Sarah Ruhl’s Guides in Life and Art
In the playwright Sarah Ruhl’s new book, “Lessons from My Teachers,” she writes of a period in her life when she—by then a celebrated dramatist, a parent, and a professor at Yale—“was supposed to be the teacher now. A grown-up, with answers. And yet, I had so many questions.” Ruhl, whose play “Eurydice” is currently running at the Signature Theatre, with Maya Hawke in the title role, joined us recently to discuss a few choice works that impart lessons about theatre, illness, gender, death, and more. Her remarks have been edited and condensed.
A Nearly Normal Life
by Charles L. Mee
I met Chuck Mee when I was at Brown and he was brought in to speak in a class I was taking. This memoir is about his life as an artist, but it’s also about him getting polio when he was fourteen, while growing up in a small town in Illinois. I read this book during the pandemic, and all the material in it about vaccines, the Salk trials, and being quarantined resonated then. The book also helped me a lot as someone who has struggled with a neurological problem. After I gave birth to twins, I developed facial paralysis—Bell’s palsy—and I really appreciated what Chuck says about not smoothing out the edges of your body’s experiences. He writes, “Illness damages our aesthetic sense of our lives, and that is a source of suffering as much as any physical pain.” Chuck’s notion that you might create an aesthetic that makes sense of your experience in some fashion—one that isn’t a neat little tale with moral causality in it—was very helpful to me.
Mother Play
by Paula Vogel
Paula was the one who pulled me toward playwriting when I was an undergraduate. I met her when I was twenty, and she changed my life.
Paula was a total genius, and the most passionate teacher I had ever encountered. She would get so excited talking about Viktor Shklovsky that she would fall to her knees. And she has this way of believing in her students that is like a magic potion, or—speaking of vaccines—like an inoculation against failure.
This is a play about Paula’s mother, Phyllis, and her brother Carl. The mother has to cope with having two queer children, including a son who is H.I.V.-positive. It’s extraordinary to me in so many ways. It has an incredible structure, and it’s very moving. At the end, the mother, who has lost her memory, is in a nursing home, and the daughter character is there washing her mother, and the mother talks about how proud she is of her daughter for the first time, not realizing that her daughter is the one washing her.
Sexing the Body
by Anne Fausto-Sterling
One crazy coincidence in my life is that Paula Vogel’s wife, Anne Fausto-Sterling, taught my husband, Tony, when we were in college. Tony and I didn’t realize it when we started dating, but our mentors were married to each other.
Anne is a brilliant feminist biologist, and this book is about how it’s impossible to separate the biology of gender from its social context. Anne describes gender as a sort of Russian doll, made up of all these processes and developmental systems that are actually nested within one another. Part of her argument emerges out of looking at the ways in which sex isn’t totally clear-cut, biologically speaking. The book opens with the example of the Spanish hurdler María José Martínez-Patiño, who had to do a last-minute DNA test at the 1988 Olympics to prove that she was a woman. Martínez-Patiño went off to the relevant office and scraped some cells off the side of her cheek, but when the results came back it turned out that she had this really complicated hormonal diagnosis. Anne’s points strike me as very relevant now, as the Administration goes after trans people everywhere. It offers a sane lens on these subjects.
The Final Voicemails
by Max Ritvo
I think that when certain students and teachers find one another, their exchange of knowledge can create a kind of electricity. Max was definitely one of those students for me.
I met Max when he enrolled in an advanced playwriting course that I was teaching for undergraduates. He was such a bright light. I just adored his mind. But, that fall, he had a recurrence of Ewing’s sarcoma, which he ’d been treated for as a teen-ager. I felt responsible for him, to some degree, knowing that he was facing death as such a young person. After he graduated, we became good friends. We exchanged writing, we talked about the afterlife and our love of soup, we wrote a book together.
“The Final Voicemails” is made up of uncollected poems that he was working on when he was sick, and it was put together by his mentor, Louise Glück, after he died. There are so many real beauties in it, like this couplet:
