TimeLine’s “In the Next Room” is a Place You’ll Want to Visit

You go to see a show subtitled “the vibrator play” (small letters are correct). What do you expect? A sex farce? If you do, you don’t know the plays of Sarah Ruhl, the thoughtful Chicago author whose In the Next Room, now playing at Stage 773 in a Timeline Theatre production, was her second Pulitzer Prize nomination. Ruhl’s plays take on subjects that affect us all (aging, in For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday, the growing reliance on little screens to the detriment of real interpersonal communication in Dead Man’s Cell Phone, etc.) and make them personal to each viewer. In the Next Room has its funny moments, to be sure, but at its core it is a drama about a subject that, sadly, seems extremely timely: how men and women utterly fail to understand each other’s needs.

The play is staged on a glorious set designed by Sarah JHP Watkins that combines the charm and perfection of a Victorian parlor with the efficiency of a Victorian operating theatre (the “next room” of the title), and then takes the whole thing one step further by encasing it in poles reminiscent of a birdcage. The effect is subtle if you don’t think about it, blunt and overwhelming if you do: the men of this era kept their women like little caged birds, worried about their being damaged or broken. And we are invited as voyeurs into one such cage, the home of Doctor Givings (Anish Jethmalani), a man of science who shares the common 19th Century belief that women are prone to “hysteria,” which is caused by any number of possible things including a buildup of “fluids” within them. To release those fluids, he has invented a device: you guessed it, a vibrator. Using it, he can and does stimulate them to “paroxysm,” which tends to cleanse them of the fluids and the hysteria, at least for a time. He always prescribes a series of treatments over several weeks; you can imagine that he gets few arguments.

There are two central patients featured here: a local woman named Mrs. Daldry (Melissa Canciller) and, later, a man named Leo Irving (Edgar Miguel Sanchez). Dr. Givings notes several times how unusual it is for a man to suffer from hysteria, but, hey, Irving is an artist. Mrs. Daldry has been brought in by her utterly condescending husband, who treats her like a child, as was common in an era in which women sacrificed their very adulthood by the act of getting married. But Daldry (Joel Ewing) is little more than an overgrown child himself, giving in to whatever odd urges compel him, flirting with Dr. Givings’ wife Catherine (Rochelle Therrien), and eventually making a blatant pass at her, the 19th Century equivalent of grabbing her p…well you know. Meanwhile, our friendly, happy artist is not only engaging in “innocent” flirtation with Catherine, but in much more serious flirtation with her wet nurse, Elizabeth (Crystal McNeil), who is also a married woman. (The fact that women are seen as property does not appear to deter these men from desiring to re-organize the ownership arrangements.)

The central relationship, of course, is the one between the Givings. From the start, it is clear that Catherine is unhappy. Anyone other than her husband (who is so concentrated on his contraptions that he can’t see his wife clearly) would understand that this woman whose infant daughter isn’t getting enough milk from her, who has to rely on a wet nurse who is bonding nicely with the baby, is depressed. But Dr. Givings, though he treats others with his machines for similar “ailments,” shrugs it off in his wife, telling her she isn’t ill. This is “The Yellow Wallpaper” in reverse: though in both we see the hysteria diagnosis and the male-centric response to it, here the doctor husband refuses to acknowledge and treat his increasingly anxious wife. Instead of slinking around the room wearing down the wallpaper, she is reduced to slinking over to the operating theatre door and trying to listen in to what her husband will not allow her to witness.

Once Catherine discovers the secret pleasures of the vibrator, and later the fact that those pleasures can actually (in some other marriages) be felt in the wedding bed, the play moves in a new direction as she tries desperately to convince her too-reserved, too-scientific, too-unsentimental husband that she needs to feel…and so does he.

In the Next Room is directed with a deliberate, slow-paced rhythm by Mechelle Moe, a member of Timeline Theatre. Moe has brought out the very best in her actors, who uniformly deliver excellent performances. A late monologue by McNeil is notable not only for its power but also for its calmness: as is the case in most of the play, the Victorian era veneer of control pervades even the heaviest moments. This creates a brilliant contrast for the points in the play when characters lose that control: Mr. Baldry’s pass, the various moments on the vibrator, a lovely scene in which the quietly efficient nurse Annie (Dana Tretta), sensing a kindred spirit, allows herself to break a Victorian boundary, the scenes in which Dr. Givings is finally allowing himself to feel jealousy, and, most of all, a long, slow, elaborately intimate ending. These changes in energy are emotional dynamite, which is why it pains me to say that the decision to keep most of the play on that deliberate rhythm in order to create them caused me some problems. The laconic pacing overwhelmed me at times; I even started losing focus on occasion: dynamite of a very different kind.

Still, In the Next Room is a play I can easily recommend. Its examination of the roles of men and women is powerful, and if we can laugh a bit at the odd mores of the Victorians and laugh a lot with these people as they discover the basic joys of sexual pleasure, an awakening that should never have had to happen, we can also understand that a lot of the dynamic of these relationships has remained unchanged. We are much cruder today—so much cruder—but too many men around the world still believe that women are delicate creatures who need to be kept in metaphorical cages. But, as more and more of the ugly underbelly of the male-female dynamic is exposed to the world with every day’s news, the play seems to argue that there is always hope for change, for each of us to learn that we can control our own small part of that world.

In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) is now playing at Stage 773 (presented with TimeLine Theatre), 1225 W. Belmont, until December 16. Tickets are available from TimeLine Theatre. Find more information about current plays on our Current Shows page and at theatreinchicago.com.