Long Wharf Theatre Associate Director Eric Ting who directed the theater’s current production of Clybourne Park as well as the world premiere of Laura Jacqmin’s January Joiner in Long Wharf Stage II back in January, has won an Obie Award for one of his non-Long Wharf projects, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s drama We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915.

The play was done at Soho Rep in New York City last November. Ting (shown above walking his dog Henry in downtown New Haven) also directed We Are Proud to Present a Presentation… in the spring of 2012 at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago.

Other 2013 Obie winners which might resonate with New Haven audiences included Ruben Santiago-Hudson (whose autobiographical one-man show Lackawanna Blues was at Long Wharf in 2002) for his revival of Yale Rep icon August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson; David Byrne, who’ll be playing New Haven’s Shubert in June, for his musical with Fatboy Slim, Here Lies Love), Lois Smith (who starred in Lil’s 90^th by Darci Picoult at Long Wharf Stage II in 2010); and John Rando (who has the distinct honor of having been announced as director of two regional theater shows in Connecticut that never happened: David Ives’ Polish Joke, which fell off the Long Wharf Theatre schedule in 2002, and Christopher Durang’s Beyond Therapy at Westport Country Playhouse, which ended up being directed by David Kennedy instead) for Ives’ All in the Timing.

The other Obie winners: David Levine and Marsha Ginsberg,  Dave Malloy and Rachel Chavkin, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Ayad Akhtar,Annie Baker, Eisa Davis, Brandon J. Dirden, Shuler Hensley, Matthew Maher, Paul Thureen, Fulcrum Theater, Half Straddle, David Byrne & Fatboy Slim, Clubbed Thumb, Lois Smith, Frances Sternhagen, Lear deBessonet, Laura Jellinek, Clint Ramos and the plays Detroit and Grimly Handsome.

The Obie Awards (the title is from “O.B.” for Off Broadway) began in the 1950s to honor the new breed of theater happening in New York City beyond the commercial confines of Broadway. The awards were created by the Village Voice, which helped further the Off Broadway movement by reviewing shows which critics for the major New York daily newspapers weren’t at. The

On May 17, the Village Voice let go several of its longtime staffers, including Michael Feingold, the Yale School of Drama grad and long-ago Yale Rep literary manager who had been writing about theater for the paper since 1970. Feingold chaired the committee which presented the Obies, and was apparently the center of attention at the awards ceremony Monday due his unceremonious dismissal from the Voice last week.

The New York reported today that Feingold’s contract with the Voice expires Tuesday, and that he “is now talking to the Voice about writing freelance reviews and continuing as chairman of the committee of judges for the Obies.”

The Voice’s coverage of Off Broadway has already shrunken alarmingly over the years. Not that others haven’t picked up the slack; the Times and other dailies have covered Off Broadway pretty handily for decades now, and thanks to the internet the days are now long gone when a story or ad in the Voice were the only way non-New Yorkers could find out about a hot new small theater. But out-of-the-way theater reviews was one of the major alternative elements which distinguished the Voice when it first began in 1955.

The Voice’s coverage of its own 2013 Obie Awards is underwhelming. There are 63 uncaptioned photos of attendees (Eric Ting’s in number 21 of the “Photo Booth Fun” shots) and a couple of other slideshows illustrating the ceremony, but the only real analysis of the awards is the the pre-ceremony announcement piece filed by Feingold. I don’t like it when the Times covers Voice things better than the Voice does.

The Obies will never be the same. Thank goodness Eric Ting got his now.

Good luck getting a ticket, but it’s worth noting that The Greater Middletown Chorus’ world premiere of the “dramatic oratorio” Letter from Italy, 1944 is this weekend at Middletown High School’s Performing Arts Center (220 Larosa Lane, Middletown).

The show’s sole regular performance, April 28 at 4 p.m., has been sold out for weeks. A “preview performance” was added for tonight (Friday, April 26) at 7:30 p.m., but you can imagine that demand for that is high as well.

The show—performed by the 18-person chorale, five featured soloists and several dozen musicians—is based on the writings of Dr. John K. Meneely Jr., specifically the letters he wrote to his family when he was stationed in Italy as an army medic during World War II.

The correspondence has been turned into an oratorio by Meneely’s daughters Nancy Fitz-Hugh Meneely (a poet, living in Guilford, whose libretto version of Letter from Italy has been published and is available here) and Sarah Meneely-Kyder (a composer, based in Old Lyme, whose works have been performed by the New Haven Symphony, City Singers of Hartford, American Music/Theater Group and others). The stage direction for the premiere is by the Greater Middletown Chorale’s resident director Sheila Hickey Garvey, a longtime Professor of Theater at Southern Connecticut State University who’s contributed to books on Jason Robards and Eugene O’Neill.

A review of an earlier version of Letters from Italy, 1944, performed in 2003, calls the text “Walt Whitman-ish” and deems the musical setting “trenchantly dramatic, eerie, frightening and warmly lyrical as the text requires.”

The GMC has set up a special website to promote this premiere production, replete with bios, info on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (which Dr. Meneely appeared to have suffered from, though the disorder wasn’t known by that name in his day), blogs by director Garvey and others; an Honor Roll of military veterans “honored by family and friends as part of Letter from Italy, 1944”; and a three minute video preview of the show

The oratorio has received a number of grants to assist in its development, including on the state level from the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development and the Connecticut Humanities Council.

Given the excitement over this one, and the fact that many will be shut out from seeing it, here’s hoping for further renditions of Letter from Italy, 1944.

I’m doing another of my “Play in a Day” children’s theater activities Tuesday, April 16 from 2-5 p.m. at Never Ending Books, 810 State Street, New Haven. In the space of three hours, we adapt a classic piece of theater, rehearse it, and (when parents come to pick up the kids) perform it.

The usual format: Parents drop off their kids at Neverending Books (810 State Street, New Haven), then return three hours later to see a show and, if they like, stick around and chat. The fee is $5 per child. Parents are welcome to stay if they wish. Children of all ages welcome—we’ve had as young as four and as old at 13.
Previous Play in a Day shows can be viewed at http://scribblers.us/nhtj/?page_id=1500
Contact Christopher Arnott at chris@scribblers.us for more details.

Haven’t done one of these in months. Looking forward to it. Will almost definitely do a comedy.

The end of a Yale Cabaret season—20 shows, now all done!—means that one team of artistic and managing directors is moving on (and in most cases are als0 graduating for the Yale School of Drama) and next year’s team has been anointed.

This weekend, in the chatty “fire speech” period before performances of the season-closing social satire The Ugly One (see review below), the Yale Cabaret has been passing the torch. Outgoing Artistic Director Ethan Heard and Managing Director Jonathan Wemette have been announcing the names of their successors.

The Managing Director for the 2013-2014 school-year Cabaret season will be Shane Hudson, who was was an associate producer of last summer’s story-based Yale Summer Cabaret season and the producer of Milk Milk Lemonade at Yale Cabaret last fall, to name a couple of credits.

For the artistic directorship, the Cabaret is changing models from a single person to a team of three. This is not the first time this method has been used, but it’s notable this time that all three co-artistic directors—Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski and Kelly Kerwin—are from the Yale School of Drama’s dramaturgy program. It’s not a given that this post tends to go to directing students, but that’s certainly been common. Having an artistic team that’s as devoted to the nuances of text as to those of staging will doubtless lead to some provocative and thoughtful programming choices.

Kerwin was the dramaturg for, and Dibo and Dubowkski were the co-directors of, the “promenade play” The Twins Would Like to Say at the Cabaret earlier this month. All three women have extensive Cabaret and Yale School of Drama credits, collectively ranging from the revival of The Yiddish King Lear to the Yale Rep show American Night—The Ballad of Juan Jose. There’s just the right mix of experience here, from down-and-dirty low-rent shows to pristine artistic displays. I’m excited already for whatever they come up with for next semester.

The Ugly One

Through April 13 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven. (203) 432-1566, www.yalecabaret.org

By Marius von Mayenburg. Translated by Maja Zade. Director: Cole Lewis. Dramaturg: Sarah Krasnow. Scenic Designer: Reid Thompson. Costume Designer: Soule Golden. Lighting Designer: Benjamin Ehrenreich. Composer: Steve Brush. Sound Designers: Steve Brush and Tyler Kiefer. Projection Designer: Nicholas Hussong. Technical Director: Alex Bergeron. Producer & Stage Manager: Jennifer Lagundino. Cast: Mitchell Winter (Lette), Michelle McGregor (Fanny), Jabari Brisport (Scheffler), Dan O’Brien (Karlmann).

The Onion Book of Known Knowledge defines “Serling, Rod” as:

Neurotic creator and host of The Twilight Zone, a weekly anthology series that enabled Serling to work through his fears of flying, being alone, his neighbors, dying in his sleep, getting sucked into dreams or works of art, being locked in a bank vault during a nuclear attack, dead grandmas calling on toy phones, being the only human-looking person in a fascist world of pig-snouted people, fictional towns called Willoughby, being harassed by small people in spaceships, and being shot by Elizabeth Montgomery

The Ugly One, by German playwright Marius von Mayenburg, takes a Serling trope—the power of attractiveness—and gives it an Onion-esque spin, taking a superficial concept about a superficial trait and deepening it by taking it to comical extremes.

It’s an entirely appropriate final show for a season which continually explored values of normalcy, sanity and beauty. But it’s also a divine showcase for the values of the Yale Cabaret. Like the Brecht script Lindbergh’s Flight, which was done at the Cabaret earlier this year, The Ugly One holds itself to a four-person ensemble in which only one actor (Mitchell Winter) consistently maintains a lead role while the other change characters with blistering speed around him. There’s no presumption of costume changes, and none of the actors ever leaves the stage. As with Lindbergh, there’s a loose and arch comic style which puts the actors at risk of cracking each other up and dropping character(s). But the transformations—which are not quickchanges, just a ball to keep up with—set a tone and pace and comic strip clamor for The Ugly One which telegraphs to audiences in its very first moments that it’s OK to laugh uproariously.

The Ugly One’s Friday 11 p.m. audience was keen to guffaw, and von Mayenburg’s play—an influential hit at London’s Royal Court theater in 2007-08—keeps giving them license. It starts with a neat theatrical premise: that lead character Lette (Mitchell Winter, who explored aspects of truth and beauty as the Georges in a Yale School of Drama production of Sunday in the Park with George earlier this school year) is unspeakably ugly, though he’s never realized this fact which is universally acknowledged by everyone around him. The audience hasn’t realized it either, since there’s no attempt (through make-up, masks or otherwise) to convey that the actor’s face is any different than that of his co-stars. When Lette is changed by a doctor (Jabari Brisport, who delivers some exceptional comic moments just through his voice inflections) into a paragon of male beauty, he succumbs to all the greediness and feelings of superiority which come with it. He torments his wife (Michelle McGregor, a sexual dynamo whose bright lipstick becomes its own character once it attaches itself to Winter’s bemused face) with his adulteries, becomes a spokesperson for the company he develops phallic-metaphor tools for (to the chagrin of his co-worker played with sublime boyish boorishness by Dan O’Brien), and otherwise exploits his good lucks and good fortune so extravagantly that a crass comedown is inevitable. When von Mayerburg delivers this denouement, however, he doesn’t succumb to the simpering sentimentality of many an Adam Sandler movie; he dollops on extra sex, extra sass, extra power struggles. The Ugly One remains riotous to its last moment, so much so that the cast is entirely justified when they turn their curtain call into a frenetic jazz dance.

Like a Rod Serling piece, The Ugly One deals with extraordinary insecurities. But even though it uses some of the same bombastic music or dramatic gasps (parodically, granted) to make its points, it’s so much greater than a Twilight Zone episode. Von Mayenburg has taken a theme which is very close to the hearts of theater people—how we look and act, how we gain importance through through popular ideals of handsomeness, and how easily those traits can be coopted, copied and taken from us. He’s spun it into a cautionary tale which ranks with great German and Russian Expressionist comedy of a century or so ago. It plays like a dream, and also like a kind of Saturday Night Live sketch, so you’re not afraid of it or intimidated by it.

Here’s the Cabaret, taking one last crack at issues of self-worth, places in society, mental stability and what constitutes importance. The Ugly One is a colorful shocker of a consciousness-raiser, and ends the Cabaret’s 2012-13 season on a pretty high note.

Nice profile of puppeteer extraordinaire Basil Twist in the new (April 15) issue of the New Yorker. The magazine did a “Talk of the Town” bit on Twist just a couple of years ago, but this is a full-blown article by Joan Acocella. Its hook is not a New York-based show Twist is working on but a production based on Stravinky’s ballet “Rite of Spring” the puppeteer is preparing for the Carolina Performing Arts Festival in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Twist has received impressive grants and support, and is one of the most acclaimed and influential artists in his field. He could presumably work whenever and wherever he wants. It’s noteworthy that throughout his career he’s balanced his New York work (Symphonie Fantastique, for instance) with projects he’s done out of town.

Here in Connecticut, for instance, Twist designed the puppets for the Long Wharf Theatre 2004 production of Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home (a co-production with Trinity Rep). This wasn’t a premiere, or a tour, or New York-bound. It was just a good, ambitious production which wanted the best life-sized puppets imaginable, so they asked Basil Twist and he said yes.

Twist’s work was also on view at the Yale Rep in 2010 for the world premiere of Rinne Groff’s Compulsion. The play is about novelist Meyer Levin attempting to adapt The Diary of Anne Frank for the stage. Anne Frank appears in Levin’s dreams in puppet form. The play is referenced in Acocella’s New Yorker article, not as a Rep show but from when it played at New York’s Public Theater.

Basil Twists also designed the puppets for the Mabou Mines show Peter & Wendy, which had a weeks-long run at the Yale Rep in 2007, and the Broadway musical The Addams Family, which just played the Shubert in New Haven.

I met Twist when he was in New Haven working on The Long Christmas Ride Home. Our interview was going OK, nothing spectacular, and he was clearly treating me like the sort of writer who probably couldn’t grasp the intricacies of what he does. So I made a point of mentioning that my father was a puppeteer who performed Greek tragedies with marionettes. At which point Twist’s entire demeanor changed, and he accepted me as a playmate. “Wanna see the puppets!?,” he beamed, and of course I did. He was so much more energized when showing off the puppets than he was just talking about them. I’ll never forget that twinkle in his eye; it almost distracted me from his skill in animated those gorgeous puppets.

Members of New Haven Theater Company celebrating the announcement of their May production of Shipwrecked! From left: Hallie Martenson, Christian Shaboo (barechested), Drew Gray (with bottle), Margaret Mann, Hilary Brown, Steve Scarpa (in green plaid shirt), Erich Greene, Peter Chenot (in ski hat) and George Kulp (in tattered shirt).

I ran into playwright Donald Margulies at a Long Wharf Theatre opening night on Tuesday. I was just back from the Humana Festival of New Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville (in Kentucky) and was happy to inform Margulies that his play Dinner With Friends was still among the top two plays immediately mentioned when Humana conversations inevitably turn to well-known works which the festival staged before anyone else. Dinner With Friends was done at Humana in 1998, and is one of three premieres there which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Margulies smiled at the news that his name is still on everyone’s lips at Humana, then told me that a New York revival of Dinner With Friends is in the works, directed by Pam McKinnon, the currently reigning queen of shouty relationship plays (Clybourne Park, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf).

Same night, I got the official word that another Margulies work is being staged here in New Haven shortly.

The New Haven Theater Company, many of whose members work behind-the-scenes at the Long Wharf in marketing and box office positions, is presenting Margulies’ comic drama Shipwrecked! An Entertainment—The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (as Told by Himself) on May 12, 18 & 19 (with two performances each day, at 4 & 7 p.m.) at the Whitney Arts Center, 591 Whitney Avenue.

Shipwrecked was produced at Long Wharf Stage II in the spring of 2008, after having had its world premiere at South Coast Repertory Theatre six months earlier. Those, and most other, productions of the play have used a three-person cast, with one male actor playing the hero and two supporting players (one male, one female) playing everybody else. The script doesn’t actually specify that the cast be a threesome, so NHTC is expanding it to a quintet. Christian Shaboo plays Louis, the real-life late-19th-century protagonist of the piece, who’s gotten worldwide publicity for an adventure in which he’d communed with hostile aboroginal tribes and ridden sea turtles. Hilary Brown, Erich Greene, Margaret Mann and Hallie Martenson are the ensemble. Peter Chenot directs, with a production design by Drew Gray. All these folks are stalwart NHTC veterans.

New Haven Theater Company has something in common with the washed-ashore hero of Shipwrecked. The space they used most often in the past few years, a storefront on Court Street, was rented out to a bar and left the company at sea, venue-wise. The Whitney Arts Center is their salvation.

For more info on NHTC, see http://www.newhaventheatercompany.com/

The Twins Would Like to Say

Through April 6 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven. Final performances tonight at 8:30 and 11 p.m. www.yalecabaret.org

By Seth Bockley and Devon de Mayo. Co-Directors: Whitney Dibo and Lauren Dubowski. Dramaturg: Kelly Kerwin. Set Designer: Brian Dudkiewicz. Assistant Set Designer: Samantha Lazar. Costume Designer: Steven M. Rotramel. Lighting Designer: Christopher Ash. Sound Designer: Sam Ferguson. Stage Manager: Molly Hennighausen. Producer: Katie Liberman. Cast: Chasten Harmon (June Gibbons), Sarah Williams (Jennifer Gibbons), Sheria Irving (Gloria Gibbons), Leonard Thomas (Aubrey Gibbons), Emily Zemba (Betsy Ronson), Maura Hooper (Chloe, Shadow Jennifer), Willa Fitzgerald (Jenny, Shadow June), Matt Raich (Lance), Ilya Khodosh (Mr. Nobody).

With one play yet to go in its 20-show school-year season, the Yale Cabaret once again touches upon mental illness (or at least psychological disorder). It once again does mirror-image stagings of fraught imaginings of artistic women. It once again… oh, never mind. This one ends up being wonderfully original, and is uniquely suited to the Cabaret space. If you didn’t know that this work was created and first presented by Chicago’s Dog & Pony troupe at the Steppenwolf Theatre (where it was directed by its co-writers), you’d think it was created expressly for the Cabaret’s intimate quarters and open-minded audiences.

The play by Seth Bockley (librettist of the musical February House, which premiered at Long Wharf Theatre last year) and Devon de Mayo is about real-life Welsh twins who jointly chose never to speak, and made several other pacts which are gradually revealed in this drama. The girls have active imaginations which they unleash in bursts of fiction.

The script is very clever in how it uses the imagery of twins. There are comedy-of-errors moments. There are distorted-prism moments. The are moments of identicalness and moments of differentness. There is also a twin image for the twins as a unit: a couple of “shadow twins,” light-skinned with long blonde hair to contrast Jennifer and June’s darker complexions. There’s also a fantasy narrator named Mr. Nobody, perfect for a piece that actively questions notions of identity and conformity.

In dramatizing the twins’ fiction-writing, Bockley and de Mayo turn the people closest to the girls in their real lives—their parents, their psychologist, the neighbor boy they lust after—into an ensemble company which acts out the stories. This is done in a way that sidesteps the sort of lazy literalization one finds in so many plays and films (from Sunday in the Park With George to Becoming Jane Austen) where it’s presumed that all fictional ideas come from real-life interactions. Everything in this piece is a little off from the start, and you move through it with a sense of unreality from the start.

When I say “you move through it,” that’s a literal statement. The audience, upon entering the performance space, is invited to sit on set pieces—a bed, armchairs, steps, wherever. If performers need the area, the audience members are tapped on the shoulder and expected to move to a different location.

I stayed put in an area where I could scribble notes in piece, and survey the flow of traffic. While some folks shifted uncertainly, as if they were afraid they were losing a game of musical chairs, others rose to the invitation of wandering about, following certain characters doggedly.

Such “promenade” staging fits beautifully with one of the writer’s structural conceits—several scenes have “A” and “B” sections which are played simultaneously. Often, one contains the exposition while the other is more  imagistic. This heighten all the twinniness of the show, and it’s a reward to the audience members who choose to dash from one corner of the Cabaret to the other in pursuit of more drama.

I learned, from my perch on a tall stool at a table near the sound booth (where I was never tapped or otherwise persuaded to move) that you could hear everything happening in the room well enough to piece together just about everything you needed to know. That is, until the very end, when (as the script insists) a curtain divides the audience in half and two different, simultaneous final scenes are performed. You need to compare notes with fellow audience members to grasp the whole picture.

The diverse cast for this challenging piece has modulated themselves so that they can emerge from or blend into the crowd at will. Particularly suited to the exercise is Matt Raich as the aforementioned boy next door. Raich’s character Lance, who becomes the hero of the girl’s fiction, looks like a young Gerrit Graham, and is more a caricature of a smoldering young James Dean/Brando type than the real thing. He is to the teen fantasy stereotype what Paul Giamatti is to Hamlet (playing just a block away from the Cabaret). There’s a wonderful looseness and informality to the cheery Emily Zemba’s portrayal the girl’s psychologist, while their parents (Sheria Irving and Leonard Thomas) wisely go with a more intense, actorly stance. As the narrator Mr. Nobody, Ilya Khodosh behaves as if he were the young Woody Allen acting as a jittery tour guide. He has every right to be nervous, since the audience is milling about at his invitation.

The Twins Would Like to Say appears to be loaded with gimmicks. But it turns out they’re not gimmicks at all. They underline major themes in the play. Not least is the sense of community and communication required for such a production to remain civilized. As we learn, there were things the Goodwin girls needed to learn about playing well with others.

Two performances remaining: April 6 at 2 & 8 p.m. in the Yale Repertory Theatre, corner of York and Chapel streets, New Haven.

By Sarah Ruhl. Directed by Stephen Kaliski. Produced by Jonathan Lian for the Yale Dramatic Association. Set Designer: Jason Sherwood. Lighting Designer: Jessica Greenberg. Sound Designer/Composer: Matt Sherwin. Costume Designer: Summer Lee Jack. Hair & Makeup Designer: Molly Weinreb. Performers: Calista Small (Catherine Givings), Tim Creavin (Dr. Givings), Marina Horiates (Sabrina Daldry), Christine Shaw (Annie), Paul Hinkes (Leo Irving), Zina Ellis (Elizabeth) and Kyle Yoder (Mr. Daldry).

Having just seen Sarah Ruhl in a panel discussion at the Humana Festival in Louisville, Kentucky, and having just read her ten-minute play which will premiere at Humana tonight, and having discussed Ruhl extensively last weekend with her teacher Paula Vogel and her frequent collaborator Les Waters (both interviews can be found at www.engine31.org), I was pleased to return home to find the Yale Dramat doing one of Ruhl’s most popular works.

Vibrator Play was not one of the several Ruhl plays which has received its world or East Coast premieres at the Yale Rep. It has, however, had numerous college and small theater productions in Connecticut, and that’s the circuit where I think it’s best appreciated. A show like this is catnip for college students. It deals with repression, sexual openness, the strictures of clinical science and the passions of the empowered mind.

In the Next Room is probably Sarah Ruhl’s least abstract, least “imaginative” play. It literally takes place in an early 20th century drawing room and the next room, the home office of a doctor in private practice. The story—about sexual frustration misdiagnosed as hysteria; about the happy erosion old-world morals and standards and the liberation of art, science and personal communications—unrolls as if it were Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, electrified. It can be performed without archness or irony, and that’s pretty much how the Dramat does it. Good thing, too: the audience provides plenty of loud laughs and whoops and gasps, which would get over-the-top if the actors were overplaying. There’s a steadiness and evenness to the enterprise, which makes the second half of the show play longer than the first (total running time is over two and a half hours) but which serves the script nicely. There’s plenty of humor emanating from stuffy sideburned men and chattering, flushed-faced women, but the central gravity of the show is not lost. This is a drama of awkward confessions and stifled feelings and corseted bodies. I was most impressed by how some of the actors—Zina Ellis as the nursemaid Elizabeth, Calista Small as the anguished Catherine Givings (wife of the doctor, played by Tim Creavin, who’s administering health cures with a vibrating electric metal phallus) and Marina Horiates (as friend/patient Sabrina Daldry)—maintained decorum in the parlor-room scenes. At one point in last night’s performance, Horiates spilled a cup of tea on her elaborate Victorian dress. She and Small covered the gaffe masterfully, so that it almost felt intentional—wet sheets and breast milk feature heavily elsewhere in the play.

It’s not until the very end of the show that In the Next Room expands its consciousness and distorts its environs, a Sarah Ruhl trademark. It’s interesting to compare this older work with Ruhl’s recent romances—her new version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters and her epistolary historical near-romance Dear Elizabeth, both produced by the Yale Rep in recent years. Most Sarah Ruhl plays, including her early hits The Clean House and Eurydice, dramatize difficult romantic choices. The Vibrator Play, true to its name, goes a bit further and actually explores the mechanics of sex.

As is their usual method, the undergraduate student-run organization has enlisted a professional director (New York-based Stephen Kaliski) and designers. It gives the cast a firm foundation on which to work. The show doesn’t feel exactly lived-in: These are college students taking on roles which would be greatly enhanced if they had actual intimate knowledge of marriage and childbirth. But they do bring the energy and exasperation and idealism which are the main tools for any Sarah Ruhl play. This is a solid, worthwhile, funny and poignant production, a fine choice for the Dramat and a neat introduction for those still unfamiliar with the extraordinary Sarah Ruhl.