Stage Review: 'Next Room' entertains, educates

Chris Neely Photography

Lyric Peters Malkin (on table) Josh Quinn and Liz Sharpe in “In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play” at Circuit Playhouse.

In 1902, the home gadget maker Hamilton Beach (now known for its commercial ice shavers and fruit juicers) patented what was then only the world's fifth electrical appliance. Behind the sewing machine, fan, tea kettle and toaster, this new electromechanical marvel would allow desperate housewives to take matters of personal health into their own hands.

Just over a century ago, the vibrator was considered a medical breakthrough. It helped cure a common illness dubbed "Hysteria," a catch-all term for a host of feminine ailments, which included anything from being overly emotional to insomnia.

The history of the vibrator is as much social as it is technological. And that makes Sarah Ruhl's Tony-nominated dramedy "In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play," now running at Circuit Playhouse, a show that functions on both entertaining and educational levels.

Because the acting here seems only half-baked, this production, at times, feels like a titillating living-history re-enactment.

We watch with a mixture of fascination and irony as the patient enters the surgical chamber. A dispassionate doctor offers his timely prognosis: "Congestion in your womb is causing a hysterical symptom," he says.

With his stone-faced female assistant jotting down notes, the doctor picks up his new device which looks similar to a hair drier.

But this cold, mechanical process is just the beginning for Ruhl. For, in the next room, the doctor's wife is listening to the loud buzz of the device and the moans of the patient and wants to know what is going on in there. One day, curiosity gets the best of her.

That's when this diorama from the Museum of Sexual History becomes more of an essay on the true beginnings of the American sexual revolution -- a full half-century before the swinging 1960s.

The women in this play all need something more from life. The wife (Andrea Rouch, in a performance that grows on you) wants more from her marriage, but can't describe it. The patient (a compelling Lyric Peters Malkin) feels the stirrings of forbidden love. The doctor's assistant (Liz Sharpe) has long hidden her true nature. Finally, the wife's nursemaid (Claire D. Kolheim) has to get past the death of her child.

The vibrator, of course, is no panacea for what ails the characters -- or for that matter, humanity -- but it does unlock a world of possibilities in a deeply repressed and dysfunctional era.

Under the direction of Dave Landis, the actors allow us glimpses into the private lives of these characters with an enormous amount of tact given the medical procedure that brings them together.

In Ruhl's play, Thomas Edison's light bulb becomes a metaphor for the light bulbs of sexual freedom flicking on inside of women.

"Can you imagine a time when all will be electric?" asks a character.

Our modern lives are full of objects that buzz, whirl, beep, light up and connect to everything else, and yet here we are, still trying to figure out the intimate workings of sex and love.

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"In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play"

Performances continue at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays through Feb. 5 at Circuit Playhouse, 51 South Cooper. Tickets are $28-$33 adults, $20 students and seniors. Call (901) 726-4656.

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