#1
Posted: 11/23/09 at 11:23pm
I need to write because I feel I've been living in an alternate reality reading reviews of this play, which I thought was one of the most jejune, sophomoric, and lazy efforts I've seen on Broadway in quite a while. While the premise is intriguing, it seemed to me (and from the few friends who have also sat through it, to at least some others) that Ms. Ruhl got enchanted with an idea, wrote a couple of scenes, and forgot to write a play. There is no conflict or drama to speak of -- merely a situation. There is no meaningful character development except for a deus ex machina ending that relies almost solely on an 'It's A Small World' animatronic moment of stagecraft. In fact, the craft of the play itself is nearly non-existent: cliches and groan-inducing conventions in the scenes are rampant, and so lazy (how many characters "forget" costume items as an excuse to return to the stage? If the writer is parodying a farce with that repetition, it fails) that I wondered how Ruhl got this play past its first workshop. Meanwhile, Ruhl is so ungenerous toward her characters that they all seem almost miraculously stupid. And yet, critics almost unanimously (except for a few voices in the wilderness) have knelt and done their obsequies before her. All hail the Macarthur Genius.
The production, meanwhile, is carried along by Laura Benanti, whose wide-eyed performance seemed to me better fit for a pantomime than for a woman whose internal world we are supposed to take seriously. Wildly gesticulating, dropping her jaw, skipping around the stage, one expects her to say "Shut! Up!" like Elle Woods hearing some gossip from the sorority girls. Michael Cerveris is an almost invisible presence, though one can hardly blame him: a doctor who is unaware that the reaction caused by inserting an electric instrument into a woman's vagina might be in some way sexual is almost preternaturally clueless, and is implausible -- despite Lincoln Center's best dramaturgical defenses -- in anything but a farce. Yet this is not (at least, as Ruhl's own statements indicate) intended to be a farce. This is intended to be a seriocomic meditation on sexuality and relationships. And in all this staggering stupidity, the one character who seems to understand the relationship between objects put into vaginas and orgasm is the one black character, the wet nurse Elizabeth. This is the oldest cliche in a very racist book: black people are more sexual than white people, as they are somehow closer to nature and more in touch with their feelings. And Elizabeth perhaps understands orgasm because black men have larger sex organs. If the depiction weren't so offensive, it would be laughable.
In fact, the entire play seems to me laughable, and not in the ways it might be intended: trafficking in easy jokes that allow a modern audience to chuckle at our superiority to our Victorian ancestors ("Look how mystified they are by electric lights! Look how sexually repressed they are!") without ever trying to understand them as human beings, only as types. Human beings are complicated. They are full of contradictions. Human beings -- at least those human beings who we are to take seriously in the theatre -- are not the Innocent Wife, the Aloof Husband, the Tortured Artist, or the Earthy African American. And the theater -- even the most absurdist of comedies -- represents our best chance, or so I believe, of excavating human beings and figuring out how they express an inner world, in language and in behavior, to others and to themselves. By my standards at least, Sarah Ruhl is not writing plays that move American theatre ahead. She is setting us back, and she is being lavishly praised for doing so. -- David
The production, meanwhile, is carried along by Laura Benanti, whose wide-eyed performance seemed to me better fit for a pantomime than for a woman whose internal world we are supposed to take seriously. Wildly gesticulating, dropping her jaw, skipping around the stage, one expects her to say "Shut! Up!" like Elle Woods hearing some gossip from the sorority girls. Michael Cerveris is an almost invisible presence, though one can hardly blame him: a doctor who is unaware that the reaction caused by inserting an electric instrument into a woman's vagina might be in some way sexual is almost preternaturally clueless, and is implausible -- despite Lincoln Center's best dramaturgical defenses -- in anything but a farce. Yet this is not (at least, as Ruhl's own statements indicate) intended to be a farce. This is intended to be a seriocomic meditation on sexuality and relationships. And in all this staggering stupidity, the one character who seems to understand the relationship between objects put into vaginas and orgasm is the one black character, the wet nurse Elizabeth. This is the oldest cliche in a very racist book: black people are more sexual than white people, as they are somehow closer to nature and more in touch with their feelings. And Elizabeth perhaps understands orgasm because black men have larger sex organs. If the depiction weren't so offensive, it would be laughable.
In fact, the entire play seems to me laughable, and not in the ways it might be intended: trafficking in easy jokes that allow a modern audience to chuckle at our superiority to our Victorian ancestors ("Look how mystified they are by electric lights! Look how sexually repressed they are!") without ever trying to understand them as human beings, only as types. Human beings are complicated. They are full of contradictions. Human beings -- at least those human beings who we are to take seriously in the theatre -- are not the Innocent Wife, the Aloof Husband, the Tortured Artist, or the Earthy African American. And the theater -- even the most absurdist of comedies -- represents our best chance, or so I believe, of excavating human beings and figuring out how they express an inner world, in language and in behavior, to others and to themselves. By my standards at least, Sarah Ruhl is not writing plays that move American theatre ahead. She is setting us back, and she is being lavishly praised for doing so. -- David
