In The Next Room Or The Vibrator Play BROADWAY REVIEWS

NY TIMES
AP
USA TODAY
VARIETY
NY MAG

Opening Night:: November 19, 2009
Closing:: January 20, 2010

Theater: Lyceum Theatre / 149 West 45th Street, New York, NY, 10036

Synopsis:

A provocative, funny, touching and marvelously entertaining story about a young doctor and his wife set at the dawn of the age of electricity in the 1880s. Back then hysteria was a real diagnosis, and women were commonly treated with electrical stimulating machines to ease their condition! Playwright Sarah Ruhl wondered what exactly doctors were thinking when they used vibrator therapies on their female patients. And what did women think was happening to them? In the Next Room or the vibrator play looks at a young technology-obsessed doctor and the devoted wife who longs to connect with him -- but not electrically.

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NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF In The Next Room Or The Vibrator Play

Beyond Electricity, Toward Female Emancipation
CHARLES ISHERWOOD

November 20, 2009: Alert the authorities. Shocking sexual acts are taking place on the stage of the Lyceum Theater, right in the heart of the Broadway theater district, so recently scrubbed free of all smut and seeded with lawn chairs. Acts involving three people at a time, no less. A man and two women, a woman and two men, sometimes three men.

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ASSOCIATED PRESS REVIEW OF In The Next Room Or The Vibrator Play

The dawn of electricity and the quest for sexual fulfillment. Who knew the two could be linked so satisfactorily on stage? But then Thomas Edison gets profusely thanked in Sarah Ruhl's "In the Next Room or the vibrator play," a perceptive comedy about female liberation of a very specific kind.
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USA TODAY REVIEW OF In The Next Room Or The Vibrator Play

More than a decade after Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues premiered downtown, an equally provocative and not unrelated v-word is making its Broadway debut.
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VARIETY REVIEW OF In The Next Room Or The Vibrator Play

Victorian repression gets a rude poke in Sarah Ruhl's typically idiosyncratic rumination on women's struggle to understand and explore their sexual selves, "In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play." While the signature 19th century ailment being treated is "hysteria," the chief weakness is the bipolar disorder of the inconsistent second act, which shifts uncertainly between serious developments and the more farcical business of romantic cross-currents. But there are so many lingering moments of emotional truth, and even more of daring comedy, that the play amuses and charms even if it doesn't quite satisfy.
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NEW YORK MAGAZINE REVIEW OF In The Next Room Or The Vibrator Play

Sarah Ruhl should write more porn. Her works of brainy, feathered whimsy generally hover a few safe inches over dolorous themes—death, depression, unbridgeable distances between the sexes and between people in general. But her latest, the giggly, teasing, shamelessly entertaining In the Next Room or the vibrator play, displays something new: a pornographer’s instinct for instant gratification.
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