In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play

Finalist 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Best Play Nominee Tony Awards 2010

This is a comedy about marriage, intimacy, and electricity

It's set in the 1880s at the dawn of the age of electricity and it's 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

In a seemingly perfect, well-to-do Victorian home, proper gentleman and scientist Dr Givings has innocently invented an extraordinary new device for treating "hysteria" in women (and occasionally men) - the Vibrator

Meanwhile, adjacent to the doctor’s laboratory, his young and energetic wife tends to their new-born daughter

And wonders exactly what is going on In the Next Room

And when a new “hysterical” patient and her husband bring a wet-nurse and their own complicated relationship into the doctor’s home, Doctor and Mrs Givings must examine the nature of their own marriage and what it truly means to love someone

The Cast

DOCTOR GIVINGS – A man in his forties, a specialist in gynecological and hysterical disorders

CATHERINE GIVINGS – His wife, a woman in her late twenties

SABRINA DALDRY – His patient, a woman in her early thirties

ANNIE – A woman in her late thirties, Dr. Giving’s midwife assitant

LEO IRVING – Doctor Giving’s other patient, an Englishman in his twenties or thirties

ELIZABETH – An African-American woman in her early thirties. A wetnurse by default

MR DALDRY – Sabrina Daldry’s husband, a man in his forties or fifties

This laugh out loud, provocative and touching play premiered at Berkeley Rep and subsequently marked Sarah Ruhl’s Broadway debut opening at the Lyceum Theatre on November 19th, 2009

“Insightful, fresh and funny, the play is as rich in thought as it is in feeling ... from one of the most gifted and adventurous American playwrights to emerge in recent years” ~ New York Times

“A play that's smart, delicate and very, very funny!” ~ New York Post

“The playwright mines her subject for suitably bawdy humor without resorting to vulgarity. But what really gives the work its distinction is its sensitive exploration of the physical and emotional repression suffered by the women of the era, which has yet to disappear entirely ... The play beautifully balances its humor and pathos” ~ Hollywood Reporter

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