Playwright

SARAH RUHL

About The Playwright

SARAH RUHL

PREMIERE WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE

 

Signature Productions:
Letters from Max, a Ritual (2023)

Eurydice (2023 Gala Reading)

 

 

Sarah Ruhl is an award-winning American playwright, author, essayist, and professor. Her plays include Letters from Max; The Oldest Boy; Dear Elizabeth’ Stage Kiss; In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2010); The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2005; Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 2004); Passion Play (PEN American Award, Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award from the Kennedy Center); Dead Man’s Cell Phone (Helen Hayes Award for Best New Play); Melancholy Play; Demeter in the City (nine NAACP Image Award nominations); Scenes From Court Life; How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday; Eurydice; Orlando; and Late: a cowboy song. Her plays have been produced on Broadway and across the country as well as internationally, and translated into fourteen languages. Originally from Chicago, Ms. Ruhl received her M.F.A. from Brown University, where she studied with Paula Vogel. She is the recipient of a Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a PEN Center Award for mid-career playwrights, a Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, and a Lilly award. She is a member of 13P and New Dramatists and won the MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. She teaches at Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Photo by Rebecca Greenfield

I am beyond honored to be included in the Signature revolution—a revolution that honors a playwright’s body of work over time. I humbly follow my heroes and teachers—including Paula Vogel, María Irene Fornés, Lynn Nottage, and Chuck Mee—with immense gratitude and a healthy dose of terror. I always love seeing plays at Signature because I know that theatrical language will come first, and everything else will follow.

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