Sarah Ruhl

Transplanted from their beloved Moscow to a provincial Russian town, three sisters-school teacher Olga, unhappily married Masha, idealistic Irina-yearn for the city of their childhood, where they imagine their lives will be transformed and fulfilled. Three Sisters is the portrait of a family grappling with the bittersweet distance between reality and dreams.

From celebrated two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, playwright, poet, and professor Sarah Ruhl comes a cozy sweet dreams guide book wherein a child empowers themself to fight their nightmares with whimsical images of love and comfort. Read just one more book to me The way you always do Then I won't dream of dragons. Instead, I'll dream of you. When bad dreams and scary things threaten a child's peaceful sleep, they ask for one more bedtime story to fill their head with kittens, kisses, and the love they have for their family.

An inspiring collection of "pristine, perfect" (Elizabeth Strout) essays on the life-altering bonds between teacher and student and the timeless wisdom imparted both inside and outside the classroom--from critically acclaimed author, MacArthur genius, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Tony Award-nominated playwright and author, Sarah Ruhl. Based on her popular class at Yale, this "tender and profound" (Booklist) essay collection from one of our greatest living playwrights and teachers, Sarah Ruhl, is a testament to the singular impact of teachers across every stage of our lives. Anchored in stories both personal and universal, drawing on Sarah's experiences with her parents and children, with schoolteachers, creative influences, and beyond, Lessons from My Teachers is a "a true tribute to those who teach... that] masterfully captures the ineffable essence of all that passes between teacher and student" (Sharon Salzberg). Perfect for sharing with loved ones and role models alike and meant for marking important seasons and milestones, Lessons from My Teachers is a collection "told by a master storyteller...Anyone who learns and teaches will find affirmation in this book." (Kirkus Reviews).

An adaptation of Sarah Ruhl and Max Ritvo's 2018 epistolary book, Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship, this intimate, poetic play explores the relationship between Sarah and her former student, Max. With humor, lyricism and candor, the two friends share letters and poems as Max faces terminal illness and tests poetry's capacity to put to words what otherwise feels ineffable.

Out of work and out of love Becky Nurse is an ordinary but strong-willed grandmother just trying to get by in post-Obama America. She's also the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Rebecca Nurse who was infamously executed for witchcraft in 1692 - but things have changed for women since then haven't they? Desperate to raise her troubled teenaged granddaughter right and also hook up with an old flame Becky visits a local witch for help. But those spells and potions don't work out exactly as planned.

This play is for all the lady cowboys of heart and mind who ride outside the city limits of convention. Mary always late and always married meets a lady cowboy outside the city limits of Pittsburgh who teaches her how to ride a horse. Mary's husband Crick buys a painting with the last of their savings. Mary and Crick have a baby but they can't decide on the baby's name or the baby's gender. A story of one woman's education and her search to find true love outside the box.

'Her story is intimate and revealing about what it is to smile and what it means when you can't' Cynthia NixonThe extraordinary story of one woman's ten-year odyssey that brought her physical, creative, emotional, and spiritual healing.With a play opening on Broadway, and every reason to smile, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high-risk pregnancy when she discovers the left side of her face is completely paralyzed. She is assured that 90 percent of Bell's palsy patients experience a full recovery, like her own mother. But Sarah is in the unlucky ten percent. And for a woman, wife, mother, and artist working in theatre, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior brings significant and specific challenges. So she begins an intense decade-long search for a cure while simultaneously grappling with the reality of her new face - one that, while recognisably her own, is incapable of accurately communicating feelings or intentions.Smile is Ruhl's piercing, witty, lucid chronicle of her journey. She explores the struggle of a body yearning to match its inner landscape, the pain of postpartum depression, the story of a marriage, being a playwright and working mother to three small children, and the desire for a resilient spiritual life in the face of illness.Brimming with insight, humility, warmth and humour, Smile is a triumph: an intimate examination of loss and reconciliation, and above all else, the importance of perseverance and hope in the face of adversity.

* A People Best Book of the Year * Time and The Washington Post's Most Anticipated List * Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence * From the MacArthur genius, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and playwright, this "captivating, insightful memoir" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) is "a beautiful meditation on identity and how we see ourselves" (Real Simple). With a play opening on Broadway, and every reason to smile, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high-risk pregnancy when she discovers the left side of her face is completely paralyzed. She is assured that 90 percent of Bell's palsy patients experience a full recovery--like Ruhl's own mother. But Sarah is in the unlucky ten percent. And for a woman, wife, mother, and artist working in theater, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior brings significant and specific challenges. So Ruhl begins an intense decade-long search for a cure while simultaneously grappling with the reality of her new face--one that, while recognizably her own--is incapable of accurately communicating feelings or intentions. In a series of piercing, profound, and lucid meditations, Ruhl chronicles her journey as a patient, wife, mother, and artist. She explores the struggle of a body yearning to match its inner landscape, the pain of postpartum depression, the story of a marriage, being a playwright and working mom to three small children, and the desire for a resilient spiritual life in the face of illness. An intimate and "stunning" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) examination of loss and reconciliation, "Ruhl reminds us that a smile is not just a smile but a vital form of communication, of bonding, of what makes us human" (The Washington Post). Brimming with insight, humility, and levity, Smile is a triumph by one of America's leading playwrights.

"Eurydice is a luminous retelling of the Orpheus myth from his beloved wife's point of view. Watching it, we enter a singular, surreal world, as lush and limpid as a dream--an anxiety dream of love and loss--where both author and audience swim in the magical, sometimes menacing, and always thrilling flow of the unconscious... Ruhl's theatrical voice is reticent and daring, accurate and outlandish." --John Lahr, New YorkerA reimagining of the classic myth of Orpheus through the eyes of its heroine. Dying too young on her wedding day, Eurydice journeys to the underworld, where she reunites with her beloved father and struggles to recover lost memories of her husband and the world she left behind.

The extraordinary story of one woman's ten-year odyssey that brought her physical, creative, emotional, and spiritual healing. With a play opening on Broadway, and every reason to smile, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high-risk pregnancy when she discovers the left side of her face is completely paralyzed. She is assured that 90 percent of Bell's palsy patients experience a full recovery, like her own mother. But Sarah is in the unlucky ten percent. And for a woman, wife, mother, and artist working in theatre, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior brings significant and specific challenges. So she begins an intense decade-long search for a cure while simultaneously grappling with the reality of her new face - one that, while recognisably her own, is incapable of accurately communicating feelings or intentions. Smile is Ruhl's piercing, witty, lucid chronicle of her journey. She explores the struggle of a body yearning to match its inner landscape, the pain of postpartum depression, the story of a marriage, being a playwright and working mother to three small children, and the desire for a resilient spiritual life in the face of illness. Brimming with insight, humility, warmth and humour, Smile is a triumph: an intimate examination of loss and reconciliation, and above all else, the importance of perseverance and hope in the face of adversity.

Playwright Sarah Ruhl's first book of poetry, Poems Addressed to You. And You. And You, offers poems that form a subtle, personal meditation on family, motherhood, and loss. With a finely tuned ear for language, Ruhl's poetry sings with a humbling honesty about what it means to share our lives with others and with those who form our hollows: a miscarriage, a close friend lost to cancer, and the sublimity of nature. She delves into womanhood through the physical reality of the everyday, and shows us life through her hands--making terrariums or jam with her husband, holding a child, grasping the counter as she bleeds. Succinct and contemplative, generous and wise, Sarah Ruhl--one of the greatest contemporary playwrights working today--addresses these poems to you.

"This new play is a subversive enchantment. It is part absurd domestic seriocomedy, part erotic magic realism, unflinching about taboos and about questioning that, just maybe, monogamy isn't enough." --Linda Winer, Newsday Over dinner with another married couple, George and her husband grow fascinated by stories of their friends' new acquaintance--an intriguing younger woman named Pip. What begins as an innocent intellectual discussion turns into a sexually explosive New Year's Eve party after George extends an invitation to Pip and her two live-in boyfriends, raising the question: What ultimately binds human beings together?

A KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF 2018In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet. He was also in remission from pediatric cancer.Over the next four years—in which Ritvo’s illness returned and his health declined, even as his productivity bloomed—the two exchanged letters that spark with urgency, humor, and the desire for connection. Reincarnation, books, the afterlife as an Amtrak quiet car, good soup: in Ruhl and Ritvo’s exchanges, all ideas are fair, nourishing game, shared and debated in a spirit of generosity and love. “We’ll always know one another forever, however long ever is,” Ritvo writes. “And that’s all I want—is to know you forever.”Studded with poems and songs, Letters from Max is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and the afterlife.

Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell were two of America’s most brilliant poets. Throughout their lifetime, they wrote over 400 letters to each other; spanning decades, continents, political eras. Their connection was messy and profound, platonic yet romantic, intense and intangible. A love that resists easy definition.These are their words.Susan Smith Blackburn award winner Sarah Ruhl has crafted a stunning and quietly bold piece of theatre about what it means to love someone, and all the questions we regret never asking.

A KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF 2018In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet. He was also in remission from pediatric cancer.Over the next four years—in which Ritvo’s illness returned and his health declined, even as his productivity bloomed—the two exchanged letters that spark with urgency, humor, and the desire for connection. Reincarnation, books, the afterlife as an Amtrak quiet car, good soup: in Ruhl and Ritvo’s exchanges, all ideas are fair, nourishing game, shared and debated in a spirit of generosity and love. “We’ll always know one another forever, however long ever is,” Ritvo writes. “And that’s all I want—is to know you forever.”Studded with poems and songs, Letters from Max is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and the afterlife.

When Ann thinks of her father she immediately remembers playing Peter Pan in her hometown theater in Iowa particularly when he used to bring her flowers after her performance. Her memory is jogged by the fact that she and her four siblings are in their father's hospital room during his final moments. His death sparks a conversational wake that includes everything from arguments over politics to when each sibling realized that they grew up. A loving look at a family's view of death life and the allure of never growing up.

"A surreal 90-minute reverie that's wistful, beautiful and perplexing, not unlike life. Surprise is a motif throughout Ruhl's plays and this is no exception." --Karen D'Souza, Mercury News"Wondrous. . . . Ruhl is a master of dialogue, and five distinct, fleshed-out personalities quickly emerge. . . . Ruhl injects enough stage magic into the proceedings to establish the possibility for one of her wondrous transitions out of the banal and into the otherworldly."--Lily Janiak, San Francisco ChronicleAfter their father's passing, five siblings gather to reminisce and recount the memories that shaped their childhoods. What Ann, the eldest sibling (and homage to Sarah Ruhl's real-life mother), remembers most clearly is performing as Peter Pan in grade school, playing a character who never had to grow up and indeed feeling as though she never would herself. Over the course of the family gathering, the siblings find comfort in their togetherness, in aging, and in shared memories. A lyrical new play about the suddenness of growing older and the enduring bonds of family, For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday is a sentimental tribute to feeling forever young.Sarah Ruhl's plays include Stage Kiss; In the Next Room, or the vibrator play; The Clean House; Passion Play; Dead Man's Cell Phone; Melancholy Play; Eurydice; Orlando; Demeter in the City; Late: a cowboy song; Three Sisters; Dear Elizabeth; and The Oldest Boy. She is a recipient of 2004 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

At a dinner party in New Jersey two couples discuss polyamory as brought up by the introduction of a new temp Pip in Jane's office. When they invite Pip and her two male partners discussion turns to action and the exploration of unexplored desire turns animalistic and then Jane's daughter sees it all.How to Transcend a Happy Marriageblurs the lines of monogamy and asks how deeply friends lovers and strangers connect.