Citation for Sarah Ruhl

Sarah Ruhl. Playwright. Poet. Consummate storyteller.

“I like to see people speaking ordinary words in strange places,” you’ve said. “Or people speaking extraordinary words in ordinary places.”

That jolt of the unexpected, of sudden literal or sensory dislocation, is characteristic of your extraordinary, genre-defying plays, in which the surrealism of our everyday emotions and encounters are given comic, even absurd, but somehow recognizable form.

Whether a woman turning into an almond or the mythological Eurydice taking an elevator to the underworld, your characters pass swiftly among shapes, geographies, and timescapes, veering from surprise to nonchalance – just as we all do every day of our lives.

Your plays – among them: The Clean House,  In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play), and How to Transcend a Happy Marriage - have been cited twice as a Pulitzer finalist, nominated for a Tony Award, and received multiple accolades. Your plays remind us of the theatrical dazzle inherent in the daily activity of our thoughts, imaginations, and feelings. 

And they remind us of the limitlessness of storytelling, and what that says about the limitlessness of our own identities. “Plays,” you’ve said, “provided a way to open up content and have many voices.”

Your plays Eurydice and Orlando have enriched Barnard stages, and given opportunities for students to inhabit your magical worlds that are tinged with the inevitable loss of loving and living.

You’ve gifted us your own voice in beautiful – and funny - books of poems, essays, and memoirs – including last year’s Smile: The Story of a Face, about your long-term struggle with Bell’s palsy, or, as you describe it, “the story of how I learned to make my way when my body stopped obeying my heart.”

In Letters from Max, you shared with us the voice of a student of yours from Yale, a brilliant young poet with whom you corresponded through his final four years with cancer. 

And in less than two weeks, we’ll all have the chance to pick up your newest book, Love Poems in Quarantine – which like everything else you’ve written will no doubt mingle flights of drama,  the sharp knowledge of loss, and precise beauty with the humor and absurdity of small things. 

Sarah Ruhl, for helping us confront the wonder of ourselves through the wonder of language and the theater, for making our imaginations soar while keeping us firmly on the ground, and for reminding us to share all the voices inside us with the world, it is my honor to present you with a 2022 Barnard Medal of Distinction.