Sarah Ruhl’s theatre career is a bridge. Particularly in her most experimental work, she builds on an artistic lineage that includes her teachers Mac Wellman and Paula Vogel, writers with poetic backbones and haunted brains. Ruhl’s plays—which have been nominated for Pulitzers and for the Tony Award—include the eerie technological fever dream “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” the magic-in-everyday-things reverie “Melancholy Play,” and the epic, erudite triptych “Passion Play.” Her work delights in odd stage pictures, metaphorical flights, and slippery, lyrical logic. In “Melancholy Play,” characters overcome by grief sometimes turn into almonds.
Ruhl is best known, though, for crossing that experimental tradition with the more conventional “drama of ideas,” particularly in her most recent works. As wild as events get in her feminist plots, her protagonists are often capable women of the middle class, almost always married, grappling with how to surrender to larger mysteries. Lincoln Center—hardly an avant-garde stronghold—is her primary artistic home in New York and the place where she has brought such comic dramas as “The Clean House,” “How to Transcend a Happy Marriage,” and “The Oldest Boy.” (It also produced “In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play,” her only venture on Broadway.) Now she brings Lincoln Center “Becky Nurse of Salem,” and, though it’s recognizably Ruhl-esque, the problems confronting her central character seem darkened by some new knowledge and anger. Deirdre O’Connell plays Becky, a many-times-removed descendant of a victim of the Salem witch trials, who decides that the solution to her problems is, ironically, a bit of sorcery. O’Connell, who recently won the Tony for “Dana H.,” gives a ribald, earthy, hilarious performance. At one point, Becky learns from her neighborhood witch that she’ll need to supply some of her own, shall we say, “intimate excretions” for a love charm, so she turns her back, unbuttons her pants, and goes straight to the source.
Ruhl coined the term “Ovidian form” to describe plays based, as so many of hers are, on transformations. But her elliptical, changeable dramaturgies straighten out when she writes for the page. Her plays waltz, but her books clap you on the shoulder. She has published a sprightly nonfiction collection titled “100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write” and two books of verse, one written during the pandemic shutdown. After her student Max Ritvo, a brilliant poet, died at the age of twenty-five, in 2016, she also published a book of their correspondence, “Letters from Max,” which served as her final communication with a mind whose loss she deeply grieved. Her finest book, so far, is the transcendent memoir “Smile,” about her experience being stricken with Bell’s palsy, an onset of asymmetrical facial paralysis, after a pregnancy. Most playwright memoirs are delicious for their old gossip and insights into craft, but “Smile” is something else entirely: a touchstone for anyone in medical or psychological distress. By turns enraging and meditative, “Smile” distills her roving responses—grief, fury, terror, acceptance, fury again—into clear expressions of how to cope when your face goes awry. It is the book I have reached for most in the past year. None of us are living with the face we want, these days.
Ruhl spoke with me by phone, just a few days before “Becky Nurse of Salem” opened. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
Where are you today—are you at the theatre? Where are you in the process for the show?
I am in the basement of Lincoln Center. I am here because there’s a talkback later, and I’m hiding while it’s raining out. I did a ritual yesterday with the actors to give the show away to them. And, because the show involves witches, we felt the need to do a witchy ritual—or at least I did.
Can you tell me what the witchy ritual was?
It involved four elements: fire, air, water, dirt. And it involved setting intentions, which is something that is common to so many ritual practices and the theatre predating Stanislavski. There’s a line in the play when the witch asks how do you expect spirits to hear you, if you don’t say things out loud. It’s something I’ve thought about for a while in terms of ritual—and of course theatre.
Do you have other rituals that are part of your work?
I carry a little pink Ganesh that Tina Howe gave me when I had a show—it was my first thing in New York, and Tina gave me that to carry to first previews. Sometimes I have to say, “The curtain goes up,” even if there’s no curtain, to the person I’m sitting with, because in my favorite childhood book they go see a play and they say, “The curtain goes up; the curtain goes up.” In terms of writing process? Sometimes I’ll meditate before I write; sometimes not. I often drink tea, and that’s about it.
In your book of “Letters from Max,” the shortest letter is “I don’t know much about my process except that it involves tea.”
Yeah. It’s really hard to talk about process. Sometimes the tea is a help.
In your essay for the Lincoln Center Theater Review, you hint at a secret. You write that everyone has a private reason for writing a play—which is not always obvious, even to the writer. You’re connecting that to Arthur Miller, who seems to have been expressing his feelings about his extramarital affair with the younger Marilyn Monroe by inventing the adulterous Abigail–John Proctor relationship in “The Crucible.” Can you talk a bit about how “Becky Nurse of Salem” is either spurred into being or, uh, midwifed, by the Miller play?
I mean, I was astonished to find out that there was this libidinal energy behind Abigail wanting to have sex with John Proctor, when, in fact, they never met. [In real life] she was eleven. He was sixty. So much of [“The Crucible”] is historically accurate, and that bit of [Miller’s] mischief just astonished me. So I thought, I’ll write an answer to “The Crucible.” Somehow Becky just started talking to me, and she talked and talked. I just listened to Becky’s voice and followed her on this pilgrim’s progress. It’s funny how you can start a play with an argument or an intellectual idea, but the truth is, what you’re hungry for is a character to start talking to you.
I’ve always hated the way Miller has John Proctor’s wife, Elizabeth, prostrate herself before him, apologize to him, telling him he was a wonderful guy for cheating on her. “It were a cold house I kept!” Ugh. You actually fold infidelity into your play—but in a forgiving or, at least, a warmhearted way. Bob, Becky’s romantic interest, is married.
I wish I could say that the love story in the play operated more on the conscious plane, but I don’t even know that it did. I definitely was thinking of infidelity and Miller. Sharon [Bob’s wife, an offstage character] is not invited to chastise herself or demean herself based on Bob’s infidelity. In this play, I wanted to believe that Bob and Becky were destined, in some karmic sense. It was as though they had married souls, even though they hadn’t married each other.
You have said you are interested in writing a play for every decade of a woman’s life. Does “Becky” slot into that larger project?
It really does. I wanted a woman in her sixties or seventies. “The Crucible,” you know, has Rebecca Nurse as a character, but she’s a minor character. And I thought, Oh, of course, Arthur Miller wouldn’t center the old lady; it’s going to be the virtuous man and the young girl. So I wanted to put that historical figure in the center, as well as her contemporary counterpart.
The first day of rehearsal, we went around the room and talked about what the play meant to us. And I don’t mean to name ages, but Candy Buckley is in that range, and Didi [Deirdre O’Connell] is in that age range, and Suzzy Roche, who does our music, is in that age range. And the women all spoke first. For maybe the first time in my life, the men in the room waited until all the women spoke. And I thought, My God, there’s a process that happens when you put a woman protagonist in the center who has life experience and wisdom. Sometimes in our culture, the old women are just shuttled off at a point, and then they reappear as old crones who can play, you know, Anfisa in “Three Sisters.” But Becky’s a very physically demanding role, and it’s a vocally demanding role. It’s heaven to see a woman tackle it who has been doing theatre for fifty years.
I know “Becky” was supposed to open long ago, but the show was derailed by COVID. So there are moments you can hear the thinking of a few years ago, particularly in your linking Didi’s character to Hillary Clinton. We hear “lock her up” chants. And I wonder, were you tempted at all to change that? Or were you tempted to amplify that, because we have so quickly swept all of that ugliness under the rug?
I was madly tacking between those extremes. The subtitle was originally “Lock Her Up,” because hearing that chant in the 2016 election cycle so upset me and reminded me of the witch trials. I’ve removed it as a subtitle, because I don’t want to give any of Trump’s words more airtime.
So it is a play that has a lot of anger in it. Or at least—it’s a very gently performed play, and everything we ever see onstage is either farce or caretaking, and it goes back and forth between those two. But underneath there’s this real, throbbing anger. And I have read you in a couple of places talking about dealing with your own anger. In some places, you say, “I need to put it aside.” In other places, it’s clearly very much an animating force for you. Where are you with anger today?
The play does move between farce and caretaking and rage. I think that’s right. My life feels like that! And I’ve noticed the new dramaturgy around caretaking that’s emerging—I see that with my Yale students, very beautiful, young writers who are interested in tenderness and care and what that looks like. I was thinking about “Cost of Living”—I only taught Martyna [Majok] for a blink of an eye one semester, but, again, I was just so impressed with [the way she was] showing care and delicacy onstage.
So where am I with rage? I was so angry during the whole of Trump’s Presidency; it consumed me all the time. So I feel more hopeful now. I feel like some grownups are in charge. I feel a little bit less rage. I’m exhausted by rage. I both completely believe in Audre Lorde’s essay about the uses of rage in politics, but I also, at the same time, believe some Buddhist teachers of mine who say, “Well, anger is not actually helping.” So I think anger can be a spark, but it doesn’t actually do the political work for you. Certainly it doesn’t do the writing for you!
In “Smile,” you talk about feeling as though there is a “before” and an “after” in your writing. In “Smile,” you’re saying that it’s before and after the onset of Bell’s palsy. But it also feels—to me—that there are shades of difference in your work before and after you became a teacher. When I read your essays or your letters, they often have very clear, instructive pedagogy to them—for instance, you write to Max, “Resist opacity.” In your life as a teacher, have you discovered lessons that you feel confident giving to others? Are there lessons that you now feel you apply to yourself?
No, no, I don’t know how to teach myself. I think I’m in a middle period now, where I might know how to teach other people, but I don’t know how to teach myself. But I do learn from my students.
Who taught you to teach?
Paula Vogel—it always, always goes back to Paula, and my mother. My mother is a teacher.
Your writing often moves between poles of believing in things that are hidden. In your non-theatrical, autobiographical writing, for instance, you’ve talked about fortune cookies as little gestures of fate in people’s lives. One of the ways that “Becky” feels like a rebuke to Miller is that, in “The Crucible,” there isn’t any magic other than crowd behavior—and your play is full of magic. So do you believe in witches? In rituals that have power in the world?
I think with Miller it’s so interesting—he takes metaphysics totally out of it. He’s relocated witchcraft into the bodies of young women’s desire. He’s saying, “That’s the witch, the young woman wanting to have sex with an old man—that’s witchcraft.” But yes, I do think there’s magic in art and in love.
Do you have any direct experience of the supernatural? Have you ever seen a ghost?
I have not seen a ghost, but I have had weird psychic revelations in dreams, knowing when people die and things like that.
Can you tell me one of them?
I’m trying to decide which one is better or worse to share! I’ll just share the one about my grandmother—the play is dedicated to my grandmother, actually. She was a really salty, wonderful woman. And when she was dying, I was on a plane. It was my junior year abroad, and I was working on “Passion Play,” my first play—I was flying from France to Germany to do research. I got on the plane in France, and, as we pulled away from the gate, I got this awful feeling that my grandmother had just died. In my high-school French, I said to the stewardess, “There’s been a death in the family; I have to get off the plane.” And she said, “What?” And I said, “I have to get off the plane. There’s a death in the family.” And so they pulled the plane round, and I called home on a pay phone, and they said, “Oh, yeah, your grandma just died.”
I was reading your poems that you wrote during the pandemic, organized by season—which certainly makes you focus on how that weird, kind of forgotten year progressed. And you have a piece, “Sisyphus,” which goes:
for John Lahr, who said:
Camus called the plague
unbearable holiday.
I call it April.
Did you see a change in your own writing over that period? Have you come out of quarantine with a different set of concerns?
I think there’s much more tenderness and fragility right now in the theatre. I want to emphasize that, because I’m not sure the audiences know that! I’m not sure they know how tender it is for actors to come back to work and how hard it is for the COVID managers—how people are getting COVID one day after the other. We’re not supposed to say this, because there’s HIPAA, and there’s also a bit of show-business razzle-dazzle: “Everything’s fine over here!” But it’s not fine in the theatre right now. Nobody’s fine. People are really bruised and scarred from the time away, so I guess I tried to lead with more tenderness than maybe I would have in the past. I don’t know if my writing has emerged from quarantine time yet, in the sense that I could not write a new play during the quarantine. I just couldn’t do it. I wrote books: I wrote “Smile” and I wrote a book of poetry. But without knowing that I could gather in a room with actors, I just could not seem to write a play.
You didn’t get anything done during the pandemic, but you wrote two books? I’ll need to cry into a pillow about that statement later. What kind of passage was that, to write “Smile” about something so personal?
Well, it’s funny you should ask that today, because I’m dealing with all these health issues right now. I don’t know if you happened to read the new edition, but it turned out a reader read “Smile” and said, “I think you have Lyme disease.” Just from reading the book! And, indeed, I tested positive. So I’m finally getting the treatment I need—and it took writing a book to get it. I think some of the rage that you were feeling in my writing was a rage over my loss of control over my body for the last twelve years—a lot of anger about that. Writing the book was a kind of healing about feeling like I had a broken face, basically. And the irony is, I did come to some peace about it after writing the book—and then, suddenly, I’m entering this new chapter of the murky, mysterious world of Lyme disease. How crazy is it that it took me writing to speak to my friends about it? It felt so private.
Would you ever write a play about Bell’s palsy?
Paula has this great exercise that’s almost like a Zen koan: write a play that’s impossible to stage. You find out that it’s almost impossible to do that, because with the right director, or designer, you can really stage anything. So I had thought I could only write about the experience of Bell’s palsy in a book, because it’s all very private and confessional. But now that it’s out in the world, I think I could take it and make it into something.
It’s funny, because I’ve thought a lot about how theatre divides the world—the sick are walled off from the healthy performers, particularly during COVID. So I’ve been thinking about all the performers who just don’t go on because they can’t go on. Could I make a play where there was a Greek chorus, who felt they were asymmetrical? I was having an interview with Alan Alda, who has Parkinson’s, and I had such a great conversation with him. I said, “I’d love to do a play together.” And he said, “Well, I can’t really act onstage anymore.” I said, “Well, why?” And he said, “I can’t do comedy. It’s all about timing, and I shake too much.” And I said, “That’s silly. Everyone would love to see you onstage.” So I’d love to see Alan Alda do a soliloquy about Bell’s palsy. . . .
Speaking of actors, can you talk a bit about working with Didi O’Connell?
Didi! She can do this extraordinary thing where she can be hyperreal, so real that you think sometimes she’s just speaking to you in the rehearsal room, but then she’s surreal at the same time. So it’s a wonderful tacking between a magical, unearthly-creature quality and very salt-of-the-earth, I’m-just-talking-to-you-at-a-bar kind of quality. The thing with Didi is just to leave her alone—because Didi is channelling something.
Another person that you’ve worked with multiple times is your director, Rebecca Taichman. . . .
I’m so grateful to work with her over time. My daughter Anna, who’s sixteen now, took her first steps in Rebecca’s rehearsal room, so it’s really a familial feeling. Rebecca is always working to unlock metaphor; she’s also quite musical. She likes to have music in a rehearsal room, and she feels a play, in terms of how it moves through time rhythmically and musically.
What was playing in the rehearsal room for this show?
Well, we had Suzzy Roche. It was just a crazy coup that she was willing to write music, so we were playing with, like, which should be the “vagina-juice music,” and—
For the people who haven’t seen the show, that’s gonna be a hell of a sentence.
And that was all Rebecca, by the way. There’s nothing in the play that says that we are going to see that moment. So that’s a true Rebecca special.
It is so hilarious to see the Tony Award-winning Didi O’Connell, with her back turned, looking over her shoulder apologetically at the front row, fishing in her pants for a bit—and then she clearly thinks, Oh, I didn’t quite get enough! And she apologizes with her eyes to the next person in the front row.
There was a moment when I was preparing the draft for the press—should I include a stage direction about this amazing interlude? Or should I just let this be a creation of this production? And I decided to just let it be a creation of this production.
Truly, it would have been a stage direction for the ages. By the way, one of my favorite events of the last, whatever, fifteen months, was seeing the Matthew Aucoin opera of your “Eurydice,” at the Metropolitan Opera, which I found totally enthralling. It worked so differently from the way that your play had done. It was not better, not worse—just very, very different. What did you take away from the experience of making that opera, as opposed to a play?
Because I started as a poet, I’m always interested in how language can produce the sensation of song without being song, so I would love to do more things with music. That play was such a cathartic play for me to write, because it’s about my dad, who died when I was young. And the repetition of seeing it over and over again was like ongoing funerals for my father.
I should tell you my other psychic story, just because it connects. Polly Noonan has been in about ten of my plays and is something of a muse. She flew out to “Eurydice” with my mother, the first time my mom had flown post-COVID. Polly’s from Chicago, so she flew my mom out and helped my mom up to my apartment. And then, that night, I had the funniest dream that Polly gave me a two-dollar bill for the opening of my opera, and we had this long conversation about friendship and labor and money. So the next day, I texted Polly to tell her, and she said, “That’s really weird,” and she sent me a text [image] of the two-dollar bills that she had just procured, crisply, from a bank in Chicago to give me on opening night.
And I thought, What the hell? What is reality, anyway? ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
