The Golden Ruhl

There's a mix of the mythic, the metaphysical and the mundane in the audacious plays of Sarah Ruhl

by Celia Wren

Mystery hovers around the ordinary in the plays of Sarah Ruhl. A lovesick woman mutates into an almond. A Joy of Cooking recipe opens a window on the universe's violent essence. An elevator—one with its own weather system—ushers the dead into the afterlife. Even the air can turn exotic: In Passion Play, a cycle, the historical and spiritual panorama that is her latest work, a veteran fills jars with the invisible stuff we breathe, hoping to bring war to a halt.

If you aren't au courant with Ruhl's idiosyncratic writing and its powerfully defamiliarizing quality, don't worry: You probably will be soon. For starters, this 31-year-old will be one of the most-produced playwrights of 2005-06. Passion Play, which conjures up dramatizations of the Christ story in three historical eras, premiered as the season opener at Arena Stage, in Washington, D.C., where it runs through Oct. 16. A few months down the road, Los Angeles's Cornerstone Theater Company launches another Ruhl premiere with Project 20, based on her interviews with 20-year-olds from various social backgrounds. Her fanciful comedy The Clean House (published in American Theatre, Nov. '04)—a meditation on love, death, empathy and, yes, housecleaning—continues its full-throttle incursion over the American landscape, with at least five theatres announcing stagings this coming season. The script nabbed the 2004 Susan Smith Blackburn Award and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize.

Ruhl's oeuvre is finding a niche on page as well as stage: This winter TCG Books will publish a collection of her pieces, including Late: A Cowboy Song, an eccentric love tale, and Eurydice, her retelling of the Orpheus myth (in which the aforementioned raining elevator makes its appearance). While diverse on the level of story, the plays share certain traits: a steely lyricism; a pronounced whimsy; a deceptive spareness, masking an almost metaphysical intensity; and a quirky, compassionate humor that often coexists with deep sadness.

"She's going to become her own vocabulary word," predicts Paula Vogel, who taught Ruhl at Brown University and considers the younger writer a landmark talent for the modern theatre. Ruhl's work is "taking us back to the importance of theatre as myth, the importance of theatre as community," Vogel raves, "and yet her plays are as much her unique voice as an Emily Dickinson poem." She adds, "I'm holding my breath hoping that we are equal to the task of being audience members for her mind."

The scope and audacity of Ruhl's mind is on colorful display in Passion Play, an epic she has been crafting for more than a decade, on and off. Originally inspired by a book about Oberammergau, Germany, where the Bible story been staged since medieval times, Ruhl's drama consists of three mini-plays united by themes of betrayal, intolerance, political coercion and the disturbing seductiveness of theatre itself. Act 1 depicts a northern English town endeavoring to mount its traditional Passion Play—from the Garden of Eden, and on—in 1575, just as the zealously Protestant Queen Elizabeth I is cracking down on such Catholic-tinged customs. Act 2, set in Germany in 1934, alludes to the enthusiasm of many Nazis, including Hitler, for the Oberammergau play, which was particularly anti-Semitic. Act 3 takes place during and after the Vietnam War, and in the 1980s, in Spearfish, S.D., where a Passion Play has been enacted for the last 60-odd years.

In each of the three acts, the characters who portray figures like Jesus, Pontius Pilate and Mary Magdalene find their private lives, and their rapports with country and community, mirroring and contrasting with the traits of the Biblical figures. Images and actions in one act resurface, slightly transformed, in others. Adding to the play's symphonic quality—its concern with the personal, the political and the historical—are cameos by Queen Elizabeth I, Hitler and a demagoguery-prone Ronald Reagan.

The loaded associations that cling to those characters amp up Passion Play's resonance for 2005, as Ruhl is quite aware. "I'm worried about the world," acknowledges the playwright, a pale young woman with light brown hair down to her shoulder blades. A resident of Los Angeles, she spent the later part of August preparing for Passion Play in Washington, D.C., a town where political reverberations can be all too perceptible. Like many people, she has been struck by the increasing sway that religion holds on current American political discourse. "More and more, religion is such a divisive topic—and yet it's shaping politics so intensely," she observes. "We're in a weird moment where we're not supposed to talk about it with each other, and yet we're supposed to act on it." Passion Play attempts to deal, indirectly, with this ideological fault line, while touching on the role of performance in both faith and politics.

Arena Stage artistic director Molly Smith, who is directing Passion Play, agrees that the production is timely: "Religion is very much coming to the fore as the new hot-button issue, because it's so personal." But she says Ruhl tackles the controversial issue without heavy-handedness. "The beauty of her writing is that she's a poet who is able to drive plot; many poets in the theatre are not. That's what makes her unusual as a writer. I also think that by drawing on different times in history she's able to shine a light on our own present moment by allowing us to think through where we are right now. She doesn't bang us over the head with it."

If Passion Play seems particularly relevant to the era of the Iraq War and the mainstreamed Religious Right, the writer started without such circumstances in mind. In fact, the first part of the triptych was Ruhl's undergraduate thesis. During her childhood in Wilmette, Ill., outside Chicago, theatre had been in her blood: Her mother is an actress, and in fourth grade Sarah concocted a script she describes as "a court drama about landmasses." ("There was a dispute between an isthmus and a peninsula and the Sun came down and settled it," she explains.)

But it was her studies with Vogel at Brown that lodged Ruhl on the playwriting track. "Paula Vogel showed you how you could make a life out of writing for theatre," Ruhl explains. "It wouldn't have occurred to me to make a life out of it." An English major, Ruhl asked Vogel to serve as her thesis adviser, and the older dramatist agreed—on condition that Ruhl's thesis be a play.

"My most significant contribution to the American theatre is just not letting her say no," Vogel asserts.

It was at this point that Ruhl recalled reading about Oberammergau, where actors often portrayed the same Biblical figure for years on end, and she found herself wondering, "What would that do to one's interior sense of self?" Her script set out to explore that question, refracted through a 16th-century English setting. She had the background for the subject, having been raised a Catholic—a faith she still identifies with (even if she did decline to get confirmed in eighth grade, due to doctrinal qualms). "I don't think Pope Ratzinger would embrace me as part of the fold," she says. "But once you're a Catholic, you're always a Catholic, in certain ways."

When Ruhl's play was finished, it was showcased in a Brown new-works festival, where it caught Molly Smith's eye. At the time artistic director of Alaska's Perseverance Theatre, Smith started to keep an eye on the young writer, a strategem that would pay off down the road.

In the meantime, the Passion Play project continued to gestate. After obtaining her B.A., Ruhl took several years off from university life, teaching creative writing in arts-in-education programs in New York and Providence, and she completed the 1934 section of her epic. Then, after she'd returned to Brown to get her MFA, her earlier script snagged the Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award through the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, qualifying her, in 2000, for a reading at Sundance Theater Laboratory. While in Utah, Ruhl met director Mark Wing-Davey, who subsequently directed the work's first two sections in London.

But she was also writing other pieces, on other topics. For instance, Melancholy Play, about a woman burdened by chronically sexy sadness, riffs on Ruhl's notion that in the era of Prozac and psychobabble, we are "losing a whole category of emotion." Depression is a serious illness, the dramatist acknowledges, but these days, "all sad emotions just get swept into the category of depression. We're failing to make distinctions, and that's scary." The Piven Theatre Workshop, in Evanston, Ill., premiered the comedy in 2002.

Eurydice, which Ruhl calls a "very personal play," prompted by the death of her father when she was 20, debuted at Wisconsin's Madison Repertory Theatre in 2003. And the busy production history of The Clean House, originally inspired by a conversation at a party Ruhl attended, kicked off at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2004.

Meanwhile, Smith had assumed the artistic director post at Arena, and after hosting a reading of Eurydice in its "downstairs" program, the theatre offered Ruhl a commission. She proposed a third passion-play variation, based on the pageant in Spearfish, S.D., a spot she'd visited after graduating from college. At one point, she envisioned staging her three-part cycle on three separate evenings, but Smith and her team ultimately proposed to buckle the plays together into one three-plus-hour production.

An undertaking of daunting proportions, one might think—so it's noteworthy that, according to Smith, Ruhl's fortes include her mastery of scale. "She isn't afraid of big subjects," the artistic director says, "but she also loves what is small and human, and she puts that next to something huge and violent. What we see in these three plays is her remarkable range as a writer."

The same goes for Ruhl's other works, judging by the comments of her collaborators. "One of the most original combinations of the mythic and the quotidian I've ever encountered," comments artistic director Richard Corley of Eurydice, which he staged for Madison Rep. He goes on to cite another, perhaps related, hallmark of Ruhl's style: an apparent simplicity that almost veils her writing's depth. "Sarah Ruhl has a reason (and a vision) for every line," he notes, "and my advice to directors is: Pay attention. Beneath that lovely, generous exterior is a fierce intelligence, which we ignore at our peril."

Just as she's able to bridge the vast and the life-sized, the straightforward and the artful, Ruhl can seemingly fuse the lyrical and the starkly dramatic. "She's one of the few people I know who can write a form of dialogue that's poetic, where the poetry is welded to the action," says Les Waters, who mounted Eurydice in 2004 for Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where he's associate artistic director, and where, he says, Ruhl's fantasia on love and death left audiences sobbing in the seats, the lobby and the bathrooms.

Ruhl's unusual wielding of lyricism has also impressed Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company artistic director Howard Shalwitz, who helmed an early version of the Passion Play commission for Arena Stage in March 2004. "Sarah is one of the first writers I've come across who's consistently poetic and sharp-edged," the director says, explaining that "there's a poetic quality with which language comes out in her plays, and yet it never gushes. There's a reserve, a sense of letting the story unfold on its own."

Shalwitz's enthusiasm resulted in a staging of The Clean House at Woolly this past summer, under the direction of Rebecca Taichman, who draws attention to another habitual tightrope act of Ruhl's: her flair for joining humor to sadness. The Clean House stands out, Taichman says, for "its incredible and totally unique tone—this delicious thin line between hilarious comedy and operatic-sized tragedy. It dances between those two in the most graceful, strange, playful way."

Taichman's comment provides one explanation for The Clean House's seeming ubiquity. For another, one can turn to Bill Rauch, who directed the Yale Rep premiere. "The play is about a lot of things, but for me it's ultimately about our completely ineffectual attempt as human beings to create order out of the chaos of life," he says. "It never works, and yet we try to do it all the time."

In other words, despite its ostensibly tight focus on domesticity, including mundane matters like tidiness, The Clean House grapples with profound existential questions. Indeed, some of the actions in the final moments—the eating of ice cream, the washing of a body—feel downright sacramental, infused with a spiritual significance that presages Passion Play.

Ruhl—who's currently working on a commission for New York City's Playwrights Horizons tentatively titled Dead Man's Cell Phone—agrees that there's a certain metaphysical weight to her most-produced opus. When composing The Clean House, she notes, "I wanted cleaning to be just plain cleaning in the first act, and in the second act, to make it feel more like cleansing—the spiritual, ritual parts of cleaning." Theatre, she thinks, is a medium that favors such an approach. Certainly her kind of theatre is.

"On some level all my work is asking questions about that invisible stuff," she says.

Celia Wren, a former managing editor of this magazine, has written about theatre for the New York Times, the Washington Post and other publications.