Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s 50th world premiere, IN THE NEXT ROOM (or the vibrator play), closed on Sunday – but the buzz continues. Today, Lincoln Center Theater announced that the script is bound for Broadway. Berkeley Rep’s associate artistic director, Les Waters, will stage a new production of Sarah Ruhl’s stimulating script at a Shubert Theater in Manhattan this fall. The show begins previews on October 22 and opens November 19. While these artists have often worked off Broadway – including bringing Eurydice to Second Stage Theatre after producing it in Berkeley – both celebrate their Broadway debuts with this play.
"Picture "The View," with the wisecracking, sympathetic sweethearts of that ABC television show replaced by a panel of embittered, suffering or enraged Arab women" -the Times review of Black Eyed
In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) illuminates the lives of six lonely people seeking relief from a local doctor—but, despite his expertise with a strange new technology, all they really need is intimacy. It’s a tender tale that takes place in the twilight of the Victorian age, an elegant comedy lit by unexpected sparks from the approaching era of electricity, equality, science and sexuality.
I will never understand the critical adoration for Sarah "Whimsy-poo!" Ruhl.
"Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
~ Muhammad Ali