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She has been writing and rising steadily ever since, creating plays that aren't easy to categorize. (An anthology of her plays will be published this fall.) "The Clean House" is tight and funny, skirting the polemics you might expect from a scenario that begins with a demanding WASP doctor and her recalcitrant immigrant maid. Yet it deepens by sly degrees, sweeping the audience on a surprising cloud of feeling as the characters deal with terminal illness in unorthodox ways.
Shalwitz observes, "It's a big statement about life and death, and how death can be transforming in a positive way for the people around it."
When Ruhl was 20, her father died of cancer. "It's very much about my dad, in a way," she says. "His sense of humor as he went through it. And humor being kind of a saving grace." Her grandmothers both died of breast cancer, as well. "So yeah, the play's very personal in a certain sense."
The scale and subject of "Passion Play" could hardly be more different, but then Ruhl seems to want to avoid doing the same thing twice. Other plays include a modern adaptation of "Eurydice" in which the heroine questions whether she really wants to come back from the underworld after all; "Late: A Cowboy Song," which Ruhl calls a "romantic western" about a married modern woman outside Pittsburgh who runs off with "a lady cowboy"; and "Melancholy Play," in which everyone can't help falling in love with a beautifully sad woman. (She becomes happy, and all is thrown into confusion.)
"There's not anyone else like her," says Vogel, who is naturally partial to her pupil. (Ruhl dedicated "Passion Play" to Vogel.) "There are no models to refer to. Ten years from now, we'll say, 'It's rather Sarah Ruhl.' "
The models Ruhl cites are real mavericks: Vogel, Caryl Churchill, Maria Irene Fornes. (The Cuban-born Fornes has written more than three dozen plays, directing many of them herself in the off-off-Broadway scene since the early 1960s, but the current lack of her works on U.S. stages is a real sore spot with Ruhl. "It's disgusting," she says.) Is it coincidence that Ruhl's pantheon is all women? "I love a lot of men, too," she asserts, then adds Elizabeth Egloff to the list.
Smith points to Ruhl's background as a poet, yet offers this: "She's able to drive plot, which a lot of playwrights whom we think of as poetic are not able to do."
Says Ruhl of the Ruhl style: "I tend to like the ancient and the modern up against each other. 'Clean House' borrows from no classical structure, so it's the least mythical, but in a way the iconic magic of it makes it feel like it's part of a mythology. I hope so, anyway. But 'Passion Play' certainly has to do with the contemporary and the ancient, and so does 'Eurydice.' And even 'Late: A Cowboy Song' -- it's really a contemporary play, but I'm interested in the old myth of the cowboy."
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Whatever the elements, Ruhl's writing has sparked a lot of interest. Half a dozen theaters are credited with developing "The Clean House," meaning they sponsored workshops or staged readings. Ruhl says "Eurydice" has had 13 readings throughout the country. Did she have to actually attend all this "development"?
"I was really young," she says, "and I didn't know how to say no. Still don't know how to say no. But I was curious. So if someone said, 'We'll get you a plane ticket to Seattle,' I said, 'Sure, I'll go to Seattle.' " Ruhl adds that squiring such relatively smaller, "finished" plays from theater to theater was manageable, "but if I'd used that process for 'Passion Play,' I think I'd be a complete wreck." The completion of "Passion Play" has been under Arena's auspices alone, and Ruhl reckons, "I really needed that focus, rather than taking it to 13 theaters and having everyone pitch in."
