Sarah Ruhl Selected Works

In this adaptation of her 2018 epistolary book, Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, and a Friendship, "a resonant and profound contribution from two fully formed artists to the literature of illness" (Slate), Ruhl shares letters and poems passed between herself and her former student Max Ritvo, as he candidly discusses terminal illness and tests poetry's capacity to put to words what otherwise feels ineffable.

Becky Nurse is an outspoken, sharp-witted tour guide at the Salem Museum of Witchcraft who’s just trying to get by in post-Obama America. She’s also the descendant of Rebecca Nurse, who was infamously executed for witchcraft in 1692—but things have changed for women since then…haven’t they? After losing her job for calling out The Crucible in front of schoolkids, Becky visits a local witch for help. One spell leads to another, and then everything really goes off the rails.

At a dinner party in the wilds of New Jersey, George and her husband talk with a fellow married couple about a younger acquaintance—a polyamorous woman who also hunts her own meat. Fascinated, they invite this mysterious woman and her two live-in boyfriends to a New Year’s Eve party which alters the course of their lives. How To Transcend A Happy Marriage explores the boundaries of monogamy and the limits of friendship. This new work asks what happens when parents let their wild sides come out of hibernation.

History, remixed. In 17th-century Great Britain, the Stuarts—Charles I and Charles II—defend their divine rights, with the help of a whipping boy. In our own time, Jeb and George W. Bush play hardball—both politics and tennis—battling for power, as siblings and statesmen. By turns intimate and epic, Sarah Ruhl’s astonishing new play reveals the cost of dynastic privilege.

When she was a girl, Ann played Peter Pan at the children’s theatre in Iowa, and her father paused his doctor’s rounds to bring her flowers. Now, she and her four siblings gather to say goodbye to their dying father, stirring up childhood memories. They argue about politics, tell jokes, and wonder what it might mean to grow up. Ruhl’s play is a love letter to a large family contending with the inexorable march of time and the allure of Neverland.

"This play was written differently than any of my other plays; it was written by and for different communities of people in Los Angeles; in some cases, I was just a scribe, and set their stories down. Most of the stories come from women at a program called Shields, for at-risk women trying to get their children back from the Department of Children and Family Services. The play was a commission for Cornerstone Theater's twentieth anniversary, and used the Cornerstone methodology of having story circles that engaged communities of writers, then presented the play with professional actors and actors from those communities." —Sarah Ruhl

The Clean House is a wryly funny, deeply moving play that begs the question: What really is important in life?

Mathilda is depressed. She doesn't want to clean, she wants to tell jokes. In Portuguese. Problem is, she's Lynn's live-in maid. And all Lynn wants is a clean house. She's got everything else: a husband who's a successful surgeon and her own busy career as a doctor. Or so she thinks. Her husband finds his soulmate in one of his patients, and moves out of Lynn's house—which, by the way, is now clean because Lynn's sister Virginia has been cleaning it on the sly. The New York Times calls Sara Ruhl "a provocative new theatrical voice" and The Clean House "visionary."

A decidedly modern look at the Greek myth of love, longing and reconciliation. An elevator of rain, a chorus of stones and a father who builds his daughter a room of string in the land of the dead. In this contemporary re-telling of the ancient story, the passionate young lovers Orpheus and Eurydice wed in the morning, celebrate in the afternoon and separate forever in the early evening. That is until Orpheus seduces the guardians of Hades with his music and attempts to bring his bride back to the land of the living. Cinematic, lyrical and mythic, Eurydice is a feast for the senses that marks the emergence of a strikingly original American playwright.

In the play, Tilly is beautiful and melancholy. Everyone she meets falls in love with her. Then one day she is suddenly happy—and things get very strange. An unexpected story of melancholy in a post-pharmaceutical world, Melancholy Play is an irrational play with a highly rational string quartet. Originally conceived as a play with accompaniment by a single cellist, it was re-tooled by Ruhl as a chamber musical in 2012 in collaboration with composer Todd Almond.

This play is for all the lady cowboys of heart and mind who ride outside the city limits of convention. Mary, always late and always married, meets a lady cowboy outside the city limits of Pittsburgh who teaches her how to ride a horse. Mary's husband, Crick, buys a painting with the last of their savings. Mary and Crick have a baby, but they can't decide on the baby's name, or the baby's gender. A story of one woman's education and her search to find true love outside the box.