Sarah Ruhl

After Andi Gordon is jilted at the altar, she makes an impetuous decision—buying one of the famed Three Sisters on Blackberry Island. Now the proudish owner of the ugly duckling of the trio of Queen Anne houses, her life is just as badly in need of a major renovation as her new home. When Deanna Phillips confronts her husband about a suspected affair, she opens up a Pandora's Box of unhappiness. In her quest to be the perfect woman, she's lost herself…and could lose her entire family if things don't change. Next door, artist Boston King thought she and her college sweetheart would be married forever. But after tragedy strikes, she's not so sure. Now it's time for them to move forward, with or without one another. Thrown together by fate and geography, and bound by the strongest of friendships, these three women will discover what they're truly made of: laughter, tears and love.

"Correspondence between playwright-teacher Sarah Ruhl and poet-cancer patient Max Ritvo, in which the student becomes the teacher"--

"At a dinner party in New Jersey, two couples discuss polyamory as brought up by the introduction of a new temp, Pip, in Jane's office. When they invite Pip and her two male partners, discussion turns to action and the exploration of unexplored desire turns animalistic, and then Jane's daughter sees it all."--Page of cover.

"In this poignant and deeply intimate memoir, Sarah Ruhl chronicles her experience with Bell's palsy after giving birth to twins. At night, I dreamed that I could smile. The smile felt effortless in my dreams, the way it did in my childhood. Happily married and in the flush of hard-earned professional success, with her first play opening on Broadway, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high risk pregnancy and given birth to twins when she discovers the left side of her face entirely paralyzed. Bell's palsy. Ninety percent of Bell's palsy sufferers see spontaneous improvement and full recovery. Like Ruhl's mother. Like Angelina Jolie. But not like Sarah Ruhl. Sarah Ruhl is in the unlucky ten percent. Like Allen Ginsberg. But for a woman, a mother, a wife, and an artist working in the realm of theater, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior, brings significant and specific challenges. So Ruhl begins an intense decade-long search for a cure, while simultaneously grappling with the reality of her new face-one that, while recognizably her own-is incapable of accurately communicating feelings or intentions. In a series of searing, witty, and lucid meditations, Ruhl chronicles her journey as a patient, mother, wife, and artist. She details the struggle of a body yearning to match its inner landscape, the pain postpartum depression, the joys and trials of marriage and being a playwright and a mother to three tiny children, and the desire for a resilient spiritual life in the face of difficulty. Brimming with insight, humility, and levity, SMILE is a triumph by one of the leading playwrights in America. It is about loss and reconciliation, perseverance and hope. The Hollywood pitch would be Joan Didion meets Ann Lamott with a little Nora Ephron for good measure" --

"The play takes place in a "metaphysical Connecticut" where married doctors emply a Brazilian housekeeper who is more interested in coming up with the perfect joke than in cleaning. Trouble erupts when the husband falls in love with one of his cancer patients. The theatrical and wildly funny, whimsical look at class, comedy, and the nature of love gives new meaning to 'I almost died laughing.' " -- Publisher's description on back cover.

Jean is sitting quietly at a cafe when she becomes increasingly frustrated at the endlessly ringing cellphone on the table next to her. Its owner won't answer it and Jean soon realizes it is because he's dead. In her panic, she begins answering the persistent phone calls, including one from the dead man's mother, and finds out the man's name is Gordon. She sits with him until the ambulance arrives.

A play of uncommon romance and unique comedy--a maid, who hates cleaning, has dreams of creating the perfect joke.

When Ann thinks of her father, she immediately remembers playing Peter Pan in her hometown theater in Iowa, particularly when he used to bring her flowers after her performance. Her memory is jogged by the fact that she and her four siblings are in their father’s hospital room during his final moments. His death sparks a conversational wake that includes everything from arguments over politics to when each sibling realized that they grew up. A loving look at a family’s view of death, life, and the allure of never growing up.

"Best Broadway Play of 2009 ... Ruhl has defied gender and genre orthodoxy to give us a hilarious and moving meditation on the many factors that complicate communication between (and within) the sexes."--Elysa Gardner, USA Today. "In the Next Room is Ruhl's best play to date. Her play-writing is inspired."--John Lahr, New Yorker. "Ruhl is one of the country's brightest playwrights. In the Next Room is a true novelty: a sex comedy designed for adults with open hearts and minds. Insightful, fresh and funny, the play is as rich in thought as it is in feeling."--Charles Isherwood, New York Times. "It's safe to say that In the Next Room goes where no Broad-way show has gone before. Ruhl presents something a lot more daring than nudity: women's discovery of their own bodies and their own pleasure ... A play that's smart, delicate and very, very funny."--Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Post. "Ruhl has written a smart, charming, iridescently funny-serious jewel."--John Simon, Bloomberg News/Bloomberg.Com. "A breathtakingly inventive addition to Ruhl's singular body of work."--Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times. In the Next Room or the vibrator play hovers at the dawn of electricity when enthusiasm for the light bulb gave rise to a handy new instrument to treat female hysteria. Ruhl, with her singular theatrical lyricism, has crafted a masterful new comedy, which went on to become a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Tony Award nominee for Best Play. Sarah Ruhl's plays include, The Clean House (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and recipient of the Susan Smith Blackburn Award); Dead Man's Cell Phone (Helen Hayes Award for Best New Play); Passion Play (Kennedy Center's Fourth Freedom Forum Play-writing Award); Eurydice; Melancholy Play; Late: a cowboy song and Orlando. She is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. --Book Jacket.

"One hundred incisive, idiosyncratic essays on life and theater from a major American playwright "Don't send your characters to reform school!" pleads Sarah Ruhl in one of her essays. With titles as varied as "On Lice" to "On Sleeping in Theaters" and "Motherhood and Stools (The Furniture Kind)," these essays are artful meditations on life in the arts and joyous jumbles of observations on everything in between. The pieces combine admonition, celebration, inquiry, jokes, assignments, entreaties, prayers, and advice: honest reflections distilled from years of working in the theater. They offer candid accounts of what it is like to be a mother and an artist, along with descriptions of how Ruhl's children's dreams, jokes, and songs work themselves into her writing. 100 Essays is not just a book about the theater. It is a map of a very particular artistic sensibility and a guide for anyone who has chosen an artist's life"-- "One hundred incisive, idiosyncratic essays on life and theater from a major American playwright"--

""Wickedly clever. Ruhl's unique, breezily elegant dialogue is fully present, as is her pleasingly loopy logic."-Variety"In the smart, rollicking Stage Kiss. passion and fidelity engage in a kind of elegant pas de deux. The play manages to be both wholly original and instantly recognizable. with its combination of hilarity and trenchancy."-The New YorkerAward-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl brings her unique mix of lyricism, sparkling humor, and fierce intelligence to her new romantic comedy, Stage Kiss. When estranged lovers He and She are thrown together as romantic leads in a long-forgotten 1930s melodrama, the line between off-stage and on-stage begins to blur. A "knockabout farce that channels Noël Coward and Michael Frayn" (Chicago Tribune), Stage Kiss is a thoughtful and clever examination of the difference between youthful lust and respectful love. Ruhl, one of America's most frequently produced playwrights, proves that a kiss is not just a kiss in this whirlwind romantic comedy, fresh off its acclaimed New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons in winter 2014.Sarah Ruhl's other plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalists In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) and The Clean House, as well as Passion Play, Dead Man's Cell Phone, Demeter in the City, Eurydice, Melancholy Play, and Late: a cowboy song. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a PEN/Laura Pels Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her plays have premiered on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and have been produced in many theaters around the world. "--

"Adaptations of two classic works through the unique lens of playwright Sarah Ruhl." --publisher description.

Passion Play is Sarah Ruhl's "biggest, most ambitious effort yet" (The New York Times), a three-and-a-half hour intimate epic, plunging the depths of the timely intersection of politics and religion. Ruhl dramatizes a community of players rehearsing their annual staging of the Easter Passion in three different eras: 1575 northern England, just before Queen Elizabeth outlaws the ritual; 1934 Oberammergua, Bavaria, as Hitler is rising to power; and Spearfish, South Dakota, from the time of Vietnam through Reagan's presidency. In each period, the players grapple in different ways with the transformative nature of art, and politics are never far in the background, as Queen Elizabeth, Hitler, and Reagan each appear, played by a single commanding actor. - Publisher.