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In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) is a play by Sarah Ruhl. It concerns the early history of the vibrator, when doctors used it as a clinical device to bring women to orgasm as treatment for "hysteria." Other themes include Victorian ignorance of female sexual desire, motherhood and breastfeeding, and jealousy.
Sabrina Daldry and Catherine Givings are sexually frustrated with their husbands, who creep quietly into their beds at night and only use the missionary position, which they endure but do not enjoy. Both are excited to have their first orgasms with the machine. Mrs. Daldry is content to continue having clinical treatments with the machine and suffer lifeless, boring sex with her own husband. "I am afraid there is very little sympathy between us." Catherine Givings wants more.
First Mrs. Givings learns from a visiting artist that orgasms detached from love ultimately are unfulfilling and empty, simply surface, without soul, and similar to sex with prostitutes. Then a lower-class wet nurse, Elizabeth, reveals to Catherine that she may be able to enjoy the same sensations from the machine with her husband, with whom she is frustrated because of his clinical detachment, but still ultimately loves.
Catherine first inspires jealousy and passion in her husband, then convinces Dr. Givings - who had earlier observed that "what men do not perceive because their intellect prevents them from seeing would fill a book"- to make snow angels with her and discovers the woman on top sex position, allowing her at last sexual satisfaction while the curtain lowers.
The playwright mines her subject for suitably bawdy humor without resorting to vulgarity. But what really gives the work its distinction is its sensitive exploration of the physical and emotional repression suffered by the women of the era, which has yet to disappear entirely....The play beautifully balances its humor and pathos." -Hollywood Reporter
