Dramatic Comedy / 5m, 2f / Unit Set In Eurydice, Sarah Ruhl reimagines the classic myth of Orpheus through the eyes of its heroine. Dying too young on her wedding day, Eurydice must journey to the underworld, where she reunites with her father and struggles to remember her lost love. With contemporary characters, ingenious plot twists, and breathtaking visual effects, the play is a fresh look at a timeless love story. "RHAPSODICALLY BEAUTIFUL. A weird and wonderful new play - an inexpressibly moving theatrical fable about love, loss and the pleasures and pains of memory." - The New York Times "EXHILARATING!! A luminous retelling of the Orpheus myth, lush and limpid as a dream where both author and audience swim in the magical, sometimes menacing, and always thrilling flow of the unconscious." - The New Yorker "Exquisitely staged by Les Waters and an inventive design team...Ruhl's wild flights of imagination, some deeply affecting passages and beautiful imagery provide transporting pleasures. They conspire to create original, at times breathtaking, stage pictures." - Variety

" Ruhl's "Orlando"] captures both the intellectual spirit and the literary brilliance of Woolf's work. . . . Ruhl writes with the imaginative sweep that allows Woolf's poetry to soar."--"Variety"

"Sarah Ruhl's smart new translation of "Three Sisters"] feels just right to contemporary American ears--lean, colloquial, and conversational for us and true to Chekhov's original work."--"The Cincinnati Enquirer"

In her stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf's gender-bending, period-hopping novel, award-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl "is her usual unfailingly elegant, unbeatably witty self, cleverly braiding her own brand-name wit with Woolf's" ("New York ")magazine. Preserving Woolf's vital ideas and lyrical tone, Ruhl brings to the stage the life of an Elizabethan nobleman who's magically transformed into an immortal woman. In her fresh translation of "Three Sisters," the Anton Chekhov classic of ennui and frustration, Ruhl employs her signature lyricism and elegant understanding of intimacy to reveal the discontent felt by fretful Olga, unhappy Masha, and idealistic Irina as they long to leave rural Russia for the ever-alluring Moscow.

Sarah Ruhl's other plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalists "In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)" and "The Clean House," as well as "Passion Play," "Dean Man's Cell Phone," "Demeter in the City," "Eurydice," "Melancholy Play," and "Late: a cowboy song." She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a PEN/Laura Pels Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her plays have premiered on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and in many theaters around the world.

Comedy / Casting: 1m, 4f / Scenery: Int. with inserts This extraordinary new play by an exciting new voice in the American drama was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. After its acclaimed run at Yale Repertory Theatre it was done to equal acclaim at several major theatres coast to coast before winding up off Broadway at Lincoln Center, where it had an extended run. The play takes place in what the author describes as "metaphysical Connecticut", mostly in the home of a married couple who are both doctors. They have hired a housekeeper named Matilde, an aspiring comedian from Brazil who's more interested in coming up with the perfect joke than in house-cleaning. Lane, the lady of the house, has an eccentric sister named Virginia who's just nuts about house-cleaning. She and Matilde become fast friends, and Virginia takes over the cleaning while Matilde works on her jokes. Trouble comes when Lane's husband Charles reveals that he has found his soul mate, or "bashert" in a cancer patient named Anna, on whom he has operated. The actors who play Charles and Anna also play Matilde's parents in a series of dream-like memories, as we learn the story about how they literally killed each other with laughter, giving new meaning to the phrase, "I almost died laughing". This theatrical and wildly funny play is a whimsical and poignant look at class, comedy and the true nature of love. "Fresh, funny ...a memorable play, imbued with a melancholy but somehow comforting philosophy: that the messes and disappointments of life are as much a part of its beauty as romantic love and chocolate ice cream, and a perfect punch line can be as sublime as the most wrenchingly lovely aria." - NY Times. "A rich work about big themes from a young playwright with an original and audacious voice." - Variety.

In this chamber musical version of Sarah Ruhl's Melancholy Play, Tilly's melancholy is of an exquisite quality. She turns her melancholy into a sexy thing, and every stranger she meets falls in love with her. One day, inexplicably, Tilly becomes happy, and wreaks havoc on the lives of her paramours. Frances, Tilly's hairdresser, becomes so melancholy that she turns into an almond. It is up to Tilly to get her back.

A KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF 2018 In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet. He was also in remission from pediatric cancer. Over the next four years-in which Ritvo's illness returned and his health declined, even as his productivity bloomed-the two exchanged letters that spark with urgency, humor, and the desire for connection. Reincarnation, books, the afterlife as an Amtrak quiet car, good soup: in Ruhl and Ritvo's exchanges, all ideas are fair, nourishing game, shared and debated in a spirit of generosity and love. "We'll always know one another forever, however long ever is," Ritvo writes. "And that's all I want-is to know you forever." Studded with poems and songs, Letters from Max is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and the afterlife.

At a dinner party in New Jersey, two couples discuss polyamory as brought up by the introduction of a new temp, Pip, in Jane's office. When they invite Pip and her two male partners, discussion turns to action and the exploration of unexplored desire turns animalistic, and then Jane's daughter sees it all. How to Transcend a Happy Marriage blurs the lines of monogamy and asks how deeply friends, lovers, and strangers connect.

A KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF 2018 In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet. He was also in remission from pediatric cancer. Over the next four years-in which Ritvo's illness returned and his health declined, even as his productivity bloomed-the two exchanged letters that spark with urgency, humor, and the desire for connection. Reincarnation, books, the afterlife as an Amtrak quiet car, good soup: in Ruhl and Ritvo's exchanges, all ideas are fair, nourishing game, shared and debated in a spirit of generosity and love. "We'll always know one another forever, however long ever is," Ritvo writes. "And that's all I want-is to know you forever." Studded with poems and songs, Letters from Max is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and the afterlife.

"A fascinating, funny and evocative play. . . . Ruhl develops the story with the enticing blend of irreverent humor and skewed realism. . . . It's beautiful." -San Francisco Chronicle

"[This] breathtakingly inventive addition to Ruhl's singular body of work . . . has the potential to be a modern masterpiece."-Los Angeles Times

Sarah Ruhl made her Broadway debut this fall with her latest effervescent comedy: a play about sex, intimacy, and equality, set in the 1880s, when enthusiasm for the electric light bulb gave rise to a handy new instrument to treat female hysteria. The story revolves around the medical office and home of Dr. Givings, who regularly induces "paroxysm" in his once high-strung patient Sabrina, allowing her to happily return to playing piano. Soon, Sabrina falls in love with the doctor's assistant Annie, and also befriends his wife Catherine, who is dealing with her own neurotic misgivings about not being able to breast-feed her baby. With this new work, Ruhl once again uses playful symbolism and lyrical language as she makes seemingly effortless thematic leaps--crafting a play with tremendous critical and audience appeal, in her singular theatrical voice.

Sarah Ruhl's plays include Dead Man's Cell Phone, The Clean House (a Pulitzer Prize finalist), Passion Play, and Eurydice, all of which have been widely produced throughout the United States and internationally. She is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.

In this moving exploration of parenthood, an American mother and a Tibetan father have a three-year-old son believed to be the reincarnation of a Buddhist lama. When a Tibetan lama and a monk come to their home unexpectedly, asking to take their child away for a life of spiritual training in India, the parents must make a life-altering choice that will test their strength, their marriage, and their hearts. The Oldest Boy is a richly emotional journey filled with music, dance, p

Art imitates Life. Life imitates Art. When two actors with a history are thrown together as romantic leads in a forgotten 1930s melodrama, they quickly lose touch with reality as the story onstage follows them offstage. Stage Kiss captures Sarah Ruhl's singular voice. It is a charming tale about what happens when lovers share a stage kiss-or when actors share a real one."CRITIC'S PICK. Suffused with warmth and humor. Sarah Ruhl frothily whips together romantic comedy and backstage farc

Tilly's melancholy is of an exquisite quality. She turns her melancholy into a sexy thing, and every stranger she meets falls in love with her. One day, inexplicably, Tilly becomes happy, and wreaks havoc on the lives of her paramours. Frances, Tilly's hairdresser, becomes so melancholy that she turns into an almond. It is up to Tilly to get her back.

This play tells the story of an unexceptional woman in a quiet cafe. Exasperated by the incessant ringing of an abandoned cell phone, the woman confiscates it and thereby inherits the life of its owner, who happens to be dead.

Dramatic Comedy Characters: 8 male, 3 female (with doubling) Hailed by the New Yorker's John Lahr as "extraordinary", "bold", and "inventive", Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play takes us behind the scenes of three communities attempting to stage the death and resurrection of Christ. From Queen Elizabeth's England to Hitler's Germany to Reagan's America, Ruhl's exploration of devotion takes us on a humorous yet unsettling journey filled with lust, whimsy, and a lot of fish. This intimate epic occurs at the timely intersection of politics and religion. Ruhl dramatizes a community of players rehearsing their annual staging of the Easter Passion in three different eras: 1575 northern England, just before Queen Elizabeth outlaws the ritual; 1934 Oberammergua, Bavaria, as Hitler is rising to power; and Spearfish, South Dakota, from the time of Vietnam through Reagan's presidency. In each period, the players grapple in different ways with the transformative nature of art, and politics are never far in the background, as Queen Elizabeth, Hitler, and Reagan each appear, played by a single commanding actor. Named one of the "Ten Best Plays of 2008" by The New Yorker "Her [Ruhl's] unmistakable voice - poetic and quirky, underpinned with serious feeling and even more serious intelligence - trumpets forth in brash, impressive form in this ambitious and frisky if sometimes unruly play." -New York Times. "Ruhl's voice seems to retreat beyond the sphere of the play, performing that special vanishment that good writers-and good gods-know best how to do...Critic's Pick!" -Time Out NY "Let's just get the superlatives out of the way. Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play is the most exciting, stimulating, and thrilling piece of theater to hit New York since Angels in America." -Backstage

Dramatic Comedy / 2m, 4f / Unit Set

An incessantly ringing cell phone in a quiet cafe. A stranger at the next table who has had enough. And a dead man-with a lot of loose ends. So begins Dead Man's Cell Phone, a wildly imaginative new comedy by MacArthur "Genius" Grant recipient and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Sarah Ruhl, author of The Clean House and Eurydice. A work about how we memorialize the dead-and how that remembering changes us-it is the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world.

"Satire is her oxygen. . . . In her new oddball comedy, Dead Man's Cell Phone, Sarah Ruhl is forever vital in her lyrical and biting takes on how we behave." - The Washington Post

"Ruhl's zany probe of the razor-thin line between life and death delivers a fresh and humorous look at the times we live in." - Variety

" Ruhl] tackles big ideas with a voice that entertains" - NPR

..".beguiling new comedy...Ms. Ruhl's work blends the mundane and the metaphysical, the blunt and the obscure, the patently bizarre and the bizarrely moving." - New York Times

"Wickedly clever . . . Ruhl's unique, breezily elegant dialogue is fully present, as is her pleasingly loopy logic."--"Variety"

"In the smart, rollicking "Stage Kiss" . . . passion and fidelity engage in a kind of elegant pas de deux. . . . The play manages to be both wholly original and instantly recognizable . . . with its combination of hilarity and trenchancy."--"The New Yorker"

Award-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl brings her unique mix of lyricism, sparkling humor, and fierce intelligence to her new romantic comedy, "Stage Kiss." When estranged lovers He and She are thrown together as romantic leads in a long-forgotten 1930s melodrama, the line between off-stage and on-stage begins to blur. A "knockabout farce that channels Noel Coward and Michael Frayn" ("Chicago Tribune"), "Stage Kiss" is a thoughtful and clever examination of the difference between youthful lust and respectful love. Ruhl, one of America's most frequently produced playwrights, proves that a kiss is not just a kiss in this whirlwind romantic comedy, fresh off its acclaimed New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons in winter 2014.

Sarah Ruhl's other plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalists "In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)" and "The Clean House," as well as "Passion Play," "Dead Man's Cell Phone," "Demeter in the City," "Eurydice," "Melancholy Play," and "Late: a cowboy song." She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a PEN/Laura Pels Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her plays have premiered on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and have been produced in many theaters around the world.

"Passionate. Show-stopping. Daringly over-the-top and impressively consistent in its delirious excess. "The Clean House" shines."--"New Haven Advocate"

""The Clean House" is not, by any means, a traditional boy-meets-girl story. In fact disease, death, and dirt are among the subjects it addresses. This comedy is romantic, deeply so, but in the more arcane sense of the word: visionary, tinged with fantasy, extravagant in feeling, maybe a little nuts."--"The New York Times"

"Touching, inventive, invigoratingly compact, and luminously liquid, "Eurydice" reframes the ancient myth of ill-fated love to focus not on the bereaved musician but on his dead bride--and on her struggle with love beyond the grave."--"San Francisco Chronicle"

This volume is the first publication of Sarah Ruhl, "a playwright with a unique comic voice, perspective, and sense of theater" ("Variety"), who is fast leaving her mark on the American stage. In the award-winning "Clean House"--a play of uncommon romance and uncommon comedy--a maid who hates cleaning dreams about creating the perfect joke, while a doctor who treats cancer leaves his heart inside one of his patients. This volume also includes "Eurydice," Ruhl's reinvention of the tragic Greek tale of love and loss, together with a third play still to be named.

Sarah Ruhl received the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2004 for her play "The Clean House," which has been produced at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia, South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, DC. Her play "Eurydice" has been produced at Madison Repertory Theatre and Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

Transplanted from their beloved Moscow to a provincial Russian town, three sisters-school teacher Olga, unhappily married Masha, idealistic Irina-yearn for the city of their childhood, where they imagine their lives will be transformed and fulfilled. Three Sisters is the portrait of a family grappling with the bittersweet distance between reality and dreams.

A moving, innovative play based on one of the greatest correspondences in literary history
From 1947 to 1977, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop exchanged more than four hundred letters. Cataloging the composition of their poems, their travel and daily routines, the pyrotechnics of their romantic relationships, and the profound affection they had for each other, these letters are the most intimate record of both poets and one of the greatest correspondences in American letters.
Sarah Ruhl is one of the most lauded and produced playwrights working today, with plays beloved for their unembarrassed lyricism, casual surrealism, and naked emotional force. In "Dear Elizabeth," Ruhl attempts the impossible: adapting Lowell and Bishop's thirty-year correspondence into a stage play. And she succeeds brilliantly, re-embodying the letters and poems in human voices, elegantly suggesting the poets' lives outside of the letters, and poignantly depicting the emotional closeness and geographical distance that defined their thirty-year relationship. "Dear Elizabeth "offers a reading experience as engaging as a live performance, one that will entrance anyone curious about the lives of these legendary poets.