This tool is unavailable at the moment. Please try again later.
Start planning your production with a cost estimate you can save and share with your team. Just answer a few questions.
This estimator is only for amateur productions. Professional customers should contact the Licensing department directly to enquire about a title's availability: [email protected]
Important: The cost quoted is an estimate only and may differ when you apply for a licence.
A SAMUEL FRENCH, INC. TITLE
Full-Length Play, Dramatic Comedy / 4w, 3m
Sarah Ruhl
Set in the 1880s at the dawn of the age of electricity and based on the bizarre historical fact that doctors used vibrators to treat “hysterical” women (and some men), this revelatory comedy centers on a doctor and his wife and how his new therapy affects their entire household.
Image: 2009 Lincoln Center Theater Production (Joan Marcus)
Finalist: 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Drama Nominee: Three 2010 Tony Awards, including Best Play Winner! 2010 Will Glickman Award for Best New Play to Premiere in the Bay Area Sarah Ruhl is the 2003 recipient of the Whiting Award for Drama
In a seemingly perfect, well-to-do Victorian home, proper gentleman and scientist Dr. Givings 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 tries to tend to their newborn daughter – and wonders exactly what is going on in the next room. When a new “hysterical” patient and her husband bring a wet nurse and their own complicated relationship into the doctor’s home, Dr. and Mrs. Givings must examine the nature of their own marriage, and what it truly means to love someone.
A prosperous spa town outside of New York City, perhaps Saratoga Springs. Circa 1880s.
“Smart, delicate and very, very funny!” – New York Post
“Insightful, fresh and funny, the play is as rich in thought as it is in feeling… one of the most gifted and adventurous American playwrights to emerge in recent years… In the Next Room is a true novelty: a sex comedy designed not for sniggering teenage boys – or grown men who wish they were still sniggering teenage boys – but for adults with open hearts and minds.” – The New York Times
“If Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde had decided to collaborate on a post-modern drawing-room comedy, the hotsy-totsy twosome surely would have turned out something very much like Sarah Ruhl’s genuinely hysterical new work.” – TheatreMania
“Sarah Ruhl… has written a smart, charming, iridescently funny-serious jewel… As Ruhl traces it with wit and insight, and without the slightest prurience, the birth of this new era gives rise to colorful events, astute psychological revelations and endearingly apt dialogue.” – Bloomberg
“The playwright mines her subject for suitably bawdy humor without resorting to vulgarity. But what really gives the work its distinction is its sensitive exploration of the physical and emotional repression suffered by the women of the era, which has yet to disappear entirely… The play beautifully balances its humor and pathos.” – Hollywood Reporter
Spotlight on In the Next Room
Excerpt of Lincoln Center's In the Next Room
Sarah Ruhl’s plays include In the Next Room, or the vibrator play, The Clean House, Passion Play, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Melancholy Play, For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday, The Oldest Boy, Stage Kiss, Dear Elizabeth, Eurydice, How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, Orlando, Late ...