Fit to be tidy

THE GOLDEN RUHL Keep your eye on this fast-rising scribe.

Photograph: Tony Charuvastra

Many playwrights aspire to geniusdom, but few have it thrust upon them at the ripe age of 32. Sarah Ruhl, however, can now tack the brainiac credit to her résumé without being accused of egotism. Last month, the author of The Clean House received a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, informally called the “genius” grant. She had been notified about the honor the week before, and perhaps that’s why she seemed so composed when she arrived at Lincoln Center Theater with her baby daughter the afternoon of the announcement.

“I don’t want to get hung up on the name,” Ruhl warned during an interview that was interrupted by separate congratulatory visits from LCT honchos André Bishop and Bernard Gersten. “As we all know, genius is a fiction created in the 19th century. I don’t want to be in awe of all the other people who came before me, but the money is truly astounding. The whole thing really does leave one speechless.”

Far from Ruhl’s first accolade—The Clean House was a Pulitzer finalist in 2005 and won the Susan Smith Blackburn Award for best play by a woman—it’s still a nice red-carpet welcome for her New York debut and her move here after four years in L.A. Like her previous work, such as last year’s Passion Play, a Cycle,The Clean House has earned acclaim in regional theaters around the country since its 2004 Yale Repertory Theatre debut, but LCT didn’t have room for it until now. Directing a cast led by Blair Brown and Jill Clayburgh is Bill Rauch, who staged the original production in New Haven. “It’s a very timeless piece that taps into the human condition, using cleaning as a metaphor for control,” explains the director, another regional theater mainstay who was recently named artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. “The way it slides in and out of comedy and tragedy is so deft and so surprising.”

Even more notable, the play contains four stellar female roles—three of them for women over 50. Lane, a doctor, hires Matilde, a Brazilian maid who finds chores depressing and would rather cleanse her soul by telling jokes. The disgruntled Matilde strikes a deal with Lane’s sister, Virginia, who relishes the empowerment that cleaning offers. Lane must also contend with her doctor husband, Charles, falling in love with a patient, Ana. But this isn’t some daytime-TV jilted-wife scenario. In some ways, Ana becomes Lane’s soul mate as much as Charles’s.

“There’s something really interesting and profound about what two women who’ve slept with the same man share,” muses Ruhl, who began the play after overhearing a doctor at a party complain about a depressed, inefficient cleaning lady. “Once the man is geographically not there, I’ve observed that a lot of women who’ve been in love with the same person actually become close.”

Ruhl’s quirky, eloquent work is reminiscent of her mentor, Pulitzer-winning playwright Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive), with whom she studied while earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Brown University. As an undergrad, Ruhl was a poet majoring in English when Vogel steered her to the stage. “I asked Paula to advise my thesis, and she said she would if I wrote a play,” she remembers. “It was a true moment of liberation. I realized that was actually what I wanted to do.”

The Chicago native hails from a family of doctors that includes her grandfather, uncles, sister and husband, but she also grew up going to the theater with her actress mother, Kathy. Soft-spoken and refined, Ruhl has a girlish quality that belies the emotional and artistic complexity of her plays. Eurydice, currently at Yale Rep, reexamines the Orpheus myth from his wife’s perspective. The epic three-and-a-half-hour Passion Play, which began as her senior thesis, tells Christ’s story in three different eras. Dead Man’s Cell Phone, a Playwrights Horizons commission, will likely hit the stage in about a year, according to Ruhl. Her current commission from Berkeley Repertory Theatre centers on the history of the vibrator.

But even though Ruhl’s career is taking off, she feels that women playwrights face greater obstacles than their male counterparts. “I’ve had experiences where an artistic director has read a play and said something like, ‘There’s no plot.’ And it was actually very plotted, but it was told from a woman’s point of view. Because he identified with the male character, he didn’t realize there was even a story. It’s a very unconscious sexism, but it’s a question of who’s in the position of power.”

is at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater.