In the Next Room at the Jericho Arts Centre

Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) is a strange work of theatre. Paradoxically, had it been even stranger--that is, had the playwright found a way both in content and form to match her provocative subject matter to a more radical and intersectional feminist/queer politics--the play might have been successful. But after first appearing to mock them, Ruhl instead opts to embrace the conventions of the nineteenth-century drawing room comedy, including its bourgeois hetero-patriarchal ending. This results in a play that veers wildly in its tone and that ends up reinscribing the very domestic structures--not least the whole idea of the family itself--it appears to be questioning. Director Keltie Forsyth, overseeing Ensemble Theatre Company's production of the play, which runs in repertory as part of their annual summer theatre festival until August 17, does her best to navigate these swings, but notwithstanding some fine performances and compelling dramatic moments, this staging leaves me flummoxed as to why the play (which ran on Broadway and was nominated for a handful of Tony awards) has garnered so much critical praise.

At the centre of the play, which is set in the late 1800s, just after the dawn of electricity, is Catherine Givings (Lindsay Nelson), an upper-middle-class woman in New York who is frustrated by the inattention of her husband, Dr. Givings (Sebastain Kroon), and also by her inability to breastfeed her newborn daughter. Dr. Givings' speciality is treating female hysteria and as a result of Edison's discovery of electrical current, Givings has found a sure-fire way to cure his patients: by applying a vibratory pulse to their pubic areas, which is supposed to relieve the pressure upon their wombs and restore them to a more contemplative mood. Thus does Ruhl introduce the conceit contained in the parenthesis of her play's title by anchoring her plot in actual history. Catherine, listening to her husband treat Mrs. Daldry (an excellent Christine Reinfort) "in the next room," becomes intrigued by her cries of pleasure and after forming a friendship with the woman over the course of successive visits (and also after sneaking into her husband's operating room and testing the machine on herself), Catherine convinces Mrs. Daldry that they should compare their respective responses to the vibrating machine's stimulus. But by this point we have learned that Mrs. Daldry much prefers the manual stimulation of Dr. Givings' assistant, Annie (Alexis Kellum-Creer), whose physiological and emotional attentions she finds much more satisfying than those of her husband (an incredibly stiff David Wallace).

Added to this mix are two sub-plots. The first concerns a black wet-nurse, Elizabeth (Mariam Barry, playing the character's suffering of numerous racist slights with just the right mix of dignity and quietly contained rage), hired to tend to the Givings' baby. The second involves a worldly painter, Leo Irving (Francis Winter), who has come to Dr. Givings for his own treatment for male hysteria (cue the vibrating anal probe). Catherine and Leo enjoy a brief flirtation that succeeds in arousing the jealousy of Dr. Givings; however, Leo only has eyes for Elizabeth. All of this culminates in a clumsy denouement that leaves no one happy except the white bourgeois heterosexual professional couple, who rediscover their passion for each other (and, it turns out, the sudden obsolescence of Dr. Givings' machine) by making love in the snow. To be sure, in this scene it is Catherine who takes control of the lovemaking, undressing her husband and making his nude body an object of erotic display. But the fact that she ends up on top in the play's concluding tableau does not, to my mind, make up for the fact that earlier in the second act the same-sex possibilities that Ruhl telegraphs in Mrs. Daldry and Annie's one shared kiss are shut down immediately and with absolute finality as soon as the two women break off from their lip-lock: "I don't suppose I shall ever see you again," Mrs. Daldry states to Annie as she moves with purpose towards the door. Similarly, the implicit critique of white liberal feminism that Ruhl seems to be embedding in her script via her suggestion that first wave suffrage in America depended on the labour of black women's bodies gets muddied by having the relationship between Catherine and Elizabeth triangulated through a man, and a rather caricatured cad at that.

I should emphasize that I see these problems as intrinsic to the structure of the play, not as symptomatic of specific choices made in this production. Indeed, given my misgivings (forgive the pun) about the play's politics, I think that Forsyth has done a remarkable job in spotlighting multiple connections between the women characters in particular, ones that suggest possible alternative outcomes for them all. On the topic of lighting, however, the dimming and raising of the lights every time Catherine turned off or on her newfangled electric lamp drove me a bit batty. As did the rickety door between the living room and Dr. Givings' operating theatre. However, Julie White's costumes were a marvel of period detail. Indeed, the successive scenes of Mrs. Daldry undressing and dressing with Annie's assistance before and after her treatments distilled for me into a wordless pantomime much that this play was trying to say about female repression and empowerment.

P

Long Division: First Week of Rehearsal

Today is the end of the first week of rehearsals for Long Division. In fact, as I write this our amazing cast is still hard at it in Richmond, taking turns working on their respective monologues with director Richard Wolfe and Assistant Director Keltie Forsyth, while presumably also running lines from the choral group scenes under the watchful eye of stage manager Jethelo Cabilete. Having worked our way through the beats of those scenes and any lingering questions about them by the end of the day yesterday, I decided to knock off from today's rehearsals as I have so much else to catch up on.

Not that I regret for a moment being there the rest of this past week. It's such an exciting--and terrifying--thing to dive into the rehearsal process. The exploration and moments of discovery are so stimulating; at the same time, one is always in a bit of a panic about the steadily diminishing amount of time one has for said exploration and discovery. In our case, because there are so many different moving parts to the production--not the least of which is creating and learning actual physical movement--juggling available time is one of Richard's main priorities. Fortunately, choreographer Lesley Telford hit the ground running during the first three days of rehearsal, aided by the emerging dance artists from her Arts Umbrella class with whom she has been building much of the choreography for the show, and many of whom have very generously agreed to accompany Lelsey to our rehearsals to help teach the material to the actors. And in this respect, one of the delights so far has been to watch the dancers' and actors' mutual admiration for each other's specific performance gifts. The entire cast has done an amazing, and exceedingly fast, job of absorbing into their bodies some fairly difficult physical phrases. At the same time, they've also absorbed much of the text into their brains, with several of them already off book in terms of their very long monologues. Composer Owen Belton was also present to observe what Lesley was working on in relation to his music, and to get a sense of what he still needed to come up with to accompany the rest of her movement score.

Yesterday we also got a glimpse of Lauchlin Johnston's mock-up of the set, which blew me away with its elegance and beauty. The Gateway's Studio B is not a huge space and we're losing some of that to the backdrop that Lauchlin has created, and that will additionally serve as the surface onto which video designer Jamie Nesbitt's will project his images. One thing Jamie flagged for Lauchlin and Richard was the colour of the floor. If, as originally intended, it remained white, like the backdrop, then it would create a lot of bounce from the lights that would make it hard to see the projections. This would only be exacerbated if, as planned, lighting designer Jergus Oprsal used a series of shins to provide side light from the wings. So the lino floor will now be a light shade of grey. If everything goes accroding to plan the set will be installed by next Thursday, with the lighting grid hung soon after and the cue-to-cue happening much earlier than usual so that the performers will ideally have three full tech runs instead of cramming everything into one half day.

It was also useful to have Jamie at the table yesterday for our final beat-by-beat read-through of the text, as he asked a lot of tough dramaturgical questions about what exactly was going on in different sections, and how video might support them in some instances, or conceivably work against them in others. Combined with the cast's similarly probing questions from the rest of the week, the rigorous text analysis has really forced me to justify my choices, and to explain their relevance to the overall structure of the play and the respective inner worlds of each of the characters. It also required me to not be precious about material that clearly had to go, or about changes to specific lines, however micro or macro. I really appreciate the attentiveness of all involved to my writing, as it has indeed made the work stronger and, in one instance spotted by Keltie, saved me from making a pretty glaring mistake in the math!

Lots more work to do, of course, but so far the process has been thoroughly rewarding. The level of collegiality and collaboration on everyone's part has been inspiring, and that's in no small measure to the open and non-hierarchical environment Richard has worked hard to create. I can't be in the studio on Monday due to teaching commitments, but I look forward to being back at rehearsals on Tuesday.

So stay tuned for more.

P