<b>✭✭✭</b>✩✩
<b>by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Richard Rose
Tarragon Theatre & The Manitoba Theatre Centre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
September 21-October 23, 2011
</b>
“Low Voltage”
The Tarragon Theatre has opened its 41st season with a handsome production of an insubstantial play. The way the title for Sarah Ruhl’s play <i>In the Next Room or the vibrator play</i> spells out the play’s subject typifies the whole play’s self-satisfied attitude by saying “Look how we can talk about naughty things that the benighted Victorians could not.” It’s a play that can’t decide if it should be an overt sex farce or a poetic examination of male-female relations in a male-dominated society--and so winds up as neither.
The subject of the play is hysteria, deriving from the Greek ὑστέρα for uterus, since from ancient times into the 20th century it was in that anatomical region that the problem of emotional excess was believed to originate. It was accordingly thought of as a woman’s disease and from ancient times the treatment was massage of the female genitalia to cause “paroxysms” of release. Unsurprisingly, since the patient felt much better afterwards, the treatment was thought to work and reinforced the correctness the of disease’s origins.
Ruhl sets her play in a spa town in New York in the 1880s just after the advent of electricity. Time-consuming manual “pelvic massage”, as it was called, has now been replaced with the much more fast-acting electric vibrator. Dr. Givings (David Storch) is in the forefront in using this technology in the surgery he has in his own home. The first patient we meet is Sabrina Daldry (Melody A. Johnson), who complaints of listlessness, nervousness and sighting ghosts in the drapes. Dr. Givings immediately diagnoses as hysteria. Though fearful at first, Mrs. Daldry’s first treatment is so successful in calming her and restoring a rosy glow to her cheeks that she soon becomes enthusiastic about her daily sessions.
Meanwhile, Dr. Givings’ wife Catherine (Trish Lindström) has just had a baby and can’t supply enough milk for it. The Daldry’s black housekeeper Elizabeth (Marci T. House) has just lost a baby and so becomes a wetnurse for the Givingses. This leaves Catherine with nothing to do but wonder what all those ecstatic sounds are that emanate from the next room and, when she sees it, what the machine is that her husband has and how to use it.
As might be expected the vast majority of the play’s humour derives from the use of the electric vibrator--a wonderful large Dr. Seuss-like floor model (a triumph for Head of Props Lokki Ma) that plugs into the lamp overhead. The fun comes from the contrast between the completely dispassionate expression of Dr. Givings and the surprised pleasure of the patient--both, apparently, entirely ignorant that this medical procedure has involved erotic pleasure. The problem with this is that the play is nothing but the repetition of the same joke. As a variation, Ruhl introduces the artist Leo Irving (Jonathan Watton), a patient with a rare case of male hysteria, who takes the extraordinarily unlikely step for the period of agreeing with Givings’ diagnosis and submitting to his treatment. (Though he’s thoroughly heterosexual, at the time admitting to “male hysteria” was tantamount to admitting homosexuality.) Ruhl has patients become involved with the Givings household in various farfetched ways that one might accept if she were willing to frame her play as a farce but she veers from this because she also wants to depict Catherine’s loneliness seriously.
Director Richard Rose’s stop-and-start pacing only emphasizes Ruhl’s unsuccessful mixture of tones. He also seems unable to help the actors fill out Ruhl’s two-dimensional characters. Lindström, who has given many excellent performances elsewhere, here displays pointlessly frenetic activity instead of gradating her character’s reactions. Storch gives so little sign of any emotion stirring under his businesslike façade as to make his turnabout by the play’s ending unbelievable. Johnson is very good at depicting Mrs. Daldry’s varying levels of therapeutic enjoyment, but can’t seem to give her character life outside the surgery. Ross McMillan does little with the unvaried cliché of male chauvinism that Ruhl has given him, while Elizabeth Saunders does as much as she can with the thankless role of the nurse Annie, who does little for most of the play but dress and undress the doctor’s examining table.
On the other hand, Watton is able to make the rather fantastical artist at least partially believable and, unlike the others, to attract our interest in his actions. As one might expect from a political correct author, Ruhl is unwilling to have humour extend to a black woman present in a serving position so that Elizabeth becomes the only stable, morally-centred character in the play. House plays her with earnestness and dignity suggesting that Ruhl might have written a far more engaging work if she could have forgotten about vibrators and focussed solely on the complex relation between a wetnurse recovering from the death of her baby and a flighty new mother.
David Boechler has created a beautiful set divided exactly in half as two rooms, including wittily dividing a single pouf into two distinct styles. Ruhl’s use of a divided set offers all sorts of theatrical possibilities--such as interlocking dialogues as in Ionesco’s <i>Rhinoceros</i> or juxtaposing parallel or contrasting scenes--but she makes no use of them, simply switching attention from one room to the other and back. For Ruhl the divided set is a visual symbol, and nothing more, of the clichéd view that Victorians kept procreation and sexual pleasure in separate compartments. With an attractive design and a cast with lots of potential, all that is missing is a fine play. Ignorant, repressed Victorians are such an easy target. If only Ruhl could imagine how people 100 years hence will view our practices, she might be less smug.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: Trish Lindström, David Storch, Elizabeth Saunders (standing) and Melody A. Johnson (on table). ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://www.tarragontheatre.com">www.tarragontheatre.com</a>.
<b>2011-09-21</b>
<b>In the Next Room or the vibrator play</b>