To imagine a time before humans understood that there was a connection between sexual intercourse and pregnancy, you have to go back pretty far through the mists of time. The relationship between sexuality and the female orgasm, however, which seems just as obvious to us today, a mere century ago hadn't been made - at least not in uptight Victorian culture. Unhappy upper- and middle-class women, women who today would be simply described as dissatisfied with their lives and/or sexually frustrated, were "diagnosed" as "hysterics" and "treated" - sometimes with vibrations that led to a release, or "paroxysm" as it is so cutely called in Sarah Ruhl's engrossing but not thoroughly baked new play.
In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play takes us back to the late 18th-century home office of a fictionalized doctor-inventor (Michael Cerveris) who uses the new miracle of electricity to create vibrating machines capable of stimulating women - and the occasional man - to orgasm. The doctor's wife (Laura Benanti), a frustrated free spirit, craves romantic love, sensuality, and excitement but gets at most deference from her buttoned-up husband, who has more passion for science than for, well, passion. To make matters worse, poor Mrs. Givings can't provide adequate milk for their new baby and feels she's a bad mother, yet has little to distract her from her unhappy state except the taking of long walks in all kinds of weather.
Dr. Givings' new patient (the fabulous Maria Dizzia) and her gruff husband (Thomas Jay Ryan) arrive to put a little kick into the proceedings, and a race/class issue is raised with the possibility of hiring a black wet nurse (Quincy Tyler Bernstine). But stilted dialogue and caricatured personalities (especially the doctor's, his character being the least colorful) prevent Act I from registering as more than an amusing trifle powered by easy laughs derived from the various characters' excited reactions to the machine. It isn't that the script makes light of their ignorance; it's simply that it seems to be coasting on a cloud of the obvious.
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