Edmiston
Featuring Anne Gottlieb
September 17 - October 16, 2010
PDF Downloads
Hi-Resolution Images
 A woman (Anne Gottlieb) listens in as her doctor husband treats a new patient in a scene from IN THE NEXT ROOM (or the vibrator play), running now through October 17 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street, in the South End. Tix/Info: 617-933-8600. Photo: Stratton McCrady. |
 Two women (from left, Marianna Bassham and Anne Gottlieb) experiment with a new invention in a scene from IN THE NEXT ROOM (or the vibrator play), running now through October 17 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street, in the South End. Tix/Info: 617-933-8600. Photo: Stratton McCrady. |
 A doctor’s wife (Anne Gottlieb) speaks with the husband of one of her husband’s patients (Dennis Trainor, Jr.) in a scene from IN THE NEXT ROOM (or the vibrator play), running now through October 17 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street, in the South End. Tix/Info: 617-933-8600. Photo: Stratton McCrady. |
 Anne Gottlieb and Derry Woodhouse in a scene from IN THE NEXT ROOM (or the vibrator play), running now through October 17 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street, in the South End. Tix/Info: 617-933-8600. Photo: Stratton McCrady. |
 (From left): Marianna Bassham, Lindsey McWhorter, and Anne Gottlieb in a scene from IN THE NEXT ROOM (or the vibrator play), running now through October 17 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street, in the South End. Tix/Info: 617-933-8600. Photo: Stratton McCrady. |
 From left: Marianna Bassham and Anne Gottlieb in a scene from IN THE NEXT ROOM (or the vibrator play), running now through October 17 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street, in the South End. Tix/Info: 617-933-8600. Photo: Stratton McCrady. |
 A nurse (Frances Idlewood) comforts her patient (Marianna Bassham) in a scene from IN THE NEXT ROOM (or the vibrator play), running now through October 17 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street, in the South End. Tix/Info: 617-933-8600. Photo: Stratton McCrady. |
 A doctor (Derry Woodhouse) marvels at his latest invention in a scene from IN THE NEXT ROOM (or the vibrator play), running now through October 17 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street, in the South End. Tix/Info: 617-933-8600. Photo: Stratton McCrady. |
 An artist (Craig Wesley Divino) charms a doctor’s wife (Anne Gottlieb) in a scene from IN THE NEXT ROOM (or the vibrator play), running now through October 17 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street, in the South End. Tix/Info: 617-933-8600. Photo: Stratton McCrady. |
 A surprising friendship blooms between a nurse (Frances Idlewood, left) and a patient (Marianna Bassham, right) in a scene from IN THE NEXT ROOM (or the vibrator play), running now through October 17 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street, in the South End. Tix/Info: 617-933-8600. Photo: Stratton McCrady. |
