In the Next Room or the vibrator play
Playhouse, Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts, Hamilton
11/11/2011 - 18/11/2011
Production Details
About the play
In the Next Room or the vibrator play is the spirited, fanciful and stimulating 2009 comedy from Sarah Ruhl.
It is the dawn of a new era – Thomas Edison has provided the world with electricity, illuminating parlours and eliminating the flickering glow of candlelight. The benefits of this technology do not pass unnoticed by Dr Givings. Aided by his nurse Dr Givings provides relief from a common ‘women’s condition’ hysteria – whose symptoms include faintness, nervousness, insomnia, irritability, loss of appetites – by turning on his newly invented vibrator.
Sarah Ruhl’s main ‘player’ may be the antique and Chatanooga vibrators but her real subject is the absence of sympathy and understanding between women and the men whose rules they had to live by, and the suspicion and fear surrounding female sexuality.
In the Next Room or the vibrator play is a comedy about marriage, intimacy and electricity.
Summary
In a seemingly perfect Victorian home gentleman and scientist Dr Givings (Nick Wilkinson) has innocently invented an extraordinary new device for treating hysteria in women (and occasionally men): the vibrator. Adjacent to the doctor’s laboratory, his young and energetic wife Catherine (Stephanie Christian) tries to tend to their newborn daughter – and wonders exactly what is going on in the next room. A new hysterical patient Mrs Daldry (Natalie Sangster) and her husband (Jason Wade) bring a wet nurse (Tendai Sithole) and their own complicated relationship into the doctor’s home. Complexities increase as Mrs Daldry is transformed by the treatment and is drawn to Annie, the midwife (Lydia Foley), the soul of tact and reserve.
Another patient, Leo Irving (Michael Potts), an artist also suffering from hysteria, cannot work since being jilted by a beautiful Italian lover. The treatment opens Leo’s eyes and enables him to paint again. Catherine develops a passion for Leo as he paints Elizabeth and the baby, while Leo falls for his subject. Catherine’s feelings of inadequacy force her to take a more drastic step until Dr and Mrs Givings must examine the nature of their own marriage, and what it truly means to love someone.
Time: the dawn of the age of electricity, circa 1880s.
Place: a prosperous spa town outside of New York City, a town like Saratoga Springs.
This funny, 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. It has had professional productions since in Boston, Philadelphia, Melbourne, Sydney.
Background to Sarah Ruhl’s play
Unwilling to acknowledge that conventional sex did not result in orgasm for most women, doctors for millennia used genital massage to bring on ‘paroxysms’ to relieve a ‘disease’ called hysteria – a cluster of symptoms that included excitability, mood swings, insomnia and restlessness. Near the end of the nineteenth century doctors began to find manual manipulation too slow to be profitable and looked to technology for help in speeding things up.
They turned to the vibrator. By the turn of the century a doctor could take his pick, from the most humble model driven by foot pedals to the top of the line Chattanooga vibrator. By 1952, the American psychiatric association, recognizing that sexual frustration was not pathology, removed hysteria from its roster.
Sarah Ruhl in writing In the Next Room (2009) has drawn on the following:
- The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria” the vibrator and women’s sexual satisfaction by Rachel Maines
- AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War by Tom McNichol
- A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: from Breast to Bottle by Janet Golden
- Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose.
About Sarah Ruhl’s writing
Sarah Ruhl is known for Dead Man’s Cell Phone, The Clean House and Eurydice.
Her characters always exist on both a poetic plane and a flesh-and-blood one, and while the people in this play speak formal English suitable to the period and the social milieu, they also drift into imagistic reveries. She has a gentle impressionistic touch and a gift for playful symbolism. The play is sprinkled with images that underscore its themes: lightness, darkness, moisture and its absence.
Venue: Playhouse, Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts, Hamilton
Thurs 10th November 7:30pm PREVIEW
Fri 11th November 7:30pm OPENING NIGHT
Sat 12th November 7:30pm PERFORMANCE
Sun 13th November 2:00pm MATINEE PERFORMANCE
Tues 15th November 7:30pm PERFORMANCE
Wed 16th November 7:30pm PERFORMANCE
Thurs 17th November 7:30pm PERFORMANCE
Fri 18th November 7:30pm FINAL NIGHT
Contains adult themes, recommended for ages 16 and older
All tickets for preview: $15 – cash at door, no EFTPOS
Email: bookings@carvinginice.co.nz to reserve a seat
Please provide your full name, and how many tickets you wish to book.
CAST
Mrs Givings: Stephanie Christian
Dr Givings: Nick Wilkinson
Mrs Daldry: Natalie Sangster
Mr Daldry: Jason Wade
Elizabeth: Tendai Sithole
Annie: Lydia Foley
Leo: Michael Potts
CREATIVE TEAM
Artistic Director: Gaye Poole
Production Managers: Gaye Poole, Brendan Theodore and Jason Wade
Stage Manager: Brendan Theodore
Scenic Design: Gaye Poole and Jason Wade
Set Construction: Gary Collins
Costume design and construction: Cherie Cooke
Assistant to Cherie Cooke: Joss Robertson
Lighting Design: Al Williamson
Lighting Operation: Callum Braithwaite
Musician: Adam Maha
Piano tuition: Adam Maha
Production/rehearsal assistant: Abbie-Rose Foley
Props acquisition: Gaye Poole
Props assistant: Shaye Petterson
Construction of vibrators: Pip Smith
Front of house coordinator/promotion: Rachel Clarke
Website manager: Brendan Theodore
Graphic Design: Courtney Watt, Catie Wilkinson
Stills photography: Catie Anderson
Videography: Dustin Feneley
Good vibrations bring sexual and emotional emancipation
Review by Gail Pittaway 14th Nov 2011
It’s hard to avoid dreadful puns for this unusual comedy by contemporary American writer Sarah Ruhl, when the subject is the use of an electrical vibrator used by doctors in the late nineteenth century to cure women of hysterical illnesses by inducing physical release, a paroxysm; an orgasm, by any other name. Shocking, stimulating, achieving a resounding climax, ultimately satisfying; there I’ve got some of them out of the way!
Gaye Poole takes her Carving in Ice company to new levels of performance in this beautifully cast and designed production. The set is brilliantly realised as two adjacent rooms, in a nineteenth century home with fine period furnishings, wooden doors and skirting boards and, everywhere in the domestic room, lighting, electric lamps; the marvel of Mr. Edison’s great invention, electricity.
Dr Givings (Nick Wilkinson) is a man of science and invention, a doctor who practices the new technology on his mostly female patients in his home surgery. Meanwhile in the living room, his lively and outspoken wife, Catherine (Stephanie Christian) wonders at the meaning of the strange sounds and cries that come through the door from the next room, when he is treating his patients. They are not sounds she has emitted or heard before.
Gradually, as she interacts with the other patients and visitors to their middle class home, it becomes apparent to her that there are possibilities of intimacy that she and her husband have not ever explored. But is it possible to break through the conventional frigidity and double standards of their times?
Woven into the story of nineteenth century wives and their sexual experiences is an additional complication for Mrs Givings (and I’m sure all puns are intended on her name) when she finds herself not able to feed her new born baby and is persuaded to hire a wet nurse. Enter Elizabeth in a dignified and sensitive performance by Tendai Sithole. Both a servant and a black woman, whose own child has recently died, she offers a paradox for Catherine as saviour and supplanter in her child’s immediate needs. Now Catherine feels dejected and frustrated on many counts and begins in earnest to investigate her husband’s mysterious treatments.
Nick Wilkinson’s deadpan enthusiasm for jabbing the contraption under the discrete surgical sheet at his patients’ groins becomes even more amusing when he expounds on the wonders of electrical currents just as they are clearly in orgasm. The Chattanooga special he produces to relieve his male patient of his tensions is a show stopper.
Apart from these episodes with the special props department and the two spectacular tools for treating patient – one a cross between a microphone and an egg beater, the other a hybrid hand drill attached to a Singer sewing machine – the play has other moments of comedy such as when Mrs Givings befriends her husband’s patient, Mrs Daldry. The two discuss the differences in their respective paroxysms, only to be incredulous when told by Elizabeth that these sensations are usual in the marriage bed.
Having established the situation and the premise in a fast moving first half, the second half of the play is spent in unravelling the complexities, much as an Oscar Wilde drawing room comedy unfolds, with some lengthy speeches, but also with more physical comedy.
Natalie Sangster gives an outstanding portrayal of Mrs Daldry, blossoming not from the treatment but from the friendship and feelings it has awakened in her. Her husband is not so well represented by the writer and comes across as a rather inadequate person, but well portrayed by Jason Wade.
Michael Potts as Leo Irving, an aesthete and artist recently returned from Italy, revels in this a gift of a part with its Wildean asides and flamboyant gestures, while Lydia Foley’s Annie, the warm and practical nurse, is a small but important role in the surgery and in the awakening of Mrs Daldry.
Above all this is a play about the sexual and emotional emancipation of Mrs Givings and Christian gives an utterly convincing performance of this complex character, with infectious openness and spirit.
The costumes – especially underwear – are important, and much is made of the fussiness of buttons and undergarments as symbols of the many barriers to naturalness between husbands and wives.
In the end the imagery of the natural world outside the rooms breaks through and the play ends outside in snow, beyond either room, in a place where the wife can teach her husband how to love.
Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer
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