sarah ruhl

“Satire is her oxygen. . . . In her new oddball comedy, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Sarah Ruhl is forever vital in her lyrical and biting takes on how we behave.”—The Washington Post

“Ruhl’s zany probe of the razor-thin line between life and death delivers a fresh and humorous look at the times we live in.”—Variety

“Sarah Ruhl is deliriously imaginative and fearless in her choice of subject matter. She is an original.”—Molly Smith, artistic director, Arena Stage

An incessantly ringing cell phone in a quiet café. A stranger at the next table who has had enough. And a dead man—with a lot of loose ends. So begins Dead Man’s Cell Phone, a wildly imaginative new comedy by playwright Sarah Ruhl, recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and Pulitzer Prize finalist for her play The Clean House. A work about how we memorialize the dead—and how that remembering changes us—it is the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world.

Sarah Ruhl’s plays have been produced at theaters around the country, including Lincoln Center Theater, the Goodman Theatre, Arena Stage, South Coast Repertory, Yale Repertory Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, among others, and internationally. She is the recipient of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (for The Clean House, 2004), the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award, and the Whiting Writers’ Award. The Clean House was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005. She is a member of 13P and New Dramatists.

“A fascinating, funny and evocative play. . . . Ruhl develops the story with the enticing blend of irreverent humor and skewed realism. . . . It’s beautiful.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“[This] breathtakingly inventive addition to Ruhl’s singular body of work . . . has the potential to be a modern masterpiece.”–Los Angeles Times

Sarah Ruhl made her Broadway debut this fall with her latest effervescent comedy: a play about sex, intimacy, and equality, set in the 1880s, when enthusiasm for the electric light bulb gave rise to a handy new instrument to treat female hysteria. The story revolves around the medical office and home of Dr. Givings, who regularly induces “paroxysm” in his once high-strung patient Sabrina, allowing her to happily return to playing piano. Soon, Sabrina falls in love with the doctor’s assistant Annie, and also befriends his wife Catherine, who is dealing with her own neurotic misgivings about not being able to breast-feed her baby. With this new work, Ruhl once again uses playful symbolism and lyrical language as she makes seemingly effortless thematic leaps—crafting a play with tremendous critical and audience appeal, in her singular theatrical voice.

Sarah Ruhl’s plays include Dead Man’s Cell Phone, The Clean House (a Pulitzer Prize finalist), Passion Play, and Eurydice, all of which have been widely produced throughout the United States and internationally. She is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.

Named one of the "Ten Best Plays of 2008" by The New Yorker

“Sarah Ruhl’s bold, inventive, and ironic triptych [is] a meditation on devotion and its appropriation by the state. . . . Ruhl is an original; a storyteller with a fine mind evolving her own theatrical idiom.”—John Lahr, The New Yorker

“It’s a different kind of morality play . . . an often wondrous work . . . with [Ruhl’s] own special lyrical blend of poetry, humor and grace.”—Frank Rizzo, Variety

Passion Play is Sarah Ruhl’s “biggest, most ambitious effort yet” (The New York Times), a three-and-a-half hour intimate epic, plunging the depths of the timely intersection of politics and religion. Ruhl dramatizes a community of players rehearsing their annual staging of the Easter Passion in three different eras: 1575 northern England, just before Queen Elizabeth outlaws the ritual; 1934 Oberammergua, Bavaria, as Hitler is rising to power; and Spearfish, South Dakota, from the time of Vietnam through Reagan’s presidency. In each period, the players grapple in different ways with the transformative nature of art, and politics are never far in the background, as Queen Elizabeth, Hitler, and Reagan each appear, played by a single commanding actor.

Sarah Ruhl’s plays include Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Eurydice, and The Clean House, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been widely produced both throughout the country and internationally, and she is the recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.

“A gift and a rarity: a superb new romantic comedy that’s moving, smart and flat-out hilarious... You will have difficulty breathing. Stage Kiss is that funny.” — Jesse Green, New York

“In Stage Kiss passion and fidelity engage in a kind of elegant pas de deux…At once a knowing send-up of the hazy half-truths of stage naturalism and a meditation on the nature of desire and sexual fantasy, the play manages to be both wholly original and instantly recognizable.” — John Lahr, New Yorker

“A knockabout farce that channels Noël Coward and Michael Frayn.” — Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

“Wickedly clever... Ruhl’s unique, breezily elegant dialogue is fully present.” — Steven Oxman, Variety

“A lively blend of romantic comedy and backstage farce... Stage Kiss reminds us of how the artifice of theater can stir real emotions not just for those who create it, but for those who attend it, too.” — Charles Isherwood, New York Times

When estranged lovers are thrown together as romantic leads in a long-forgotten 1930s melodrama, the line between offstage and onstage begins to blur. Here, Sarah Ruhl, one of America’s most widely produced playwrights, brings her unique mix of lyricism, sparkling humor and fierce intelligence to the world of romantic comedy. The play asks us to consider what is real, both in love and in art.

Sarah Ruhl’s plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalists In the Next Room or the vibrator play (Tony Award nominee, Best Play) and The Clean House (Susan Smith Blackburn Award), as well as Passion Play, a cycle; Dead Man’s Cell Phone; Dear Elizabeth; Eurydice; Melancholy Play and Late: a cowboy song. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a PEN/Laura Pels Award and a MacArthur Fellowship.