Sarah Ruhl

Sarah Ruhl was born in Chicago in 1974 and raised as a Catholic, though she lost her faith during her schooldays. Her mother was an English professor at the University of Illinois and keen amateur actor. Her father, a marketing executive, took her to a pancake breakfast each week and taught her a new complicated word. After writing an unproduced play while in fourth grade, she studied poetry and creative writing at Brown University, graduating with a B.A. in English.
Ruhl currently lives in New York City with her husband and infant daughter. She has been the recipient of a Helen Merrill Award and a Whiting Writers' Award, was a Kennedy Center Fellow at the Sundance Theatre Laboratory in 2000 and is currently a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a 'genius grant' which pays her $100,000 annually for five years.
Following 'Chekhov Shorts' (adaptations of the Chekhov short stories) staged in 2001, Ruhl's first fully original work to be staged was 'Melancholy Play' (2002) in which other characters can't resist falling in love with a beautifully sad woman who transforms into an almond. 'Orlando' (2003) is an adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel. With 'Eurydice' (2003), a re-telling of the Orpheus myth in which the heroine questions whether she wants to come back from the underworld, Ruhl began to garner considerable critical attention. 'Late: A Cowboy Song' (2003) is a romantic Western in which a married woman runs off with a cowgirl. 'Passion Play' (2005) is an epic trilogy that places Christ's crucifixion in three diverse settings - Elizabethan England, Nazi Germany and South Dakota in the Reagan era. 'Dead Man's Cellphone' (2005) is about invisible connections between the living and the dead. She is currently working on a commission from the Berkeley Repertory Theatre for a play about the history of the vibrator.
Her writing is inspired by Paula Vogel but also by other feminist dramatists such as Caryl Churchill, Maria Irene Fornes and Elizabeth Egloff. She told PerformInk Online: "One of the things Paula taught us was Russian formalism and peering at the object at a slant. I think that's one of the hugest things I learned from her aesthetically. Indirectness is not culturally valued right now. Everything is so head-on. You can’t enter into it on your own, because it’s coming right at you. I think it's the Pilgrims and the fact that they didn't like theatre much. Certainly they wouldn't like theatre in which weird transformations happen. I come from a Catholic upbringing so I can talk about water turning into wine."
'The Clean House was' commissioned by the McCarter Theater (Princeton, N.J.) and premiered in the autumn of 2004 at the Yale Repertory Theater. It won for Ruhl the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2004 (an award for the best new play by a woman) and saw her nominated for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. After numerous regional productions and foreign productions in Canada, England and Australia, 'The Clean House' finally reached New York late last year and enjoyed an extended off-Broadway season at the prestigious Lincoln Center.
Ruhl comes from a family of doctors that includes her grandfather, uncles and sister. Her inspiration for The Clean House came from a chance remark by a doctor, overheard at a party of doctors. "Oh, it's been such a hard month. My cleaning lady from Brazil is depressed and won't clean my house. So I took her to the hospital and had her medicated. And she still won't clean! And now I've been cleaning my house. I didn't go to medical school to clean house." Ruhl's grandmothers both died of breast cancer and her father died of bone cancer when she was 20. She admitted to the Washington Post that the play was "very much about my dad, in a way. His sense of humour as he went through it. And humor being kind of a saving grace." In Time Out New York she argues, "There's something really interesting and profound about what two women who've slept with the same man share. Once the man is geographically not there, I've observed that a lot of women who've been in love with the same person actually become close." Having grown up in a chaotic home, she remarked in Elle magazine on the way the quality of one's housework can stir emotions: "It's all about people's relationship to death and the passage of time. We're in an era of things appearing to be clean, chemically clean, but not being washed in a more soulful way. So the question is, how much can you tolerate chaos?" Writing in American Theatre she noted: "I wanted cleaning to be just plain cleaning in the first act and in the second act, to make it feel more like cleansing - the spiritual, ritual parts of cleaning." Summing up her play for the New York Times, she claimed: "The question is, how much responsibility do you have, not just literally, for the mess of your own life, and how much do you try and avoid chaos?"
The Fortune is delighted to present the distinctive work of this rising American dramatist for the first time to New Zealand audiences.