STC prepares to kick off 2011 season

Sydney Theatre Company’s first main stage production for 2011 is the Australian premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s acclaimed Broadway comedy In The Next Room or the vibrator play.  

Sydney Theatre Company’s first main stage production for 2011 is the Australian premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s acclaimed Broadway comedy In The Next Room or the vibrator play.  

Pamela Rabe directs Jacqueline McKenzie as Catherine Givings, an 1880’s woman whose husband Dr Givings (David Roberts) marvels at the effectiveness of a newfangled electric invention he uses to administer remedial treatment to women suffering from ‘hysteria’. 

The STC production opens at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, on February 11, running to March 27 2011, followed by tours to Melbourne, Wollongong, Canberra and Parramatta.

With a sumptuous period setting, the play is based on the fact that doctors in the Victorian era used vibrators to treat ‘hysterical’ women. Unable to breastfeed her baby, excluded from her husband’s world and feeling desperately lonely, Catherine seeks companionship with two of the patients her husband has been treating with the new device in the adjoining room and begins to discover the truth of what goes on behind the closed door.

Both a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist and a 2010 Tony Nominee for Best Play, this beguiling comedy about love, longing, invention and equality, was a resounding hit when it opened on Broadway last year.

Jacqueline McKenzie last worked with Sydney Theatre Company in 2003 in Proof by David Auburn. The cast also includes Helen Thomson (God of Carnage), Mandy McElhinney and Sara Zwangobani (A Streetcar Named Desire) and Josh McConville who, as a NIDA student in 2008, performed in STC’s Gallipoli and for 2011 has been cast in two other STC main stage shows, Loot and Gross Und Klein. 

Pamela Rabe, well known to audiences for her standout STC performances including as Richard III in The War of the Roses and Nora in The Season at Sarsaparilla has twice directed for Sydney Theatre Company.  In 2009 she directed the touching comedy Elling by Simon Bent and in 2008 directed the taut Citizens, part of a double bill by Daniel Keene.

The success of In The Next Room or the vibrator play has consolidated Sarah Ruhl’s reputation as one of America’s most exciting contemporary writers. Her other plays include The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2005); Passion Play, a cycle (Pen American Award); Dead Man’s Cell Phone (Helen Hayes Award for Best New Play) and Eurydice.

The full cast is Josh McConville, Mandy McElhinney, Jacqueline McKenzie, Marshall Napier, David Roberts, Helen Thomson and Sara Zwangobani.

Bookings: (02) 9250 1777 or www.sydneytheatre.com.au.