The Golden Ruhl: Playwright Has A Midas Touch

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That imagination compelled Ruhl to begin "The Clean House" in "metaphysical Connecticut" (the play's locale) with a joke told in Portuguese by an appealing Brazilian maid who refuses to clean. Later in the play, a woman's living room doubles as the sea; it's up to the actors, director and designers to figure out how to make that believable.

Says Woolly Mammoth Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz, who directed an early reading of "Passion Play's" third leg at Arena: "She's becoming famous for her impossible stage directions. . . . Her writing is an invitation to a production. She really believes in letting other people take it and run with it."

Perhaps that's because Ruhl saw the working side of theater at an early age. Her mother acted with scrappy, serious-minded troupes in Chicago. That was before small theaters were professional, and Ruhl's mother managed to keep her hand in community theater while raising Sarah and her older sister, Kate.

"I grew up with her hauling me to rehearsals," Ruhl says. She reports that her mother had her first paying job recently at Chicago's Court Theater: "They washed her stockings. She was so excited about that."

Despite the maternal influence, Sarah Ruhl had no intention of studying theater when she went to Brown. She says she was "lured to the dark side" when she asked her teacher Paula Vogel to advise a thesis. Vogel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Baltimore Waltz" and "How I Learned to Drive," declined.

"I'm not an academic," Vogel explained.

But, she told Ruhl, if you want professorial guidance with a play . . .

In fact, Ruhl had something in mind: a tale about villagers and a passion play they were performing. Ruhl wrote it, and Vogel managed to get it produced at Trinity Rep. Ruhl says that sold her on the profession -- much to her surprise.

"I loved doing it," she says. "And it felt very natural to me. But it wasn't something where I thought, 'Oh, you can make a life out of this.' It just seemed too pleasurable. It seemed decadent ."

But when Vogel took Ruhl and a group of fellow graduate students to her house in Cape Cod after "How I Learned to Drive" won the Pulitzer, Ruhl realized writing plays could be a career. She recalls, "We stood out on the porch and looked at the ocean view, and Paula said, 'Look: This is what playwriting can buy. I bought my house with this play.' " (A writer's royalties at a relatively small theater like Woolly Mammoth might be $8,000 or $10,000, while in a bigger theater like Arena, the playwright's take can be three or four times that.)

Ruhl had already graduated with a degree in English, taken two years off, spent time in Chicago and New York writing, teaching arts education in public schools, "having a million jobs trying to stay afloat" before returning to Brown for her MFA.