In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)

ON THE STAGE

Closed curtains.

A pram/bassinet.

A rocking chair.

Sumptuous rugs, sumptuous wallpaper.

Many electrical lamps, and one particularly beautiful one, with green glass.

Next to the living room, a private doctor’s room, otherwise known as an operating theater.

The relationship between the living room and the operating theater is all important in the design, as things happen simultaneously in the living room and operating theater.

In the operating theater, a medical table covered with a sheet. A basin for washing hands.

Several vibrators.

And an outlet, to plug in electrical apparatus.

One exit, in the operating theater, to an unseen room (the doctor’s private study) and one exit to the living room, which has an exit to an unseen nursery and to the outdoors.

One might consider, rather than recorded sound, using only the live piano if one of the actors is good at playing piano.

One might consider, rather than the usual lighting instruments, something ancient.

That is to say—in a play hovering at the dawn of electricity—how should the theater itself feel?

Terribly technological or terribly primitive or neither—

At any rate, let the use of technology feel like a choice.

DR. GIVINGS, a man in his forties, a specialist in gynecological and hysterical disorders.

CATHERINE GIVINGS, his wife, a woman in her late twenties.

SABRINA DALDRY, his patient, a woman in her early thirties.

MR. DALDRY, Sabrina Daldry’s husband, a man in his forties or fifties.

ANNIE, a woman in her late thirties, Dr. Givings’s midwife assistant.

ELIZABETH, an African-American woman in her early thirties, a wet nurse by default.

LEO IRVING, Dr. Giving’s other patient, an Englishman in his twenties or thirties.

A prosperous spa town outside of New York City, perhaps Saratoga Springs.

The dawn of the age of electricity; and after the Civil War; circa 1880s.