Overview

Sarah Ruhl is one of the most highly-acclaimed and frequently-produced American playwrights of the 21st century. Author of eighteen plays and the essay collection 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, she has won a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, been nominated for a Tony Award for In the Next Room or the vibrator play and twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for The Clean House and In the Next Room. Ruhl is a writer unafraid of the soul. She writes not about “this or that issue,” but “about being,” creating plays that ask “big questions about death, love, and how we should treat each other in this lifetime.” In this volume, Amy Muse situates Ruhl as an artist-thinker and organizes her work around its artistic and ethical concerns. Through a finely-grained account of each play, readers are guided through Ruhl’s early influences, the themes of intimacy, transcendence, and communion, and her inventive stagecraft to dramatize “moments of being” onstage. Enriched by essays from scholars Jill Stevenson, Thomas Butler, and Christina Dokou, an interview with directors Sarah Rasmussen and Hayley Finn, and a chronology of Ruhl’s life and work, this is a companionable guide for students of American drama and theatre studies. Amy Muse specializes in dramatic literature and performance studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department. She is the author of “Sarah Ruhl’s Sex Ed for Grownups” (Text & Presentation 2013) and essays on Romantic drama, intimate theatre, female Hamlets, and travel in Romantic Circles, Romanticism: The Journal of Romantic Culture & Criticism, Frontiers, and other journals. METHUEN DRAMA CRITICAL COMPANIONS Series Editors: Patrick Lonergan (National University of Ireland, Galway) and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. (Loyola Marymount University, USA)

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9781350007819

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Reviews

A unique approach to Ruhl that helps to understand her both as a writer and as a maker of theatre. I am very pleased with the interview with Ruhl and with the director's roundtable. Professor Muse comes from a department of English Literature, and so I think these will balance out her interest in the plays qua drama with a focus on the performative aspects, as reflected by the title The Drama and Theatre of.... Likewise, the essays by other scholars should prove a real strength of the volume. I know all of their work and think Professor Muse again found a great group to supplement her own work. Ruhl is arguably one of the most significant playwrights to emerge in American theatre in the last decade and a half, but is still under-represented in scholarly literature. -- Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr, Loyola Marymount University, USA

Author Information

Amy Muse is associate professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA.

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