Playwriting by her own rules

Volume Number 1 Issue Number 13 / December 22 - 28, 2006

Theater

Tony Charuvastra

Sarah Ruhl, who hates to clean house

Playwriting by her own rules

By Jerry Tallmer

Sarah Ruhl writes plays that are different. They are different from anybody else’s plays, and different, as she writes them, one from the other.

One that has been seen in New York and — extended by popular demand — can still be seen through January 28 (after a Christmas hiatus) is “The Clean House,” at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. It’s about — well, it’s about love and death and doctors and outworn marriage and adultery and — in Sarah Ruhl’s wry, dry, idiosyncratic gestalt — a Brazilian housemaid who hates to clean house so her employer’s older and more insecure sister does it (secretly).

A play that has not been seen in New York but got at least one ecstatic review (in the New York Times) when done up at Yale a few months ago is “Eurydice,” also idiosyncratic but quite poetic, a Ruhl take of her own on the Greek legend about — well, love and death, with Orpheus, maker of music, going down into Hades, the underworld, to try to bring his beautiful young wife back into this world.

And a piece that has been seen in part in workshops here and there but has not yet been seen in its entirety, because she’s still working on the end of it, is “Passion Play,” a trilogy “not quite as long as Tom Stoppard’s [nine-hour] ‘Coast of Utopia,’ ” she said the other day in a press room deep in the bowels of Lincoln Center.

“Actually,” she said, “we’re doing [another] workshop on it right now, down the hall.”

There’s more to tell about “Passion Play,” which sounds, as she sketches it, even more interesting than “The Clean House” or “Eurydice,” but meanwhile let’s say hello to blue-eyed, brownblonde-haired Anna, 8 months, daughter of Sarah Ruhl and Sarah’s husband Tony Charuvastra, a psychiatrist who’s from Thailand and whom she met when he was at med school at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, and she was going after her masters there in Creative Writing. Or maybe it was her BA. Have I noted that she’s a quite creative writer?

Speaking of Anna —though not of Ana, the 67-year-old femme fatale (in several senses) of “The Clean House” — it was when Ms. Ruhl, some few weeks ago, was “strolling my baby to the pharmacist at 20th Street and First Avenue” that the heavens opened up and the sky fell on soon-to-be-32-year-old playwright Ruhl. Not rain. The ringing of her cell phone. When she answered, a voice informed her that she had just won one of those $500,000 MacArthur “genius” awards.

“It came completely out of the blue,” she said now. “I didn’t even know [the MacArthurs] were coming out. I had no idea at all. It really made my heart stop. They asked if I was sitting down.”

How did they get your cell-phone number?

“They have their co-conspirators.” The co-conspirator in this instance was Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist Paula Vogel, Sarah’s teacher at Brown, who had earlier called “to ‘update her address book’ with my new address and phone numbers.”

And what now? What might change, thanks to an unforeseen $100,000 a year (before taxes) for five years?

“I think the main thing is it makes it easier to balance my baby with this

profession. I find that productions block the writing more than the baby blocks the writing.”

Yes, Ms. Ruhl has seen Jean Cocteau’s 1950 masterpiece, “Orphée”— saw it when she was halfway through her own very different “Eurydice.” A central figure in her drama is Eurydice’s father, who has preceded her to Hades —i.e., has died some time before she died.

Sarah Ruhl — born in Chicago, January 24, 1974 — lost her own father when he was 54 and she was 22. He was Pat Ruhl, a marketing executive for a toy company. Her mother is Kathy Kehoe, who

teaches English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, “and is an actor.”

So you come by this theater stuff honestly?

“Sure. And mommy used to take me to rehearsals when I was little.”

Now for “Passion Play” — the trilogy.

“It starts in Elizabethan England, just before Elizabeth I [a Protestant, like her father] shuts down the Passion plays. There’s a guy who portrays Pontius Pilate every year, and he wants to be upgraded to the Christ.

“Part II takes place in Oberammergau [Bavaria], where Hitler attended the Passion Play in 1934. They welcomed him with open arms. Everyone in town was a Nazi — with the exception, in this case, of the guy playing Judas. The Passion Play itself was anti-Semitic, and the guy playing Jesus was a Nazi.”

Two beats. “This is all before Mel Gibson.”

No, Sarah Ruhl is not Jewish. As Ruhl-Kehoe would indicate, she is of German-Irish and Roman Catholic heritage.

“Part III is set in America in the 1980s. Among the religious right, in South Dakota. I’m still rewriting that.”

The five characters of “The Clean House” are Lane (actress Blair Brown), a doctor in her early 50s; Lane’s sister Virginia (Jill Clayburgh), late 50s; Lane’s husband Charles (John Dossett), a surgeon in his 50s; Ana (Concetta Tomei), the 67-year-old beauty with whom Charles falls in love after he mastectomies her cancer-stricken right breast; and Matilda (Vanessa Aspillaga), late 20s, the livewire housemaid from Brazil who gets depressed when she has to clean.

“Because I don’t like to clean,” said Ms. Ruhl.

What about the following statement of Ana’s, just after she’s fallen in love with Charles? — “I have avoided doctors my whole life. I don’t like how they smell. I don’t like how they talk. I don’t admire their emotional lives. I don’t like how they walk. They walk very fast to get somewhere … tac tac tac —I am walking somewhere important. I don’t like that. I like a man who saunters … ”

But only a second later Charles is telling about “a very great American surgeon named [William Stewart] Halsted. He was married to a nurse. He loved her — immeasurably. One day Halsted noticed that his wife’s hands were chapped and red when she came back from surgery. And so he invented rubber gloves. It is one of the great love stories in medicine.”

So it is, and it also happens to be true. Chicago has a street named Halsted, for him. Sarah Ruhl first heard about Halsted and the gloves from her husband the med-school intern from Thailand. “There’ve been a lot of doctors in my family,” she says. There’s also been a lot of cancer in her family: two grandmothers and her own father.

Yes, she says, her plays “are mostly about love and death.” Short pause. “I think there’s a problem when something’s not about those two things.” When her father died, “I thought about going to the underground.” Has “Eurydice” exorcised any of that? “I think so. I used to attend productions of it like going to a funeral. I don’t hold onto that any more.”

At one point in “The Clean House,” after Lane has learned that husband Charles is two-timing her with a glamorous older woman, Matilde the maid exclaims to one and all, in Portuguese and then in English: “Es como una telenovela —It’s like a soap opera. So sad!”

And so it is.

“I think that when melodrama is tightening,” says Sarah Ruhl, “it can be most effective. That’s why I like Pedro Almodovar.

Hey, Pedro! Listen to her latest:

“A man has a heart attack and dies at a café. His cell phone rings and rings. A woman on the scene answers it — and decides to reconstruct his life.”

Working title: “Dead Man’s Cell Phone.”

It’s to be staged, in June, at the Wooly Mammoth in Washington, D.C. A future playwright named Anna Ruhl Charuvastra may be sitting on her mama’s lap.

THE CLEAN HOUSE. By Sarah Ruhl. Directed by Bill Rauch. Through January 28 (after a Christmas hiatus) at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, 150 West 65th Street, (212) 239-6200.