@ Cleveland Play House 4/18/12
No need to ask “Was it good for you?” It was a good (very good) opening night for In the Next Room, a spicy play with plenty of attitude that looks and laughs at conventions surrounding sexuality, marriage, and (most especially) orgasm.
Award-winning Sarah Ruhl’s play directed by Laura Kepley is set in 19th-century upper class Victorian-era society, a period associated with repression and decorum. Wives were to bear children and keep quiet. Sex was to be endured, but not enjoyed — at least, not if one was a “lady.”
This play is funny and is anything but a Lecture.
Maybe sometimes we don’t realize just how gracefully a truly feminist viewpoint can draw on wit, pathos, and comic talent and just sail over any worn-out plots about men vs. women. Here the playwright’s viewpoint is decidedly female (male nudity involved instead of female, for example), but there’s a lot of humor and sex combined to show that the only factor which limited these women’s lives (and their men’s) was mental. Yes, the play specifically concerns their sex lives, but the metaphor seems expansive enough to cover most of life.
The beautifully rendered Second Stage set is the home and office of Dr. Givings (Jeremiah Wiggins), whose patients are women brought to the good doctor to cure their depression and anxiety. The cure (involving the judicious and unemotional use of electrical stimulation on sheet-clad patients) invokes moans from the patients, but the sounds are those of pleasure, not pain. The doctor’s wife Catherine (played with cheery cheerleader sweet niceness by Nise Sturgis) overhears and decides to find out what is going on. She finds out and begins to spread the good word as she and her friends share their discovery and their rather innocent delight in the very fulfilling possibilities of sexual gratification.
The brilliant ensemble cast created such an atmosphere of believability that even the radical, fantasy of the final snow scene seemed a natural extension of this marvelous recreation of an era when electricity was new and so (it seems) was enjoying sex.
Gail Rastorfer played doctor’s assistant, Annie, with poker-faced aplomb. Birgit Huppuch (Sabrina Daldry) and Donald Carrier (Mr. Daldry) as Dr. Wiggins’ patients played nicely off each other as a husband and wife who reflected the other’s fears. Zac Hoogendyk dashed romantically around stage as Leo Irving, a male patient in for treatment (when all along all he really needed was a trip to Italy). Rachel Leslie, as wet nurse Elizabeth, was persuasive as a grounded, confident working-class woman whose friendly practicality stood in contrast to the neuroses of the high-strung gentry.
Visually the production was a knockout. The costumes, including corsets and other undergarments, were exquisitely detailed, as was the set. The design team — Michael B. Raiford (scenic design), Michael Boll (lighting design), David Kay Mickelson (costume design), and Jane Shaw (composer/sound design and finder of realistic baby noises), plus stage manager Shannon Habenicht — all deserve high marks for making great use of the remarkable new stage space – -for this performance it was a thrust configuration which meant a U-shaped seating around three sides of the stage for the audience. (It’s hard not to think of puns when writing about this play.)
The play’s run has been extended through Sun 5/13, 2012. For tickets call the PlayhouseSquare ticket office at 216-241-6000 or go online at http://ClevelandPlayHouse.com.
Laura Kennelly is a freelance arts journalist, a member of the Music Critics Association of North America, and an associate editor of BACH, a scholarly journal devoted to J. S. Bach and his circle.Listening to and learning more about music has been a life-long passion. She knows there’s no better place to do that than the Cleveland area.