In 2018, Milkweed Editions published Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship, which Ruhl co-authored with the late Max Ritvo. Ruhl subsequently adapted the book into a 2023 stage play, which was named a New York Times Critic's Pick. Her memoir Smile was published by Simon & Schuster, and was listed as one of Time Magazine's "100 Must-Read Books of 2021." She is currently the Premiere Writer-in-Residence at Signature Theatre Company. Since 2015, Ruhl has served on the playwriting faculty of the Yale School of Drama.
Life
Ruhl was born in Wilmette, Illinois. Her mother, Kathleen Ruhl, studied theater at Smith College, earned a Ph.D. in Language, Literacy, and Rhetoric from the University of Illinois, and became an English teacher, as well as an actor and a theatre director. Her father, Patrick Ruhl, became a marketer of toys. Her older sister, Kate, is a psychiatrist.
Beginning in the fourth grade, Ruhl received dramatic training at the Piven Theatre Workshop, in Evanston, Illinois. Piven later produced her Melancholy Play in 2015. Ruhl attended Interlochen Arts Camp for several summers in her youth.
When Ruhl was twenty, in August 1994, her father died of cancer after fighting the disease for two years, which had a profound impact on her and her art. Ruhl had intended to become a poet, but after she studied under Paula Vogel at Brown University, she was persuaded to switch to playwriting. Her first play was The Dog Play, written in 1995 for one of Vogel's classes. She graduated from Brown University with a Bachelor of Arts in English (1997), with her undergraduate work including a year spent at Pembroke College, Oxford. She worked a variety of jobs for the next two years, including teaching art in public schools, before returning to Brown for her Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting (2001).
The Lady with the Lap Dog and Anna Around the Neck were commissioned and produced by the Piven Theatre Workshop in 2001. The two plays are Ruhl's stage adaptions of Anton Chekov short stories.
Late: A Cowboy Song was produced by Clubbed Thumb (New York City) in 2003.
The Cornerstone Theater Company (Los Angeles) commissioned Ruhl for a play about young people living in Los Angeles. Cornerstone presented the play, Demeter in the City, at REDCAT in June 2006. The play is based on the myth of Demeter and Persephone.
Her play Scenes from Court Life, or The Whipping Boy and His Prince premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre on October 1, 2016, in previews, opened officially on October 6, and ran to October 22. The play, directed by Mark Wing-Davey, involves "privilege and politics in both 17th century Britain and current day America." The play was presented by the graduate acting class at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts in November 2015.
Her play How to Transcend a Happy Marriage premiered off-Broadway at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on February 23, 2017, in previews, and officially on March 20, 2017, directed by Rebecca Taichman. The cast featured Lena Hall, Marisa Tomei, Brian Hutchison, David McElwee, Naian González Norvind, Omar Metwally, Austin Smith, and Robin Weigert. The play, which takes place in New Jersey, is about two married couples.
For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday had its debut at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in May 2016 and then at the Shattered Globe Theatre at Theater Wit in Chicago in May 2017, starring Ruhl's mother Kathleen Ruhl. The play premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons on August 18, 2017 (previews), directed by Les Waters and starring Kathleen Chalfant and Lisa Emery.
Becky Nurse of Salem premiered at Berkeley Repertory Theatre on December 19, 2019, directed by Anne Kauffman and featuring Pamela Reed as the title character.
Ruhl is an active member of New Dramatists, a development space for new playwrights that is in partnership with the NYU Tisch Graduate Acting Program.
Ruhl gained widespread recognition for her play The Clean House (2004). The play centers married doctors who employ a Brazilian housekeeper who is trying to come up with the perfect joke. The husband then falls in love with one of his cancer patients and trouble ensues. It won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2004 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005.
Each Saturday, from the time Ruhl was five, Patrick took his daughters to the Walker Brothers Original Pancake House for breakfast and taught them a new word, along with its etymology. (The language lesson and some of Patrick's words—"ostracize," "peripatetic," "defunct"—are memorialized in the 2003 Eurydice, a retelling of the Orpheus myth from his inamorata's point of view, in which the dead Father, reunited with his daughter, tries to re-teach her lost vocabulary.)
Eurydice is Ruhl's version of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend. Talking stones serve as a Greek chorus. The play explores relationships, love, communication, the permeability between the worls of the living and dead, and the true meaning of life and the afterlife.
Ruhl's Passion Playcycle premiered at the Arena Stage, Washington, D.C., in 2005, directed by Molly Smith. It was next produced by the Goodman Theatre (Chicago) and Yale Rep (New Haven). Ruhl began writing Passion Play at age 21, while studying with Paula Vogel at Brown University. She did not finish the play until eight years later, after Wendy C. Goldberg and Molly Smith commissioned the third act. Passion Play made its New York City premiere in Spring 2010 in a production by the Epic Theatre Ensemble at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn. Each part of the trilogy depicts the staging of a Passion Play at a different place and during a different historical period: Elizabethan England, Nazi Germany, and the United States from the time of the Vietnam War until the present.
In September 2006, Ruhl received a MacArthur Fellowship. The announcement of that award stated that she creates "vivid and adventurous theatrical works that poignantly juxtapose the mundane aspects of daily life with mythic themes of love and war."
[If] Ruhl's demeanor is unassuming, her plays are bold. Her nonlinear form of realism—full of astonishments, surprises, and mysteries—is low on exposition and psychology. "I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life," she has said. "Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. They're pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isn't a wound being excavated from childhood."
In a discussion with Paula Vogel for BOMB Magazine, Ruhl described the psychology of her plays as "putting things up against Freud [...] it's a more medieval sensibility of the humors, melancholia, black bile, and transformation." Rather than "connect the dots psychologically in a linear way," Ruhl prefers to create emotional psychological states through transformation of the performance space.
Personal life
In 2005, Ruhl married child psychiatrist Tony Charuvastra. He taught a course at NYU on marriage and divorce and sometimes included In the Next Room on his syllabus. Ruhl and Charuvastra have three children: Anna, William, and Hope.
Because of Bell's palsy, contracted after she gave birth to the twins, one side of her face is paralyzed. She wrote about her experience in her book Smile: The Story of a Face, a nonfiction memoir.
Ruhl was awarded the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award for 2016. The Steinberg committee said: "Her work sparks conversation in audiences of all ages with its emotionally vivid language [...] Sarah Ruhl is unique. She fills her intelligent and highly theatrical plays with striking oddities and playful humor. Sarah is a prolific playwright of great distinction.
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