Sarah Ruhl

2003 Winner in

Drama

Sarah Ruhl’s plays include Stage Kiss, In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Tony Award nominee for best new play), The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize Finalist, 2005; The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 2004); Passion Play, (Pen American award, The Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award from The Kennedy Center); Dead Man’s Cell Phone (Helen Hayes award); Melancholy Play (a musical with Todd Almond); Eurydice; Orlando, Demeter in the City (NAACP nomination), Late: a cowboy song, Three Sisters, Dear Elizabeth, The Oldest Boy, For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday, and How To Transcend a Happy Marriage. In New York her plays have been produced on Broadway at the Lyceum by Lincoln Center Theater, Off-Broadway at Playwrights’ Horizons, Second Stage, and at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater. Her plays have also been produced regionally all over the country, with premieres often at Yale Repertory Theater, the Goodman Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theater, and the Piven Theatre Workshop in Chicago. Her plays have also been produced internationally and have been translated into over twelve languages. Originally from Chicago, Ms. Ruhl received her M.F.A. from Brown University where she studied with Paula Vogel. An alum of 13P and of New Dramatists, she won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006 and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award in 2016. She is the recipient of a PEN Center Award for a mid-career playwright, a Whiting Award in Drama, the Feminist Press’ Forty under Forty award, and a Lilly Award. She proudly served on the executive council of the Dramatist’s Guild for three years, and she is currently on the faculty at Yale School of Drama. Her book of essays on the theater and motherhood, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, was a Times Notable Book of the Year. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Photo Credit:

Joan Marcus

Reviews & Praise

"Insightful, fresh and funny, the play is as rich in thought as it is in feeling . . . one of the most gifted and adventurous American playwrights to emerge in recent years . . . In the Next Room is a true novelty: a sex comedy designed not for sniggering teenage boys—or grown men who wish they were still sniggering teenage boys—but for adults with open hearts and minds." —The New York Times

“The Clean House is not, by any means, a traditional boy-meets-girl story. In fact disease, death, and dirt are among the subjects it addresses. This comedy is romantic, deeply so, but in the more arcane sense of the word: visionary, tinged with fantasy, extravagant in feeling, maybe a little nuts.” —The New York Times

"Exhilarating!! A luminous retelling of the Orpheus myth, lush and limpid as a dream where both author and audience swim in the magical, sometimes menacing, and always thrilling flow of the unconscious." —The New Yorker [on Eurydice]

"If you’ve never experienced Sarah Ruhl’s work before—or if you’ve wondered what all the fuss over the lauded American playwright is about—Melancholy Play is a good place to start. This early work . . . is whimsical, surrealistic, even absurdist somewhat in the mode of Eugene Ionesco. You worry that bad things happen to good people? Here really strange things happen to all people . . . Giddy as it is, Melancholy Play actually affords considerable psychological insight." —Dallas News