By David Gordon

On Wednesday, April 1, the English department presented playwright Sarah Ruhl, the final speaker in the 2008-2009 “Great Writers, Great Readings” series. Ruhl is the recipient of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship and is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her play, “The Clean House.” She has also had her plays translated into numerous languages and preformed around the world.

In honor of April Fool’s Day, Ruhl began by offering to tell a joke in Portuguese, a nod to “Clean House,” which opens with a woman telling a joke in Portuguese. Few people in the crowd of faculty and students got her reference. She then read a monologue from her play, “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” and two scenes from her most recent work, “In the Next Room (the Vibrator Play).”

“Dead Man’s Cell Phone” is about what happens to a woman when she answers the ringing cell phone of a man she later learns is dead. It was produced last spring at Playwrights Horizons and featured Mary-Louise Parker and Kathleen Chalfant.

“In the Next Room” which is about the early use of the vibrator as the medical treatment for hysteria, will make its Broadway premiere, as well as Ruhl’s Broadway playwrighting debut, in October courtesy Lincoln Center Theatre.

Following the readings, Ruhl took questions from the eager audience regarding a variety of topics, from the presence of death in her works, to her frequent use of technology in her plays. Ruhl described her play, “Eurydice,” a modern re-telling of the “Orpheus and Eurydice” story, which was written shortly after the death of her father)

She described her “tortured relationship” with technology, only to have her opinion slightly reversed after her infant daughter came down with pneumonia and was almost instantly cured by modern medicine. Cell phones-and vibrators-are, as Ruhl put it, “objects of desperation” that manage to distance everyone. Her plays, she feels, explore the question of whether or not technology can be used “to connect people rather than distance.”

Before signing copies of her plays Ruhl finished by reading a series of paragraphs she wrote, collectively titled “25 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write.” Her ruminations on everything from the loss of sword fights to titles with participles to “the Function of Theater Criticism in an Age of Digital Reproduction” are available to read online at http://device.papertheater.org.

(David Gordon)