Ruhl rings it up
Playwright Sarah Ruhl walked into the Steppenwolf Theatre lobby recently, saw the walls filled with photos of its ensemble members and it hit her.
"Steppenwolf is actually doing one of my plays."
Indeed, some of the country's top theaters have produced her plays. Among them: Lincoln Center, Yale Repertory, Berkeley Repertory and Chicago's own Goodman Theatre which staged "The Clean House" two years ago and "Passion Play: a cycle in three parts" last fall.
Steppenwolf joins the ranks this week with "Dead Man's Cell Phone," a "meditation on death and manners" inspired by the proliferation of cell phones. It's currently in previews with the opening set for Saturday.
"I have enough connections to Steppenwolf that it feels like coming home," says the award-winning Ruhl, a 2006 MacArthur Fellowship grant recipient and a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for "The Clean House."
In a recent interview, Ruhl -- a Wilmette native known for her whimsical, whip-smart writing -- talked about her past plays and her plans for the next one. Here is an edited transcript:
Q. Where did the idea for "Dead Man's Cell Phone" come from?
A. I started writing it five, maybe seven years ago when not everybody had cell phones.
There was still a sense of the culture not having caught up with technology. Emotionally, we hadn't caught up with how it was changing our relationships and our solitude. You'd never really be alone, you could always call someone, you could always be in touch with someone you know. You wouldn't have to connect with a stranger.
Q. What did the writing process involve? Did the play come to you all at once or did it evolve over time?
A. I get an image or voice first. The voice becomes the character and the image becomes the world of the play.
With "Dead Man's Cell Phone," the image came first: the image of a cell phone ringing and ringing and no one answering it.
I took a year off between the first act and the second act (I did the same thing with "The Clean House"). It gives me breathing room. I'm not avoiding it; I'm waiting to know what the rest of it is. Sometimes you have to live a little longer to know how to finish a play.
Q. How did you respond to being dubbed an "overnight sensation" in the wake of the success of "The Clean House"?
A. From the outside it looks like it happened overnight. But there were long years of "why won't anyone do my play?" And the piles of rejection letters, the constant traveling to do readings of plays that don't get produced.
Q. What impact did the MacArthur grant have?
A. The money gives you the freedom to not work on projects you don't want to work on. You get offered strange projects that won't fulfill you as an artist, but you take them because you're trying to pay for preschool in New York.
Q. You mentioned you next want to write about people sleeping in the theater. Can you elaborate?
A. Sometimes you watch people fall asleep at your plays. I don't take it personally when someone falls asleep so luxuriously after I've spent so much time trying to get my daughter to sleep.
Writing a play designed around an audience's REM cycle, in a sense you can't fail. If they're awake, that's OK. If they sleep, that's OK too.