Playing by the Ruhl

PASSION PLAYER Ruhl sits in on a Goodman rehearsal.

Sarah Ruhl should stop reading this now. That’s not because what follows will offend her, but because we’re about to do something she wouldn’t let us do during the interview itself: quote a critic’s review of her work. That critic, Hilton Als of The New Yorker, wrote of Ruhl’s The Clean House—the 2005 Pulitzer finalist concerning a white doctor whose Brazilian maid won’t clean—“Ruhl ends up performing her own version of literary typecasting. Latins are more poetic than whites, no?”

Meanwhile, the play received career-making support from The New York Times. Regardless of critics’ love-hate responses, The Clean House put Ruhl on the national map. From her apartment in New York, Ruhl, 33, spoke by phone about her work, her critics and her Passion Play: a cycle in three parts, opening at the Goodman.

You’re part of a wave of playwrights interested in the whimsical—less naturalism than surrealism. What do you make of that trend?
I think people are bored of watching watered-down television onstage. I think playwrights are responding to that.

What do you mean by “watered-down television”?
What I mean is family dramas that take place in a house with furniture, and there’s an issue at the center of it and a secret that is ultimately revealed.

But couldn’t one say that this whimsy-playwriting—with its quick scene cuts, interior fantasy sequences, breezy dialogue—is influenced more by TV trends than by theatrical tradition?
I don’t really watch TV, so I don’t know. But I do think we live in a cinematic culture, so the concept that you might achieve more by juxtaposition of images than by linear progression through time—I think that’s definitely part of being in the Digital Age.

One criticism of that type of writing is that it can let a writer off the hook when it comes to the politics of representation. For example, The Clean House featured a white doctor and her Latina maid, yet issues of race and immigration seemed marginal. The rejoinder to that criticism might then be, It’s not a realist play, so it doesn’t have to consider that stuff.
Well, I think the play does consider the politics of class and race. I think the play is about the interactions between this white woman and her maid. I don’t think it’s only about that. I think it’s about love and illness as well, but if I wanted to only write about that, I would write a sociology paper. And I think that some playwrights are only interested in politics, and that’s fantastic. I don’t quite understand the off-the-hook question in the sense that that assumes that all plays should only be political all the time.

The criticism isn’t necessarily that it has to be political all the time, but it’s curious that you say The Clean House did account for it because—
What do you mean “account”—account for what?

The racial politics, the class politics. Let me ask it this way. Hilton Als wrote about The Clean House that—
Oh, could you not repeat a review to me? I’m sorry, I don’t read them so I’d rather not know what Hilton Als said. I know that he wrote a dreadful review of the play, but that’s why I don’t read them, to not have that particular language in my head.

Okay, this one is general. Your work has seen polarized critical responses.
Mm-hmm.

You know that the Times has been really supportive; others haven’t been as enamored. What do you make of that polarized response?
I don’t know what to make of it. I’m relieved that the plays are finding their audience and that the audiences seem to really be connecting with the work. I don’t think it’s my job to interpret why people hate my work, if they hate it.

Let’s talk about your latest work, Passion Play. It’s an epic three-parter about passion plays in Elizabeth England, Nazi-era Germany and Reagan-era U.S.
It looks at three historical icons—Queen Elizabeth, Hitler and Reagan—and the way they blur the state with issues of theology. Queen Elizabeth wanted to control religious representation, and now we’re almost back full circle. We’re going to war in this country for, you know, who knows what the real reason is, but George Bush has his own religious reasons. And Reagan really wanted to put the church and the state together.

Passion Play begins previews Saturday 15.