Backstage Book Club: Edition #6 - "Smile" by Sarah Ruhl
Sarah Ruhl (Photo: Gregory Costanzo)
If you were to present American theatergoers with the question “who is your favorite American playwright”, several names would likely come up multiple times - Arthur Miller, August Wilson, Neil Simon, Lorraine Hansberry, and Edward Albee are five of the most celebrated playwrights of the last 75 years, and their work has gone on to define the zeitgeist of their era - what is more early 1960’s than a Neil Simon domestic comedy?
If I were presented with this question, my immediate answer would be Sarah Ruhl. Her ability to ground the fantastical, and elevate the everyday brings me to my knees on a regular basis. Her play In The Next Room, or the vibrator play, changed my life, and I have been a distinctly different person since her poetry first entered my heart.
Ms. Ruhl has written an incredible memoir, titled Smile, that deeply explores her decade-long journey with Bell’s Palsy (a form of facial muscular paralysis) following the birth of her twins. As a woman working in the theater, where emotion and expression are paramount, she was forced to grapple with a reality where all she had were her words.
I had the honor of speaking with Ms. Ruhl about her internal evolution over the last decade, changes she hopes will come to the American theatre industry, and how writing Smile helped her grapple with her own experiences.
The following is an edited version of Ms. Ruhl and I’s conversation, and an exclusive excerpt from Smile.
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Smile is remarkably vulnerable, and unflinchingly honest - what drew you towards writing your story in this way?
RUHL: Writing a memoir without being honest feels a little like skinny-dipping with your underwear on. There was no way I could write the story without laying things bare.
The opening of your first Broadway play, In The Next Room or the vibrator play, was the last major event you attended before your prescribed bed rest while carrying your twins. The irony of your being prescribed a Victorian rest cure shortly after writing of a similarly constrictive Victorian treatment is undeniable. Do you see any other similarities between your situation and that of Catherine and Sabrina?
RUHL: Those women both experienced a gulf between mind and body, which I also experienced; as well as feelings of shame and helplessness. I had a taste of those emotions while going through my medical travails, unfortunately.
The stories of medical malfeasance, both during and following your pregnancy, are incredibly frustrating. Do you have any advice for others who find themselves trapped in a similar loop of not being truly heard?
RUHL: I love what Gloria Steinem once said, “Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.” So I would tell other patients who are having a hard time getting a diagnosis, or getting heard, to remember that they are experts on their own bodies. No one else knows exactly what it feels like to be in your body, as smart or smug as a specialist might seem.
Our society often subsumes women into archetypes of purpose - a mother, a lover, a career woman, and so on. Did you find it difficult to move between these archetypes when you were unable to facially genuflect as many women are trained to from birth?
RUHL: I love your term: “facially genuflect”. I’ll never forget being in a work meeting two weeks or so after the twins were born and right after I was diagnosed with Bell’s palsy. I couldn’t move the left side of my face at all. The person sitting opposite me was a film development person whose smile took up his whole face. Very white, toothy grin. I felt I had very little to offer in return. At a point, I thought, I still have my ideas to offer. I still have my kindness to offer. I still have my ability to listen keenly. But it took me a very long time to come to those realizations.
The mistreatment you faced when working on a piece out of town while nursing your children was infuriating - what changes do you hope take effect as in-person theatre slowly wakes after 18 months of exile?
RUHL: There are so many changes I’d love to see in the theater now that we’ve had 18 months of, as you put it, exile, to reflect on how we’d love the theater to be. In terms of being a breastfeeding mother—yes—there should be dedicated breastfeeding or pumping rooms in every theater. This would serve not only the artists but the staff of a theater and also, potentially, the audience! I’d love to see daycare at theaters. They are already cutting back on 10 out of 12s for tech which will make it much easier for workers and artists with babies at home to go to work. They are considering five-day work weeks instead of six. I’ve thought long and hard about the challenges ahead with equity, diversity, and inclusion in our community. We all need to come to Jesus on this.
One thing that would help the situation, in general, is for institutions to be truly artist-centered across the board. When artists are listened to—about who they want to collaborate with—about what they need—some entrenched hierarchies will start to shift. We also need to change the critical discourse about the theater and look at how we are bringing audiences in, and what audiences we are bringing in. We are in a very tender moment. Let’s attend to the tenderness before things scab over.
The love between you and your husband is achingly affecting as a reader, especially as many memoirs of illness feature a romantic partner crumbling under the pressure of acting as a support system. Do you have any advice for those looking to foster a more caring intimacy in their own relationships?
RUHL: My husband and I were friends before we fell in love. I think, for whatever reason, sometimes it’s easier to care for a friend than it is to care for a romantic partner. We have less blindness when it comes to friendship. So I suppose my advice would be to find the deep friendship within your romance. Marry your best friend. Marry someone who makes you laugh. Marry a feminist. Then, always bring them soup when they are sick.
The distinction between disappointment and tragedy is a fascinating dichotomy put forward by your close childhood friend - can you elaborate on the contrast?
RUHL: I love something my friend Beth Henley said after reading the book. She said something like—the tragic thing about disappointments is that disappointments lead to tragedy! For me, the distinction had something to do with what we think we’re allowed to write about and what we think is off-limits. Something chronic and disappointing seemed not aesthetically satisfying at first glance; not the stuff of either comedy or tragedy. I needed to write it out to see what was there.
Your relationship between religion and self-reliance is compelling - how has your personal definition of grace changed over the past decade?
RUHL: I think grace is what happens when we’re not looking.
Identity, and how the personal is affected by the physical is a significant theme throughout the back half of Smile. Do you believe it is possible to be truly body neutral?
RUHL: That’s an interesting phrase—body neutral. I can’t say for the general reader, but I can say for myself that part of why I wrote the book was realizing that as a feminist, and as someone who purports to care more about the invisible than the material world, and the soul over the body, I still seemed to care very much about my body when it felt broken. I was full of laments about the old self, the old face, and my attempt at neutrality was really a form of impressive denial. I think, in the end, I had to write about the bodily changes I was experiencing to truly embrace them and move on from them.
What do you wish you had known in 2009, confined to your bed and consumed with concerns?
RUHL: It would have been a comfort to me if I’d known for sure that my babies would be delivered safely. I also would have been comforted if I’d known that I would eventually turn to my writing again. There are so many things that would not have been comforting to learn—like a world-wide pandemic was going to hit. Maybe it’s good that we are cocooned inside the present moment until we aren’t.
You can purchase a copy of Smile at this link
Make sure to check back with Backstage Book Club next month, when we will be covering A Revolution in Three Acts.
If you are interested in submitting a book for consideration, please contact Margaret at www.margaret-hall.com
Excerpted from “Smile" by Sarah Ruhl. Published by Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2021 by Sarah Ruhl. All rights reserved.
That fall I sat at rehearsals for my play In the Next Room, or the vibrator play at Lincoln Center with my widening belly under the table, watching the actors, and frequently snacking on crackers. I fantasized about the Actors’ Equity breaks that come in two-hour intervals, so that I could pee or buy more food. I was the amount of showing where you just look sort of ambiguously fat, not unambiguously pregnant. I wondered if I would even be sitting at a rehearsal table once I had three children under the age of four.
Wearing a strange, green, roomy sweater, I put my arm around a luminous, slender actress for a photograph; she was so small it was as though my arm looped around her waist twice. And I smiled for the cameras.
Nerves are tricky for a playwright the week before any opening, but for Broadway openings, they are nearly impossible. Add being pregnant with twins and feeling like your belly is about to fall through your vagina onto the floor, because your second trimester actually feels like your third trimester, and your third trimester feels like some imagined fourth trimester that can’t possibly exist, and what you have is a kind of temporary psychosis.
On opening night, I put on a tentlike navy blue maternity dress with sparkles on the collar. My Husband and I arrived at the Lyceum Theatre, Broadway lights aglow. I squeezed into my seat. And I got through opening night without drinking a single glass of champagne. At the after-party, we learned that the reviews were good, more than good, really; and the actors were ebullient. We all rejoiced.
The day after opening night, I realized that I was bleeding. From the place you aren’t supposed to bleed when you are pregnant. I remembered the couplet I’d written when I’d had a miscarriage earlier in the year, and the melody started to go through my head, a worried mantra:
Every month, women practice for this, casual loss as a regular thing—
women bleed in private like animals; men bleed in public like kings.
I called my doctor and told him I was bleeding. “Stay home,” the doctor said.
“Stay home?” I asked, incredulous. Yes, stay home, he told me. In bed. For the next four months.