The Golden Ruhl: Playwright Has A Midas Touch

And the travel is wearing. "I'm getting to know LAX way better than I should," she says. She lives in Los Angeles now, but only until her fiance finishes his medical residency next year at UCLA. She also wants to have kids someday, "and I can't really see being on a plane constantly if that happens."

With "Clean House" all over the country this season, Ruhl is likely to look like an overnight sensation, especially since she has yet to make her mark in New York. Says Shalwitz, "It's been pretty quick, but it's not like she hasn't laid the groundwork."

And the ride hasn't been frustration-free. "It's just an anxiety-ridden profession," Ruhl says. "I have more white hairs at age 31 than I should have."

They don't show.

"I pluck them," she says with a laugh. "I grew up with my mother, watching her go through the thing of, you know, the charge of being in a play, the sadness of not being in a play. So I think playwrights are really [messed] up people because we're really introverted and we want to be alone to write our play, and if we don't have solitude we're complaining about it. And then you have the time alone at your desk and you say, 'Oh, I wish I could see people.' "

So why do it?

Ruhl grins at the question. "On some level I'm really not equipped to do much else."

That answer doesn't wash; she's an Ivy League graduate. She blushes as a high, demure giggle escapes.

"I don't really know why I do it," she says, trying to pin it down. "I think it's important. Many days I think it's important for the cultural health of the world we're living in. Other days I think, 'This is a really useless activity; the world is falling apart, better to be a nurse.' But I really would be a bad nurse."

So she's writing more plays. One, a commission for Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan, is called "Dead Man's Cell Phone." "It's kind of about cell phones, kind of about invisible connections between dead people and alive people. That seems to be a theme I keep returning to."

She also has a commission from Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles. Her job is to write about the lives of local 20-year-olds. She has interviewed campus Young Republicans, Compton mothers with addiction issues and Latina students, getting her assumptions challenged at every turn. "You're there to collect stories," she says, "and you turn off the judgment. You just hear what they have to say. And it's fascinating what that simple thing does, that little act of listening."

It will indeed be a busy year, yet Ruhl will make a point of attending "The Clean House" when it plays her home town at the Goodman Theatre. "I can barely find the time to get married," she frets. "It's hilarious."

And as for the Vogel dictum: Will "The Clean House" buy Ruhl a house?

"I hope," she says, "that it will buy me rent at a spacious apartment in Brooklyn. I think if it does that, it will be doing its job."