A moving, innovative play based on one of the greatest correspondences in literary history.
From 1947 to 1977, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop exchanged more than four hundred letters. Describing the writing of their poems, their travel and daily illnesses, the pyrotechnics of their romantic relationships, and the profound affection they had for each other, these missives are the most intimate record available of both poets and one of the greatest correspondences in American literature.
The playwright Sarah Ruhl fell in love with these letters and set herself an unusual challenge: to turn this thirty-year exchange into a stage play, and to bring to life the friendship of two writers who were rarely even in the same country. As innovative as it is moving, Dear Elizabeth gives voice to a conversation that lived mostly in writing, illuminating some of the finest poems of the twentieth century and the minds that produced them.

Dramatic Comedy / 5m, 2f / Unit Set In Eurydice, Sarah Ruhl reimagines the classic myth of Orpheus through the eyes of its heroine. Dying too young on her wedding day, Eurydice must journey to the underworld, where she reunites with her father and struggles to remember her lost love. With contemporary characters, ingenious plot twists, and breathtaking visual effects, the play is a fresh look at a timeless love story. "RHAPSODICALLY BEAUTIFUL. A weird and wonderful new play - an inexpressibly moving theatrical fable about love, loss and the pleasures and pains of memory." - The New York Times "EXHILARATING!! A luminous retelling of the Orpheus myth, lush and limpid as a dream where both author and audience swim in the magical, sometimes menacing, and always thrilling flow of the unconscious." - The New Yorker "Exquisitely staged by Les Waters and an inventive design team...Ruhl's wild flights of imagination, some deeply affecting passages and beautiful imagery provide transporting pleasures. They conspire to create original, at times breathtaking, stage pictures." - Variety

Comedy / Casting: 1m, 4f / Scenery: Int. with inserts This extraordinary new play by an exciting new voice in the American drama was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. After its acclaimed run at Yale Repertory Theatre it was done to equal acclaim at several major theatres coast to coast before winding up off Broadway at Lincoln Center, where it had an extended run. The play takes place in what the author describes as "metaphysical Connecticut", mostly in the home of a married couple who are both doctors. They have hired a housekeeper named Matilde, an aspiring comedian from Brazil who's more interested in coming up with the perfect joke than in house-cleaning. Lane, the lady of the house, has an eccentric sister named Virginia who's just nuts about house-cleaning. She and Matilde become fast friends, and Virginia takes over the cleaning while Matilde works on her jokes. Trouble comes when Lane's husband Charles reveals that he has found his soul mate, or "bashert" in a cancer patient named Anna, on whom he has operated. The actors who play Charles and Anna also play Matilde's parents in a series of dream-like memories, as we learn the story about how they literally killed each other with laughter, giving new meaning to the phrase, "I almost died laughing". This theatrical and wildly funny play is a whimsical and poignant look at class, comedy and the true nature of love. "Fresh, funny ...a memorable play, imbued with a melancholy but somehow comforting philosophy: that the messes and disappointments of life are as much a part of its beauty as romantic love and chocolate ice cream, and a perfect punch line can be as sublime as the most wrenchingly lovely aria." - NY Times. "A rich work about big themes from a young playwright with an original and audacious voice." - Variety.

"Passionate. Show-stopping. Daringly over-the-top and impressively consistent in its delirious excess. "The Clean House" shines."-"New Haven Advocate" ""The Clean House" is not, by any means, a traditional boy-meets-girl story. In fact disease, death, and dirt are among the subjects it addresses. This comedy is romantic, deeply so, but in the more arcane sense of the word: visionary, tinged with fantasy, extravagant in feeling, maybe a little nuts."-"The New York Times" "Touching, inventive, invigoratingly compact, and luminously liquid, "Eurydice" reframes the ancient myth of ill-fated love to focus not on the bereaved musician but on his dead bride-and on her struggle with love beyond the grave."-"San Francisco Chronicle" This volume is the first publication of Sarah Ruhl, "a playwright with a unique comic voice, perspective, and sense of theater" ("Variety"), who is fast leaving her mark on the American stage. In the award-winning "Clean House"-a play of uncommon romance and uncommon comedy-a maid who hates cleaning dreams about creating the perfect joke, while a doctor who treats cancer leaves his heart inside one of his patients. This volume also includes "Eurydice," Ruhl's reinvention of the tragic Greek tale of love and loss, together with a third play still to be named. Sarah Ruhl received the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2004 for her play "The Clean House," which has been produced at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia, South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, DC. Her play "Eurydice" has been produced at Madison Repertory Theatre and Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

An incessantly ringing cell phone in a quiet café. A stranger at the next table who has had enough. And a dead man—with a lot of loose ends. So begins Dead Man’s Cell Phone , a wildly imaginative new comedy by playwright Sarah Ruhl, recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and Pulitzer Prize finalist for her play The Clean House . A work about how we memorialize the dead—and how that remembering changes us—it is the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world.