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There's a mix of the mythic, the metaphysical and the mundane in the audacious plays of SARAH RUHL
mystery around the ordinary in the plays of Sarah Ruhl. A lovesick woman mutates into an almond. A Joy of Cooking recipe opens a window on the universe's violent essence. An elevator-one with its own weather system-ushers the dead into the afterlife. Even the air can turn exotic: In Passion Play, a cycle, the historical and spiritual panorama that is her latest work, a veteran fills jars with the invisible stuff we breathe, hoping to bring war to a halt.
If you aren't au courant with Ruhl's idiosyncratic writing and its powerfully defamiliarizing quality, don't worry: You probably will be soon. For starters, this 31-year-old will be one of the most-produced playwrights of 2005-06. Passion Play, which conjures up dramatizations of the Christ story in three historical eras, premiered as the season opener at Arena Stage, in Washington, D.C., where it runs through Oct. 16. A few months down the road, Los Angeles's Cornerstone Theater Company launches another Ruhl premiere with Project 20, based on her interviews with 20-year-olds from various social backgrounds. Her fanciful comedy The Clean House (published in American Theatre, Nov. '04)-a meditation on love, death, empathy and, yes, housecleaning-continues its full-throttle incursion over the American landscape, with at least five theatres announcing stagings this coming season. The script nabbed the 2004 Susan Smith Blackburn Award and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize.
Ruhl's oeuvre is finding a niche on page as well as stage: This winter TCG Books will publish a collection of her pieces, including Late: A Cotcboy Song, an eccentric love tale, and Eurydice, her retelling of the Orpheus myth (in which the aforementioned raining elevator makes its appearance). While diverse on the level of story, the plays share certain traits: a steely lyricism; a pronounced whimsy; a deceptive spareness, masking an almost metaphysical intensity; and a quirky, compassionate humor that often coexists with deep sadness.
"She's going to become her own vocabulary word," predicts Paula Vogel, who taught Ruhl at Brown University and considers the younger writer a landmark talent for the modern theatre. Ruhl's work is "taking us back to the importance of theatre as myth,...