Dr. Givings (Paul Niebanck) is a no-nonsense man of science, a skilled technician who, like a Michael Palin character in a Monty Python sketch, stands rigid and erect, his face an idiotic mask of formality, as he pleasures a female patient with an electric vibrator until she cries out in ecstasy for deliverance from above. Catherine (Hannah Cabell), his wife, is a new mother who’s guided by a loopy logic that bubbles uncontrollably from her lips pretty much whenever she opens her mouth. He is all restraint and control; she is all impulse.
The good doctor and his wife are the most richly drawn characters in Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), now playing at Berkeley Rep, but that, alas, is not saying much. Like the rest of the play’s characters who mechanically enter and exit the two-room set, Givings and his wife are tired clichés, which makes their eventual catharses and epiphanies about life, love and the virtues of being connected to each other in an honest and human way so implausible. Where, we wonder, could their insights have possibly come from?
Ruhl’s play is set in the United States at the dawn of the electric age. Like the Givings’ newborn daughter, the 20th century is barely in its infancy. For privileged people like Catherine, her doctor husband and his patients, the world is a place of endless social constraints and unlimited technological possibilities. In addition to bringing light to homes once illuminated by fire, electricity has spawned a number of crackerjack new inventions, including electric vibrators, which are used by male doctors to treat women (mostly) whom they have diagnosed with hysteria. The cure involves bringing these women to orgasm so that the fluids putting pressure on their wombs can be released. What they need, in other words, is a good lay.
Or at least that’s how Samantha on Sex and the City might explain it to Carrie today. But as I watched these uptight Victorians in their gorgeous costumes (hats off to David Zinn) busy themselves in scene after scene, I wondered if perhaps Ruhl’s decision to set her play about marriage and intimacy in this particular era mired it needlessly in the anachronistic. Sure I was drawn to her source material: The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction by Rachel P. Maines sounds like a terrific read. I’m not sure, though, that it makes a terrific play. I concede that sexual intimacy remains confusing terrain for a great many couples, even in “a time when pornography is mainstream,” as Ruhl puts it. But like the emotional and sexual repression of the Victorian era, pornography is an extreme. A more accurate picture of the “mainstream” are the millions of younger potential theater-goers who have grown up with American Pie, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Juno. For them, I fear, Ruhl’s play is going to seem like so much whining by so many confused old people, who probably shouldn’t be thinking so much about sex in the first place.
Worse than the cartoon personalities of the lead actors is the relationship between the play’s white female characters and its solitary black one. Consider this on-stage geometry: In one corner is Catherine, who recently bore a child but cannot produce any milk. Sitting next to her is her husband’s female patient, Sabrina Daldry (Maria Dizzia), who cannot bear a child. Opposite them is Elizabeth (Melle Powers), Sabrina’s black housekeeper who a) has just lost a baby so has plenty of milk to spare for Catherine’s daughter, b) manages to hold down a job despite her recent loss and two kids at home, c) has a loving husband who is not afraid to express himself emotionally and d) is the only one of the bunch who can recognize an orgasm when it’s described to her in dripping detail because she’s the only one of them who has actually had one during “relations” with her husband. In fact, she’s so clear-eyed that she even understands that when it comes to the performance of one’s marital duties with one’s husband, orgasms are not always a sure thing. No, these wealthy white chicks don’t stand a chance against this black earth mama, who’s wise beyond her station in life and class. I understand that Ruhl is using Elizabeth to make certain points, but the over-reaching near-deification of the character had a racial edge to it that made me squirm.
