2015: Sarah Ruhl
Sarah Ruhl (1974- )
It is a great honor to be in the unbelievably excellent company of the playwrights Profile has produced, and a great honor to be part of such a singular theatrical dedication to the writer. – Sarah Ruhl
Sarah Ruhl’s Plays include The Oldest Boy, In the Next Room, or the vibrator play, The Clean House, Passion Play, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Melancholy Play; Eurydice; Orlando, Late: a cowboy song, Dear Elizabeth and Stage Kiss. She has been a two-time Pulitzer prize finalist and a Tony award nominee. Her plays have been produced on Broadway at the Lyceum by Lincoln Center Theater, off-Broadway at Playwrights’ Horizons, Second Stage, and at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater. Her plays have been produced regionally all over the country, often with premiers at Yale Repertory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theater, the Goodman Theater, and the Piven Theatre Workshop in Chicago. In 2014 she was the second most produced playwright in the country. Her plays have also been produced internationally and have been translated into over twelve languages. Originally from Chicago, Ms. Ruhl received her M.F.A. from Brown University where she studied with Paula Vogel. She has received the Susan Smith Blackburn award, the Whiting award, the Lily Award, a PEN award for mid-career playwrights, and the MacArthur “genius” award. You can read more about her work on www.SarahRuhlplaywright.com. Her book of essays 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write was published by Faber and Faber last fall. She teaches at the Yale School of Drama, and she lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Sarah Ruhl, winner of the MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship and twice-Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright, grasps her pen like an alchemist. The style of her plays is entirely unique, structured more like poetry than prose, mixing lyricism with irony, and balancing the sacred and the mundane while capturing the essence of everyday life. She weaves tales of wonder that look like our lives and feel like our lives, but reveal truths we couldn’t see on our own. In her plays, a sea of language and emotion carries us to a deeper understanding of our own innermost selves, as our minds are stretched and we are lured to let our imaginations run free.
Sarah Ruhl writes how life actually feels, not how it looks. It’s like she’s tapped into the spiritual subconscious of all of us. – Adriana Baer, Artistic Director
