Seeing What the Buzz is All About at Woolly's Vibrator

The sad joke of it all is that it takes so long for it to occur to anyone on stage that what these women are experiencing is just normal sexual pleasure. Like the television series Mad Men, Ruhl's play is quite effective at exposing just how backwards social attitudes were in a bygone era, as well as making one laugh at ridiculous prejudices and misconceptions that really aren't so pleasant to think about.

The subtitle may be "the vibrator play," but in taking on late Victorian social mores, Ruhl makes targets of more than just the repression-induced stress those new machines "cure" in the operating theater. There is, for instance, the notion that a woman who can't breast-feed her child is less of a mother, articulated by Mrs. Givings (Katie deBuys) when she can't produce sufficient milk for their new baby. There is the related belief that morals might be passed through breast milk, and that the black wet nurse they hire might pass on the wrong things to their child.

Dr. Givings responds to this concern of his wife's by saying he'd "rather have a negro protestant than an Irish Catholic" nursing their child. Religious prejudices still hold sway even on an ostensibly non-spiritual man of science like the Doctor.

The "next room" of the title is the Doctor's operating theater, which is adjacent to the house's front sitting room. From that sitting room, Mrs. Givings can often hear the audible results of the "treatments" next door, an effect that is heightened by the fact that the set omits placing a physical wall between the two rooms. So when Mrs. Givings sits on the chaise lounge in the sitting room, she is situated right next to the bed in the theater where the orgasmic patients (who are not just female) receive their relief.

Much of the humor in the play centers around those treatments, administered primarily to Sabrina Daldry, a young wife so paralyzed by anxiety that her hands barely work and she can't endure bright light. As Mrs. Daldry, Kimberly Gilbert is called upon to writhe and moan in pleasure throughout the play; a task which she gamely performs with the vigor of Meg Ryan in the famous deli scene from When Harry Met Sally.

That particular joke does begin to get a little stale after a while. Two and a half hours is a little lengthy for a comedy, and by the fifth or sixth time she eagerly gets under the sheet on the table for a session, Ruhl has made her point. Luckily, the sight gag of Daldry's shocked orgasms isn't the only comedic trick Ruhl has up her sleeve. She relishes in throwing out double entendres and comically uncomfortable situations that sometimes make things play out like the classiest episode of Three's Company ever seen. Dr. Givings' cognitively dissonant tendency to tell dull stories while he holds a vibrator between a patient's legs is played for plenty of laughs, though none more when the story is about "stroking the cat."

Ruhl doesn't just poke fun, though. She's genuinely concerned for the unfulfilled lives of these characters, the emotional deadness of the era. Amid the laughs, there are epiphanies aplenty, some happy, some not so much. Not everyone gets out of this play with their problems solved and their hearts and minds opened, which tempers a magical, hopeful ending with just the right measure of tragedy.

Woolly Mammoth's production of In the Next Room, or the vibrator play runs through September 19. Tickets are available online.