The playwright, says the director, “aims high here, treating … gender roles in relationships, the brutality of class difference and how it can create a crazy storm [and] serves it all up in a palatable way. What I love about the play — and what, I think, makes it succeed — is that [the playwright] makes us laugh so fully and open-heartedly that she can slip in the quite serious issues.”
The director is Sheila Siragusa, and she’s referring to Living Out, by Lisa Loomer, which plays at Mount Holyoke College this weekend. But she might just as well be talking about Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), which opens this week at Smith College. Both plays, you’ll notice, are by women, and could arguably have been written only by women. Their protagonists are smart, spirited women, and the problems that drive the plays are distinctly female issues.
In Loomer’s play, Ana is an undocumented domestic worker, a mother who cares for another working woman’s infant while one of her own sons remains in El Salvador. Her employer is Nancy, an Anglo lawyer whose time-intensive job and desire to “have it all” has its own cost. The play explores the two women’s common dreams — both are, in fact, striving to do the best for their kids — as well as the disparities in race, class, education, and culture that make their lives so unbridgeably different.
For Siragusa, the “crazy storm” in Living Out is the contemporary American landscape in which we find “Latina women working to take care of the children of wealthy white women — who themselves are working to keep their families in the right neighborhoods — so that the Latino women can have enough money to bring their own children to this country to take part in ‘the dream’.”
The terrain of Sarah Ruhl’s play — the one with the deceptively prosaic title and the tantalizing subtitle — is the 19th-century middle class and women’s place in that (literally) straitlaced society. This “comedy about marriage, intimacy, and electricity” is set in two rooms of a staid Victorian home. In his laboratory-office, Dr. Givings treats women diagnosed with “hysteria” (marked by unseemly sexual desire or other emotional “pathologies”) with a vibrating device of his own invention, designed to relieve their symptoms by giving them orgasms. Meanwhile, his young, sexually unfulfilled wife, Catherine, tends to their newborn baby and wonders what’s going on in the next room.
Lee Sunday Evans, who’s directing the Smith production, says that by taking us back to the dawn of the electric age (and, perhaps not coincidentally, of the suffrage movement) the playwright “is giving us a chance to reflect on how the stigmas of that time can seem both humorous and poignantly reflective of views that have persisted.”
The play, she says, “reflects a timeless truth about how we yearn to be known and seen by those we love and share our lives with.”
Living Out, Feb. 26-28 and March 1, Rooke Theatre, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley. Reservations (413) 538-2406 or email rookeboxoffice@gmail.com. Info at mtholyoke.edu/acad/theatre/season.
In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), Feb. 27-28, March 5-7, Hallie Flanagan Studio Theatre, Mendenhall Center, Smith College, (413) 585-3220, www.smith.edu/smitharts.•
Chris Rohmann can be contacted at StageStruck@crocker.com.
