Eric Hissom, Sarah Marshall, Kimberly Gilbert in Woolly Mammoth’s ‘In the Next Room, or the vibrator play’ Photo Credit: Stan Barouh

In the late 1880s, electricity was still a curiosity. Not every home was wired, and as the debate over Edison’s direct current and Tesla’s alternating current raged on, some wondered if electric light was even a desirable substitute for candles, oil lamps, and gas lights to begin with. This is the world of Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room, or the vibrator play, currently being presented in an skillfully staged production at Woolly Mammoth, one in which every light that turns on at the flip of a switch is cause for a momentary incredulous pause at what wonders technology brings.

There’s another flip of a switch that causes more extended wonderment, though, and it’s the one that operates Dr. Givings’ (Eric Hissom) new device to treat women suffering from “hysteria,” a nervous condition attributed to the buildup of excessive fluid in the womb. After a session with the good Doctor’s buzzing electrical device, applied to the right area of the body, and the sudden “paroxysm” that results, these women are suddenly the picture of calm, rosy-cheeked good health.

All that is a whole lot of dancing around what everyone sitting in the audience knows: that there’s nothing wrong with Dr. Givings’ patients aside from being sexually and emotionally unfulfilled, stressed out with all that pent-up libido combined with the legion of other repressions that came with the close of the Victorian Age — this is a world in which even the most oblique references to sex are cause for mortification, after all. Givings lays them down, gets them off, and they feel understandably refreshed.