Sarah Ruhl

Sarah performed on stage for Seriously Entertaining at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater on June 7, 2022, speaking on the evening’s theme, “Being and Becoming.” Watch it below.

Sarah Ruhl is a Pulitzer-Prize and Tony Award-nominated American playwright whose sometimes-surreal work has been produced by Lincoln Center Theater, Playwright Horizons, Yale Repertory Theater, Arena Stage, Woolly Mammoth Theater Company, and other companies.

Sarah originally intended to be a poet but turned to drama after studying with Paula Vogel at Brown University. In 2003, she won the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award and the Whiting Writers’ Award. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006 and is also the recipient of the PEN/Laura Pels Award for a mid-career playwright, the Feminist Press’ Forty Under Forty award, and the 2010 Lily Award.

Her plays, which she says “celebrate the pleasure of heightened things,” include In the Next Room, or the vibrator play, The Clean House; Passion Play, a cycle; Dead Man’s Cell Phone; Melancholy Play; Eurydice; Orlando, Demeter in the City, Late: a cowboy song, Three Sisters, Stage Kiss, and Dear Elizabeth. Her recent memoir, Smile: The Story of a Face, was a Longlist Selection for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence.

She is currently on the faculty at Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

In her own words: “Cell phones, iPods, wireless computers will change people in ways we don’t even understand. We’re less connected to the present. No one is where they are.”

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