Comments on: Theater Commentary: The Ruhling Class

By: Art

Art — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:43:19 +0000

Thanks for the link,

Just a small note. The commentary about the play not sticking with you is from Ed Siegel,who was the former Boston Globe theatre critic, but it was actually from a review of the New Rep production Mr. Seigel wrote for the Boston Phoenix.

BTW: It seems as if with Dead Man’s Cell Phone many critics uniformly lost their sense of wonder with Ruhl. It received pretty much uniformly bad reviews, even from those who had been in her corner for a while.

By: Bill Marx

Bill Marx — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:52:53 +0000

Art,
Thanks for the head’s up — I will make the change in the text about the piece appearing in the Boston Phoenix.

And I did notice that Dead Man’s Cell Phone was not as well received as Ruhl’s other plays. But that doesn’t seem to have slowed the trend.

And my response is also sparked by reading the New Yorker piece, which was filled with so many mush-headed generalizations that I felt somebody should raise an objection, though it could well be that Ruhl will be a flash in the pan.

By: Art

Art — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:00:03 +0000

I agree with you. Ruhl is not just a flash in the pan.

We will be getting her work for years to come. As long as The New Yorker and the lead at the Times are still championing her vision, regional theatres will keep lining up.

What made the Lahr piece so fascinating, not in a good way, was its overarching mission: to try and prove, through theory, some type of deep and tragic meaning to Ruhl’s work.

From Calvino to Ovid, (Ruhl’s work resembles neither,) and suddenly I was reminded of Eric Bentley’s caution about dramatists who create a theory for their work.

By: David Cote

David Cote — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:37:43 +0000

Hello Bill: I’m very late getting to this article, but I think you mischaracterize the NYC critical establishment’s reception of Sarah Ruhl. With the exception of Charles Isherwood, the New York Times’s second-string reviewer, critics have been mixed to negative on Ruhl’s offerings. Isherwood has set himself up as Ruhl’s chief cheerleader, even while he has greeted much darker and stylistic daring work with strenuous disdain and condescension. I myself have tried to keep an open mind at Ruhl’s various attempts at surrealist whimsy, but I find them increasingly cloying and vapid. Many NYC critics don’t understand her success and find the work seriously wanting. You make a good point that it infantilizes the audience. But even worse, I find that her value system (as regards people in society) is creepily conservative and retrograde, even if she thinks she’s being daring by writing whimsical stage directions as if it were grad-school poetry.

By: Philip

Philip — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:41:01 +0000

I saw “The Clean House” at the New Rep. In the end, I thought the most affecting scene was the one where the husband tells his wife he’s fallen in love with his patient: that is, a scene, or a part of one anyway, without the labored “whimsy” (to use the word regularly applied to the play–I prefer “affectation”) that characterized most of the play. As for the alternating emotions–i.e., “I laugh, I cry”–that seems to me an easy way of not bothering to dramatize the transitions one makes from one emotion or perception to another, possibly opposite one. In the play, the divorced wife’s change from resenting her replacement to caring for her was not explained but rather only announced by one of the projected “stage directions.” That’s too bad, because understanding the ex-wife’s change would have had a far greater dramatic payoff than anything else in the play, especially the joke to die from. But then again, it seems so many new plays seem to have little interest in drama.