In a time when, uh, “personal massagers” are available in the $4 bins at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, it’s amusing and unsettling to look back at an era when many women had no idea that “marital relations” could be anything but unpleasant. Sarah Ruhl’s play In the Next Room, now showing at Playmakers, does just that. Set in New York state in the late 1880s, the play explores the then-cutting-edge treatment for hysteria—the vibrator—and its effects on the lives of seven very repressed Victorians.
It’s a situation ripe with comedic potential, and, while the play is very funny, it is refreshingly free of condescension towards its characters. Rather, it strives to puncture any sense of superiority viewers may harbor about the Victorians. While we titter at the characters’ naivete, we’re also made uncomfortably aware of our resemblance to them. These characters, after all, see themselves as modern. They’re beginning to question their culture’s ideas, and are enthralled—and frightened—by the latest disruptive technological development: electricity.
In fact, technology, more so than sex, may be the play’s major theme. Some characters, like Dr. Givings, the pompous man of science who administers the vibrator treatments, see it as mankind’s salvation, and anticipate the day when cities will blaze with electric light. Others, like Dr. Givings’ wife Katherine and the artist Leo (Matt Garner), are pre-emptively nostalgic for candles, and contemplate the possibility of “electric fireflies” and electric limbs” with horror. None of is able to anticipate the ways the vibrator will change their lives, or their relationships; they, like us, are stumbling about blind.
Katherine, capably played by Kelsey Didion, emerges as the play’s most intriguing character. She illustrates the plight of the middle-class Victorian wife, but Ruhl never flattens her into a feminist heroine or a put-upon victim. Rather, she’s a believable (if slightly broad, in the interests of comedy) and flawed character: ditsy, tactless, clingy, overbearing, but also energetic, curious, engaging, and surprisingly strong-willed. Katherine’s existence is so idle that she sees an umbrella-less walk in the rain as a “madcap adventure”; now and then, hints of her intellect and thwarted, questing nature rise to the surface, leaving the viewer with a powerful sense of loss and waste.
The rest of the cast is winning as well, especially Matthew Greer, who evokes Tim Curry and Sherlock Holmes as Dr. Givings, and Katie Paxton as Mrs. Daldry, a young wife who gains roses in her cheeks—and some alarming revelations about herself—from her sessions with the vibrator. The set design is exquisite: lush with antiques and heavy, carved woods, it sets up a contrast between the comfort of the Victorian home and the disquieting emotions the characters come to experience.
The play does have its flaws, though most lie with the script and not with this particular production. At times it seems to have been written expressly to be unpacked by modern academics. It gestures toward au courant themes—race and homosexuality are two—that it does not have time or space to fully develop, and much time is spent on a subplot about breastfeeding that is not integrated well with its primary material. (That said, this former academic enjoyed a nerdy in-joke about the poster child for Victorian repression.) Some lines and speeches seem strained, as the actors struggle with clunky lines meant to underline a theme rather than develop their characters.
On the whole, though, In the Next Room is one of Playmakers’ most successful productions. It will make you laugh, gasp, and shake your head in disbelief, and leave you wondering just what our great- great- great- great-grandchildren will think of us.
Ong-Bak, however, reclaims Temple of Doom for Asia. Its hero, Ting, is a native-born villager and a devout Buddhist. The bad guys, in this film, are the ones with no respect for religion, whereas Ting would risk his life to restore the head of Ong-Bak, a sacred statue of Buddha, to his hometown. He is seen praying and at a critical juncture in the film he draws strength from gazing upon another Buddhist statue.
My husband and I are big fans of Planet Earth, so we were happy to hear about its creators had made a sequel, the 11-part 
Lately my husband, who’s Chinese-American, has been looking up songs he remembers from his childhood on YouTube. He showed me the following video, of Taiwainese pop star Fei Xiang performing on the 1987 CCTV Chinese New Year Gala, and we couldn’t stop cracking up. Fei Xiang is like the Taiwanese version of A.C. Slater, and his dance moves have to be seen to be believed. He points with his index finger in all directions. He does horizontal jazz hands in front of his face. He bends his knees and flaps his arms, bird-wing style, as he crosses the stage. All this while sporting a poofy black pompadour and a shiny red tuxedo jacket paired with a leopard-print cummerbund.
With a better script, Wicked would have been Glinda’s tragedy as much as it almost was Elphaba’s. For Glinda does become self-aware by the play’s close. She’s less happy to spread the Wizard’s lies than she is afraid not to, lest she lose her adoring public. As she mollifies the Munchkins with assurances that the Wizard has everything under control, one can almost hear her thinking, “This isn’t right, but if I speak out, then they won’t like me anymore.” That basic desire to be liked is what humanizes Glinda, transforming her from the ditzy comic relief into a sympathetic character.
I don’t know what goes on in Sarah Palin’s head, and so I can’t say whether she believes some of the more inflammatory things she says, but I see her as a Glinda: someone who’s in love with popularity and will hold onto it at any cost. Palin’s been blessed with good looks, charisma, and a gift for coining phrases that resonate with her base. When I hear her spouting rhetoric about “death panels” or Obama’s “palling around with terrorists,” I look at her winks and smirks and think, “There’s no way she can really buy that tripe,” partly because I don’t believe that Bump-It-covered head has ever held an idea in its life, and partly out of an inborn suspicion that all politicians*, of whatever party, are glib hucksters. Palin’s speeches are conglomerations of catch phrases, unfettered by logic or even 
