THEATRE REVIEW:
IN THE NEXT ROOM
25 SEPT/11

JOHN COULBOURN,
QMI Agency
R: 2.5/5

TORONTO - Sometimes, a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing — but often, it doesn’t even add up to that. For instance, playwright Sarah Ruhl stumbled upon the information that vibrators were in use in the otherwise up-tight Victorian era, and rather than turning that knowledge into the punchline of a monologue on the contradictions of that famous time, crocheted it instead into a full-length play, titled, perhaps not too surprisingly, IN THE NEXT ROOM, OR THE VIBRATOR PLAY.

And, based more on the fact that it has already been nominated for a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize than on what one sees on stage at the Tarragon Theatre (where IN THE NEXT ROOM opened last week in its Canadian première in a co-production with the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre), her play is not half bad. But in the end, one expects something that isn’t half bad to be at least half good — and in this production, half good is, quite frankly, still a little beyond its reach.

Set in the upscale Victorian home of Dr. Givings (David Storch) and his wife Catherine (Trish Lindstrom), the play focuses not just on the marriage of the up-tight doctor and his nubile young wife, but on the clinic he runs in the next room — a clinic specializing in treating ‘hysteria’ through a certain mechanical intervention, only recently facilitated by the harnessing of electricity.

Already sexually frustrated and rendered insecure by her inability to nurse her new baby, Catherine is at first bewildered, then intrigued by the strange sounds that emanate from her husband’s office as he and his un-married assistant (Elizabeth Saunders) provide intimate intervention to relieve the ‘hysteric’ symptoms of patients like the fey Sabrina Daldry, played by Melody A. Johnson. And judging from their success with Mrs. Daldry, who recovers among other things her ability to play the piano, most women blossom under their care.

Not that women are the only patients the good doctor attracts. In fact, a troubled young man (Jonathan Watton) signs up for a course of treatment — men suffering from ‘hysteria’ are rare, the good doctor concedes, but this one is after all an artist. The presence of a free thinking, not to mention good looking, young man, throws the household into a tizzy that eventually involves the wet-nurse (Marci T. House), Mrs. Daldry’s husband (Ross McMillan) and something called the Chattanooga Vibrator, which soon restores the young artist to glowing health and well-being.

In writing the play, Ruhl seems to have walked a tightrope between the bizarre revelation that vibrators played a role in Victorian medicine (one can’t help but wonder what she would have made of it if she’d discovered at the same time that marijuana was sold over the counter as a treatment for asthma) and a touching story about ignorance, inhibition and the healing power of communication.

In bringing IN THE NEXT ROOM to life on David Boechler’s highly symmetrical set — one half drawing room, the other clinic, lit by Rebecca Picherack — director Richard Rose appears to struggle with the balance of the piece too, juggling largely ineffectual attempts from Storch, Lindstrom and, perhaps a little more successfully, from Johnson, to turn the piece into a sustained farce, against credible, often touching work from House and Watton, who seems to strike a perfect balance.

In the end, Rose relies far too heavily on what has become known in modern parlance as those When Harry Met Sally moments, suggesting along the way that faked orgasms might have made an appearance concurrent with the arrival of the mechanical vibrator. But as some few modern husbands and, one suspects, even more modern wives might have told him, faked orgasms might be funny — but they don’t constitute an evening of real entertainment.