Sarah Ruhl’s fifteen plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalists The Clean House and In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), also nominated for a Tony Award. Her awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, and her book of essays 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Eurydice, named one of the 25 best American plays of the past 25 years in 2018 by the New York Times, was developed into an opera with music by Matthew Aucoin, and performed at The Metropolitan Opera in 2021. Her most recent book, Smile: The Story of a Face, was published in 2021 by Simon & Schuster. Ruhl teaches at the Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
11 products
Becky Nurse of Salem (TCG Edition)
Regular price $17.95 Save $-17.95A wry, innovative reckoning with the legacy of the Salem witch trials from one of America’s foremost playwrights.
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. A darkly comic play about a woman coming to terms with her family’s legacy and finding her voice in the “lock her up” era.
Dead Man's Cell Phone (TCG Edition)
Regular price $15.95 Save $-15.95“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.
Eurydice
Regular price $15.95 Save $-15.95“Eurydice is a luminous retelling of the Orpheus myth from his beloved wife’s point of view. Watching it, we enter a singular, surreal world, as lush and limpid as a dream—an anxiety dream of love and loss—where both author and audience swim in the magical, sometimes menacing, and always thrilling flow of the unconscious… Ruhl’s theatrical voice is reticent and daring, accurate and outlandish.” —John Lahr, New Yorker
A reimagining of the classic myth of Orpheus through the eyes of its heroine. Dying too young on her wedding day, Eurydice journeys to the underworld, where she reunites with her beloved father and struggles to recover lost memories of her husband and the world she left behind.
For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday (TCG Edition)
Regular price $14.95 Save $-14.95After their father dies, five siblings find themselves around the kitchen table of their childhood, pouring whiskey and sharing memories. The eldest, Ann, reminisces about her days playing Peter Pan at the local children’s theater, and soon the five are transported back to Neverland. For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday is a fantastical exploration of the enduring bonds of family, the resistance to “growing up,” and the inevitability of growing old.
How to transcend a happy marriage (TCG Edition)
Regular price $14.95 Save $-14.95“This new play is a subversive enchantment. It is part absurd domestic seriocomedy, part erotic magic realism, unflinching about taboos and about questioning that, just maybe, monogamy isn’t enough.” —Linda Winer, Newsday
Over dinner with another married couple, George and her husband grow fascinated by stories of their friends’ new acquaintance—an intriguing younger woman named Pip. What begins as an innocent intellectual discussion turns into a sexually explosive New Year’s Eve party after George extends an invitation to Pip and her two live-in boyfriends, raising the question: What ultimately binds human beings together?
In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)
Regular price $16.95 Save $-16.95“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.
Letters from Max
Regular price $26.00 Save $-26.00A KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF 2018
In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet. He was also in remission from pediatric cancer.
Over the next four years—in which Ritvo’s illness returned and his health declined, even as his productivity bloomed—the two exchanged letters that spark with urgency, humor, and the desire for connection. Reincarnation, books, the afterlife as an Amtrak quiet car, good soup: in Ruhl and Ritvo’s exchanges, all ideas are fair, nourishing game, shared and debated in a spirit of generosity and love. “We’ll always know one another forever, however long ever is,” Ritvo writes. “And that’s all I want—is to know you forever.”
Studded with poems and songs, Letters from Max is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and the afterlife.
Letters from Max
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00A KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF 2018
In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet. He was also in remission from pediatric cancer.
Over the next four years—in which Ritvo’s illness returned and his health declined, even as his productivity bloomed—the two exchanged letters that spark with urgency, humor, and the desire for connection. Reincarnation, books, the afterlife as an Amtrak quiet car, good soup: in Ruhl and Ritvo’s exchanges, all ideas are fair, nourishing game, shared and debated in a spirit of generosity and love. “We’ll always know one another forever, however long ever is,” Ritvo writes. “And that’s all I want—is to know you forever.”
Studded with poems and songs, Letters from Max is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and the afterlife.
Passion Play (TCG Edition)
Regular price $15.95 Save $-15.95Named 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.
Stage Kiss
Regular price $16.95 Save $-16.95A 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.
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.
The Clean House and Other Plays
Regular price $19.95 Save $-19.95“Passionate. Show-stopping. Daringly over-the-top and impressively consistent in its delirious excess. The Clean House shines.”—New Haven Advocate
“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
“Touching, inventive, invigoratingly compact, and luminously liquid, Eurydice reframes the ancient myth of ill-fated love to focus not on the bereaved musician but on his dead bride—and on her struggle with love beyond the grave.”—San Francisco Chronicle
This volume is the first publication of Sarah Ruhl, “a playwright with a unique comic voice, perspective, and sense of theater” (Variety), who is fast leaving her mark on the American stage. In the award-winning The Clean House—a play of uncommon romance and uncommon comedy—a maid who hates cleaning dreams about creating the perfect joke, while a doctor who treats cancer leaves his heart inside one of his patients. This volume also includes Eurydice, Ruhl’s reinvention of the tragic Greek tale of love and loss, Late: A Cowboy Song, and Melancholy Play.
Sarah Ruhl received the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2004 for her play The Clean House, which has been produced at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia, South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, DC. Her play Eurydice has been produced at Madison Repertory Theatre and Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
