Sarah Ruhl '97 MFA '01 is busy. She is so busy that even Bruce Ostler, her agent, can't keep up with the wave of urgent messages, pressing phone calls and inquiring letters that has flooded his office - she will not even be available for press interviews until Nov. 13.
Ruhl's "Passion Play, a Cycle" - her latest production after her growing success in recent years - is now showing at the Arena Stage Theatre in Washington, D.C. She is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the 2004 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for her play "The Clean House." Another of her plays, "Eurydice," is showing at the Berkeley Repertory Theater through November.
At only 31 years old, the Chicago native is featured on the cover of the October issue of "American Theater" as one of the three most prominent and widely produced female playwrights in America.
"Passion Play," which Ruhl started writing while at Brown, stages an epic of three episodes set in different eras, with no specific continuities tying them together, apart from a color-shifting sky background throughout.
The recurring roles of Jesus, Pontius Pilate and the Virgin Mary are played by the same actors throughout the production, but the other cast members switch roles throughout the play, creating 30 characters in all. "Passion Play" takes the audience through politically dense settings ranging from Elizabethan England to Hitler's pre-war Germany to the town of Spearfish, S.D., filled with Vietnam War patriotism.
The three-and-a-half hour long production recreates Ruhl's poetic and metaphorical play, which reads fluidly, like "fresh clear cool water on your skin," according to Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Professor of English Paula Vogel, Ruhl's former Brown professor. To be a successful playwright, one needs the "skills of a writer, and unlike fiction, it requires the diplomacy of a UN Secretary General," two traits that Ruhl vividly demonstrated, Vogel said.
Ruhl, a Virginia Woolf devotee, also delved into Japanese literature and literature from the Middle Ages and developed a love for poetry, studying all genres and eras, Vogel said.
When Vogel first taught Ruhl in Advanced Playwriting during her sophomore year, Ruhl tended toward fiction and novel form, Vogel said. Ruhl possessed "amazing writing" skills and the ability "to think in dramatic form" of the then 19-year-old, but Ruhl's mind was not yet set on her future calling. It was only after returning from studying abroad at Oxford that Ruhl stepped into Vogel's office asking Vogel to be her thesis advisor for a playwriting project.
By November Ruhl had plowed through bookshelves of plays at the Becker Library and completed the first draft of what would become her honors thesis, which ultimately became the first act of "Passion Play." Toward the end of the year, Vogel involved Ruhl in the first production of this play, which was performed at the Trinity Repertory Company.
Two years went by before Ruhl wrote the second part of "Passion Play." Kenneth Prestininzi, a theater arts graduate student, recalls meeting Ruhl in Prague in 1997. Ruhl and Vogel had been invited to a two-week-long playwriting workshop led by Prestininzi.
Ruhl devoted a few of her workshop exercises to "Passion Play." Impressed by what he called the "delight ... the lightness of touch" of Ruhl's work, Prestininzi offered her a scholarship to attend a 1998 workshop in Mexico alongside renowned playwrights such as Maria Irene Fornes.
In the meantime, while Ruhl was back at Brown getting her MFA, her first script for "Passion Play," which she wrote at Brown, earned the Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival.
Ruhl wrote the third and final part of the play only two years ago after director Molly Smith suggested she combine the plays in the epic now featuring at the Arena.
With the biggest production to date of the combined plays, critics have enthusiastically acclaimed Ruhl. The headline of a profile on Ruhl in the Sept. 4 issue of the Washington Post read: "Playwright has a Midas Touch."
Though Ruhl's impact on American theater is still in the making, Vogel compared her success to the influence of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," saying there is already "a before and after Sarah Ruhl."
It is Ruhl's power to let "everyone in the room own the dialogue" that causes the audience to "leave the theatre and talk in the car and the subway or the bus," Vogel said.
"I think she's going to win a Pulitzer Prize," she said.
