In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play

Related Content

• Ice Cream Fried Bread Cone = Ice Cornet, a Sweet Treat Coming to Mitsuwa in Costa Mesa This Week
  May 20, 2013
• This Week In Food: Craft Beer Week, Bluth's Traveling Banana Stand, and MTV Being Dumb
  May 10, 2013
• Restaurant Roll Call for April 2013
  May 7, 2013
• OC's Nekter Juice Bar Launches New Cold-Pressed Cocktail Mixers With A Party This Thursday (P.S. Free Booze!)
  May 6, 2013
• Chixy Natural: Twirl-a-Bird
  May 9, 2013

More About

• Sarah Ruhl
• Costa Mesa
• The MacArthur Foundation
• Theatrical Plays
• Theater

Back in the Victorian Era, female hysteria was a very common diagnosis among women—symptoms included nearly everything, such as irritableness, nervousness, insomnia, and, our favorite, a “tendency to cause trouble.” So what did physicians deem a suitable remedy? An orgasm. Since constant treatment was rather, um, popular with the patients (not the doctors, they grew tired of the manual process, which could take hours), a machine was introduced in the 1870s that would shorten sessions from hours to minutes—and that machine vibrated. Pulitzer-nominated and MacArthur Foundation Grant-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl shares her touching story of the aptly named Dr. Givings and this absurd and rather hysterical medical breakthrough, a Broadway hit that’s now making its way to Costa Mesa.
Saturdays, Sundays, 2 p.m.; Tuesdays-Sundays, 7:45 p.m. Starts: Aug. 28. Continues through Oct. 17, 2010