Sarah Ruhl

"One hundred incisive, idiosyncratic essays on life and theater from a major American playwright "Don't send your characters to reform school!" pleads Sarah Ruhl in one of her essays. With titles as varied as "On Lice" to "On Sleeping in Theaters" and "Motherhood and Stools (The Furniture Kind)," these essays are artful meditations on life in the arts and joyous jumbles of observations on everything in between. The pieces combine admonition, celebration, inquiry, jokes, assignments, entreaties, prayers,and advice: honest reflections distilled from years of working in the theater. They offer candid accounts of what it is like to be a mother and an artist, along with descriptions of how Ruhl's children's dreams, jokes, and songs work themselves into her writing. 100 Essays is not just a book about the theater. It is a map of a very particular artistic sensibility and a guide for anyone who has chosen an artist's life"--

On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write

Dramatic Comedy / 5m, 2f / Unit Set In Eurydice, Sarah Ruhl reimagines the classic myth of Orpheus through the eyes of its heroine. Dying too young on her wedding day, Eurydice must journey to the underworld, where she reunites with her father and struggles to remember her lost love. With contemporary characters, ingenious plot twists, and breathtaking visual effects, the play is a fresh look at a timeless love story. "RHAPSODICALLY BEAUTIFUL. A weird and wonderful new play - an inexpressibly

Eurydice

The extraordinary story of one woman’s ten-year medical and metaphysical odyssey that brought her physical, creative, emotional, and spiritual healing, by a MacArthur genius and two-time Pulitzer finalist. At the height of her career, with her first play opening on Broadway, and a happily married mother of three, Sarah Ruhl had just survived a high-risk twins pregnancy when she discovered the left side of her face completely paralyzed. She is assured that ninety percent of Bell’s palsy patients see spontaneous improvement and experience a full recovery. Like Ruhl’s own mother. Like Angelina Jolie. But Sarah is in the unlucky ten percent. And for a woman, wife, mother, and artist working in theater, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior brings significant and specific challenges. So Ruhl begins an intense decade-long search for a cure while simultaneously grappling with the reality of her new face—one that, while recognizably her own—is incapable of accurately communicating feelings or intentions. In a series of piercing, witty, and lucid meditations, Ruhl chronicles her journey as a patient, wife, mother, and artist. She explores the struggle of a body yearning to match its inner landscape, the pain of postpartum depression, the story of a marriage, being a playwright and working mom to three tiny children, and the desire for a resilient spiritual life in the face of illness. Brimming with insight, humility, and levity, Smile is a triumph by one of America’s leading playwrights. It is an intimate examination of loss and reconciliation, and above all else, the importance of perseverance and hope in the face of adversity.

The Story of a Face

Smile

First produced by the Berkeley Repertory Theater, at the Berkeley Rep Roda Theater in Berkeley, California, in February 2009.

In the Next Room, Or, the Vibrator Play

Typescript, dated opening night Oct. 30, 2006. Used by The New York Public Library's Theatre on Film and Tape Archive on Jan. 25, 2007, when videotaping the stage production by Lincoln Center Theater at Mitzi E. Newhouse, New York, N.Y. The production was directed by Bill Rauch.

The Clean House

Max Ritvo

In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet. He was also in remission from pediatric cancer. Over the next four years—in which Ritvo’s illness returned and his health declined, even as his productivity bloomed—the two exchanged letters that spark with urgency, humor, and the desire for connection. Reincarnation, books, the afterlife as an Amtrak quiet car, good soup: in Ruhl and Ritvo’s exchanges, all ideas are fair, nourishing game, shared and debated in a spirit of generosity and love. “We’ll always know one another forever, however long ever is,” Ritvo writes. “And that’s all I want—is to know you forever.” Studded with poems and songs, Letters from Max is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and the afterlife.

A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship

Letters from Max

Dead Man's Cell Phone

* A People Best Book of the Year * Time and The Washington Post’s Most Anticipated List * Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence * From the MacArthur genius, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and playwright, this “captivating, insightful memoir” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) is “a beautiful meditation on identity and how we see ourselves” (Real Simple). With a play opening on Broadway, and every reason to smile, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high-risk pregnancy when she discovers the left side of her face is completely paralyzed. She is assured that 90 percent of Bell’s palsy patients experience a full recovery—like Ruhl’s own mother. But Sarah is in the unlucky ten percent. And for a woman, wife, mother, and artist working in theater, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior brings significant and specific challenges. So Ruhl begins an intense decade-long search for a cure while simultaneously grappling with the reality of her new face—one that, while recognizably her own—is incapable of accurately communicating feelings or intentions. In a series of piercing, profound, and lucid meditations, Ruhl chronicles her journey as a patient, wife, mother, and artist. She explores the struggle of a body yearning to match its inner landscape, the pain of postpartum depression, the story of a marriage, being a playwright and working mom to three small children, and the desire for a resilient spiritual life in the face of illness. An intimate and “stunning” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) examination of loss and reconciliation, “Ruhl reminds us that a smile is not just a smile but a vital form of communication, of bonding, of what makes us human” (The Washington Post). Brimming with insight, humility, and levity, Smile is a triumph by one of America’s leading playwrights.

A Memoir

The first publication of a major new voice of the American Theatre.

The Clean House and Other Plays

The clean house and other plays

Todd Almond

In this chamber musical version of Sarah Ruhl's Melancholy Play, Tilly's melancholy is of an exquisite quality. She turns her melancholy into a sexy thing, and every stranger she meets falls in love with her. One day, inexplicably, Tilly becomes happy, and wreaks havoc on the lives of her paramours. Frances, Tilly's hairdresser, becomes so melancholy that she turns into an almond. It is up to Tilly to get her back.

A Chamber Musical

Melancholy Play

An exploration of the relationships between religion, performance, and life. Part I is set in 1575 in an English village whose traditional annual passion-play is about to be outlawed by Queen Elizabeth's anti-Catholic rulings; Part II is set in Oberammergau, 1934, as the town and the play are becoming Nazified; Part III takes place in an American small town from 1969 through the Reagan era and the present.

Passion Play

An incessantly ringing cell phone in a quiet cafe. A stranger at the next table who has had enough. And a dead man - with a lot of loose ends. So begins Dead Man's Cell Phone, the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world.

""Wickedly clever. Ruhl's unique, breezily elegant dialogue is fully present, as is her pleasingly loopy logic."-Variety"In the smart, rollicking Stage Kiss. passion and fidelity engage in a kind of elegant pas de deux. The play manages to be both wholly original and instantly recognizable. with its combination of hilarity and trenchancy."-The New YorkerAward-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl brings her unique mix of lyricism, sparkling humor, and fierce intelligence to her new romantic comedy, Stage Kiss. When estranged lovers He and She are thrown together as romantic leads in a long-forgotten 1930s melodrama, the line between off-stage and on-stage begins to blur. A "knockabout farce that channels Noël Coward and Michael Frayn" (Chicago Tribune), Stage Kiss is a thoughtful and clever examination of the difference between youthful lust and respectful love. Ruhl, one of America's most frequently produced playwrights, proves that a kiss is not just a kiss in this whirlwind romantic comedy, fresh off its acclaimed New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons in winter 2014.Sarah Ruhl's other plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalists In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) and The Clean House, as well as Passion Play, Dead Man's Cell Phone, Demeter in the City, Eurydice, Melancholy Play, and Late: a cowboy song. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a PEN/Laura Pels Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her plays have premiered on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and have been produced in many theaters around the world. "--

Stage Kiss

And Other Essays

What My Phone Won't Teach Me

a play in three ceremonies

The oldest boy

Passion play / Sarah Ruhl.

An enchanting new comedy by Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl.

“This new play is a subversive enchantment. It is part absurd domestic seriocomedy, part erotic magic realism, unflinching about taboos and about questioning that, just maybe, monogamy isn’t enough.” —Linda Winer, Newsday Over dinner with another married couple, George and her husband grow fascinated by stories of their friends’ new acquaintance—an intriguing younger woman named Pip. What begins as an innocent intellectual discussion turns into a sexually explosive New Year’s Eve party after George extends an invitation to Pip and her two live-in boyfriends, raising the question: What ultimately binds human beings together?

How to transcend a happy marriage (TCG Edition)

Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell were two of America's most brilliant poets. Throughout their lifetime, they wrote over 400 letters to each other; spanning decades, continents, political eras. Their connection was messy and profound, platonic yet romantic, intense and intangible. A love that resists easy definition. These are their words. Susan Smith Blackburn award winner Sarah Ruhl has crafted a stunning and quietly bold piece of theatre about what it means to love someone, and all the questions we regret never asking.

Sarah Ruhl

About

Books

Join the club