In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), which premiered on Broadway in 2010, has since become one of Sarah Ruhl’s best-known and most popularly produced plays. Prior to Ruhl’s Broadway debut with In the Next Room, she earned a MacArthur Genius Fellowship and a PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award, and her 2004 play The Clean House was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In the Next Room was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the 2010 Tony Award for Best Play. Ruhl’s writing style juxtaposes the mundane of the everyday with the extraordinary, employing elements of absurdism and surrealism. She flouts the trend in 20th- and 21st-century theater of imbuing characters with deep, hidden psychology, opting instead to create characters who say what they mean.

Ruhl was inspired to write In the Next Room after reading Rachel P. Maines’s book The Technology of the Orgasm about the history of the vibrator. The play is set in the 1880s, when the first electric vibrators appeared to relieve doctors of the hand cramps that came with manual stimulation. Ruhl explores the way electricity and electrical devices became tools to approximate human contact and social interaction, suggesting that the reliance on mechanical substitutes creates further distance and feelings of loneliness. By the early 19th century, doctors were administering orgasms to female patients who had been diagnosed with hysteria, a catch-all disorder that encompassed emotionality, anxiety, and general unhappiness in women. These treatments were desexualized and clinical, as it was considered improper for a woman to experience sexual desire and pleasure, but they were successful in making women feel happier and more relaxed. 

In the Next Room is about the functions and needs of the female body as they are disconnected from the social roles and expectations of women. A doctor-supplied orgasm may meet certain physical needs, but it does not replace the need for intimacy and human connection. The women in the play struggle with the ways that their bodies feel inadequate, failing to fulfill what they see as their primary purposes: fulfilling their husbands’ sexual desires and nurturing children. The women are expected to submit to their husbands, sublimate their own emotions, and devote themselves to childrearing. Decades before women’s suffrage and the women’s liberation movement, the women in the play wage individual wars for the control of their bodies and their sexuality.

Plot Summary

Set in the 1880s outside of New York City, In the Next Room takes place in the living room of the Givings home and the connected home operating theater where Dr. Givings runs his practice with the aid of his assistant, a midwife named Annie. Dr. Givings is a gynecological physician who specializes in treating hysteria in women by stimulating patients with a vibrator until they reach orgasm. Catherine Givings, his wife, is tormented and unfulfilled by her inability to produce enough milk to breastfeed their child and her husband’s indifferent dismissal of her emotional turmoil. Catherine is lonely and feels trapped in the domestic sphere, anxious and insecure at the prospect of needing to hire a wet nurse to feed her baby. Catherine befriends Sabrina Daldry, a patient whose hysteria stems from her inability to become pregnant and unexplored homoerotic desires. Mr. Daldry offers their housekeeper, a black woman named Elizabeth whose child recently died, as a wet nurse. 

Curious about the sounds of a device she hears from her husband’s office, Catherine asks Dr. Givings to use the device on her, but he refuses. After he leaves, Catherine and Sabrina break into his office and use the device on each other. As Sabrina’s treatments continue, she can only reach orgasm when stimulated manually by Annie. Catherine grows jealous of Elizabeth and pleads with Dr. Givings to treat her with his device. This time, he reluctantly agrees, but he stops when Catherine becomes sexually excited. Catherine takes revenge by flirting with Leo, a new patient, who flirts back but is more intrigued by Elizabeth. Leo convinces Elizabeth to allow him to paint her while breastfeeding, making Catherine even more envious. Dr. Givings, who had previously remained unaffected, becomes upset when he catches them painting and pronounces Leo cured, dismissing him as a patient. After a treatment, Annie and Sabrina finally kiss but immediately decide that it was a mistake. Elizabeth announces that she must quit, and Leo decides to move to Paris after Elizabeth rebuffs his confessions of love. Alone with her husband, Catherine finally reaches him, and they share a moment of intimacy and connection.