Sarah Ruhl

Sarah Ruhl (born January 24, 1974) is an American playwright, poet, professor, and essayist. Among her most popular plays are Melancholy Play (2001) Eurydice (2003), The Clean House (2004), Dead Man's Cell Phone (2007), and In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) (2009). These works and others have been produced on and off Broadway and the West End.

Among numerous awards and honors, Ruhl has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a Whiting Award, and the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award. She has twice been a finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (2005, 2010) and been nominated for Tony Award for Best Play (2010). In 2020, she adapted her play Eurydice into the libretto for Matthew Aucoin's opera of the same name at the Metropolitan Opera. Eurydice was nominated for Best Opera Recording at the 2023 Grammy Awards.

In 2018, Milkweed Editions published Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship, which Ruhl co-authored with the late Max Ritvo. Ruhl subsequently adapted the book into a 2023 stage play, which was named a New York Times Critic's Pick. Her memoir Smile was published by Simon & Schuster, and listed as one of Time Magazine's "100 Must-Read Books of 2021." She is currently the Premiere Writer-in-Residence at Signature Theatre Company. Since 2015, Ruhl has served on the playwriting faculty of the Yale School of Drama.

Ruhl was born in Wilmette, Illinois. Her mother, Kathleen Ruhl, studied theater at Smith College and earned a Ph.D. in Language, Literacy, and Rhetoric from the University of Illinois and became an English teacher, as well as an actress and a theatre director. Her father, Patrick Ruhl, became a marketer of toys, with an appreciation for literature and music. Her older sister, Kate, is a psychiatrist.

Beginning in the fourth grade, Ruhl received dramatic training at the Piven Theatre Workshop, in Evanston, Illinois. On the occasion of a 2015 production at Piven of her Melancholy Play, Ruhl credited the institution with teaching her about the role of language and narration in theater. Ruhl attended Interlochen Arts Camp for several summers in her youth.

When Ruhl was twenty, in August 1994, her father died of cancer after fighting the disease for two years, an event that would have a profound impact on her and her art. Ruhl had intended to become a poet, but after she studied under Paula Vogel at Brown University, she was persuaded to switch to playwriting. Her first play was The Dog Play, written in 1995 for one of Vogel's classes. She graduated from Brown University with a Bachelor of Arts in English (1997), with her undergraduate work including a year spent at Pembroke College, Oxford. She worked a variety of jobs for the next two years, including teaching arts education in public schools, before returning to Brown for her Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting (2001).

Sarah Ruhl currently teaches at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Orlando, an adaptation of the novel by Virginia Woolf, was commissioned by the Piven Theatre Workshop and premiered in Evanston, Illinois in May 1998 featuring Justine Scarpa as Orlando. Director Joyce Piven later helmed the show again in March 2003 at The Actors' Gang, Hollywood, California, with Polly Noonan taking on the title role. The play was produced Off-Broadway by the Classic Stage Company in 2010. In 2015, Orlando premiered for the Sydney Theatre Company at the Sydney Opera House with actress Jacqueline McKenzie playing the lead.