The Unbearable Lightness of Being Sarah Ruhl
Lightness isn’t stupidity. It’s actually a philosophical and aesthetic viewpoint, deeply serious, and has a kind of wisdom—stepping back to be able to laugh at horrible things even as you’re experiencing them.
Sarah Ruhl
By Emily Boyle
A dog is waiting by the door, waiting for the family to come home, unaware that the family is at his master’s funeral, unaware of the concept of death. This was the story of Orlando playwright Sarah Ruhl’s first-ever play, a ten-minute miniaturist drama filled with gorgeous, emotionally vivid language. At the time, Ruhl was twenty years old and grappling with losing her father to cancer. Although her father's illness filled her with grief, what she treasures most about him was his ability to make their whole family roar with laughter—even in his last days as he joked through his treatments about having radioactive urine. To cope with the heavy issues of life, love, and death, Ruhl sees her subjects through a sense of lightness, humour, playful whimsy, and fantasy. This lightness has become a hallmark of her playwriting.
The interplay between the actual and the magical allows Ruhl’s characters to occupy both the real world and a lightened suspended state. With flights of imagination, she transports her characters to extraordinary places and transforms them in remarkable ways. In Orlando, we follow our protagonist through three centuries and across their transformation from male to female. Through this fabulous and metamorphic trip of space, time, and gender, Orlando grapples with the loss of a loved one—Sasha, the Russian princess who is Orlando's first true love and who abandons Orlando to return to her home country. Ruhl’s style mitigates the heaviness of heartbreak and longing within the play, helping both Orlando and the audience endure the loss. Fantastical elements never fully mask the pain of loss, death, bereavement, and love in Ruhl’s works. Rather, they lighten the burdens of being human through compassionate humour, playful reveries, and the wonders of fantasy.
In her own words
Sarah Ruhl on Subtext
Sarah Ruhl on adapting Orlando
Photo Credits
Top: Ruhl’s Passion Play, Goodman Theatre, 2007, photo by Liz Lauren
Bottom: photo by Rebecca Greenfield
Published October 2024