Even in clumsy hands, "the Vibrator Play" is a powerful enough instrument to frequently hit the right spot.
Sarah Ruhl’s kinky, funny, feminist sex comedy about the use of vibrators to cure hysteria at the dawn of the age of electricity, barely escapes the misfirings of its mounting by the SpeakEasy Stage Company with its wit and wisdom in tact. The relationships are there, and the strange Victorian mores, and a some situations imbued with a humor that seems invincible, but the pace staggers, and the cast, aided by a campy soundtrack and dramatic lighting effects, stumbles around the needed tone of tragic sincerity, playing for laughs and often overshooting them.
The play takes place in the home of the Givings. Catherine Givings (Anne Gottlieb) rules its drawing room, while her husband, Dr. Givings (Derry Woodhouse) treats psychiatric patients in an adjacent examination room with what proves to be a fatefully porous door. Dr. Givings is obsessed with the technical revolution being wrought by Edison and Westinghouse. But excited as he is by electricity, there seem to be no sparks between this stiff man of science and his languishing romantic of a wife.
When Dr. Givings begins treating hysteria—essentially a catchall disorder used to diagnose women who feel the effects of their repression—with a secret procedure in which an electrical device is used to create a healing "paroxysm," Catherine becomes incurably fascinated and envious. Feeling neglected, she befriends all who come to visit her husband in the next room. There’s his female patient, Sabrina Daldry (Marianna Bassham) a woman of purported frail constitution who suddenly seems quite rosy, her seemingly reserved husband (Dennis Trainor, Jr.) and then confounding, there is Leo Irving (Craig Wesley Divino), who seems bizarrely to suffer from the female condition of hysteria—although he is an artist.
As Catherine, Sabrina and Leo all struggle to come to terms with the life-changing sensation being had in the eponymous "other room," their already unsettling relationships become complicated by the presence of two more women: there is Annie (Frances Idleboork) Dr. Giving’s assistant, who is sometimes asked to administer the treatment in his absence (and is far more skilled at it for some reasons) and Elizabeth (Lindsay McWhorter), the African American wet nurse, recommended to the Givings by the Daldrys, whom Catherine feels is stealing her baby and Leo feels is stealing his heart.
Each configuration of these characters is complex and highly amusing. If only Gottlieb’s Catherine weren’t so tiresomely exaggerated. Bored and neglected she is clearly, but repressed? It’s hard to see with all of her shouting and line punching, and flitting and flailing.
Woodhouse is more believable in the slightly less challenging role of her overly scientific husband. Meanwhile Bassham’s Sabrina, awakened and halteringly emboldened has some moments of greatness, and the cast is anchored by the realism and pathos of McWhorter’s Elizabeth, who seems to be the most outwardly repressed and inwardly free of the play’s quartet of desperate Victorian housewives.
The real star is the script—full of dramatic irony of what post-modern, post-sexual revelation American will bring, for better or for worse, and full of a longing for romanticism in an age in which machines are perhaps too much depended upon for light and warmth.
"In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play runs through October 16 at the Boston Center for the Arts
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