Secret Desires

What do you long for? Reveal your secret desires... and review the desires of others. For the entire run of In the Next Room or the vibrator play, you can discreetly engage in this incredibly intimate conversation anonymously in a number of public settings.

Click here to surreptitiously share your innermost longings or fill out a Secret Desires card when you come to see the show.

You can read the desires of others in our lobby, here on our website (look for the Secret Desires tab on this page), by visiting Woolly's Facebook page, or by following our Secret Desire tweet of the day.

 

Antique Self-Stimulation

An invigorating pre-show lobby experience! A number of vibrators from the 19th and early 20th century are on-loan from the Museum of Sex throughout the run.

 

Audience Salon: Technology, relationships and sexuality

Wednesday, September 1st before the 8pm performance

Come dish with sex and gender blogger Amanda Hess (formerly known as “The Sexist” at the Washington City Paper) and guests Zack Rosen from The New Gay and Ann Friedman blogger at Feministing.com and deputy editor of The American Prospect. The free and open event features gelato and sorbets by Pitango Gelato beginning at 6:30pm; discussion starts at 7:00pm.

 

Audience Salon: The Art and Science of Light

Wednesday, September 15th at 6:30pm

Get enlightened! Join Colin K. Bills (Woolly’s Artistic Associate, and lighting designer of In the Next Room or the vibrator play) and his guest Dr. Robert Friedel (technological historian from University of Maryland, College Park) to learn about the very special role the light bulb plays in this production. The free and open event features gelato and sorbets by Pitango Gelato. The event will begin at 6:30pm; discussion begins at 7pm.

 

Girls Night Out

Thursday, September 30th

Ladies, get your buzz on! Enjoy Happy Hour at the theatre before and after the show, test out a wild array of Passion Parties, Inc products, and mingle with artists involved in the discussion. You might even go home with a new toy, provided by sponsors Lotus Blooms, Pleasure Place, and Secret Pleasures Boutique.

 

Post-Show Discussions

Intimate investigations around the play, production, and its ideas.

• Wednesday, August 25th following the 8pm performance
  featuring director Aaron Posner
• Wednesday, September 1st following the 8pm performance
  Chad Heap, Associate Professor and Chair of American Studies Department at George Washington University
• Thursday, September 9th following the 8pm performance
  featuring scenic designer Dan Conway
• Sunday, September 12th following the 3pm performance
  featuring noted women's health attorney Sybil Shainwald
• Saturday, September 18th following the 3pm performance
  featuring Rachel Maines, author of The Technology of Orgasm.
• Saturday, September 18th following the 8pm performance
  featuring Rachel Maines, author of The Technology of Orgasm.
• Sunday, September 19th following the 3pm performance
  featuring Rachel Maines, author of The Technology of Orgasm.

 

What do you long for?

During the run of In the Next Room or the vibrator play, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company is inviting audiences to anonymously reveal their innermost longings and voyeuristically review the longings of others.

There are many ways you can follow the project:

1. In person in the Woolly lobby
2. On our Facebook Page
3. On Twitter, where one Secret Desire will be tweeted daily
4. Here!

We invite you to join us in having this very private conversation and a public setting. To share your Secret Desire, please click here.

• I want to make out with my best friend!
• To lick my colleague's pussy while her boyfriend fucks her.
• I long to massage a beautiful lady's feet and ankles.
• To stop worrying about my size, exercising like I'm being sponsored by an energy drink, throwing up when I can't be in control anymore – and do all that and not gain any weight.
• One more day with my mother, like David in the movie A.I.
• Someone to like me enough to want to be my boyfriend, instead of just my lover.
• I'd like to know God.
• To stop feeling so horrible about the way I look/behave/feel.
• To lick Grand Marnier off my ex-girlfriend’s nipples.
• A nap on the beach...
• To have very public, and loud, sex with my partner.
• To have my arms tied to the headboard of an insanely comfy bed; peanut butter licked off my torso.
• Two girls. Sisters. I am just watching.
• I want my ex-beau now my boss to get the starch to tell me he loves me as much as I love him.
• To be part of a poly triad with David Doersch of Coyote Run and Viggo Mortensen.
• I want to go someplace without thinking about how my tummy looks in an outfit.
• I long for connection with a partner who is not afraid of expressing—and who, above all, is excited to share with me—love, desire, passion, spirituality, adventure, and creativity. I want someone who is motivated to be (and capable of being) my equal, my helpmeet, my champion, my rock, my friend, my lover, my homie. I want to dream wonderful dreams with this person and I want our life together the journey we build as we make these dreams come true for ourselves, our family, our community, and for the world.
• I fantasize about my date tying me to her bed and taking me with a strap-on.
• At long last I want to break my 3-year run as a celibate and enjoy getting fucked in every hole for days on end.  I'm tired of being safe, tired of being good, tired of waiting. I want satisfaction. I want Klingon sex, bites and all!
• To participate in a masturbation party with friends. Not an orgy—I don't need strangers all over me—but the idea of people you know and care about all being exposed, sexual, and comfortable all together, makes me truly horny and eager.
• About 20 years back to use the vibrator I just bought after seeing "In the Next Room"—my first at the age of 42!
• I'd like to eat spicy tuna sushi off my lover's stomach and lick up all the wasabi paste and soy sauce.
• To make passionate love like we used too, when we first got married.
• I wish my boyfriend was a vampire. No Edward Cullen though, I want a dirty vampire. Bite my neck, bite my back, bite me. I'll only scream a little.
• Quit my job, break up with my boyfriend, move to a new city, and see where I can go from there.
• To get my gay best friend to make me pregnant, but raise the baby with my boyfriend. (Gay best friend has better genes!)
• I want to leave her for you after we hooked up 3 times. I just don't want to break her heart.
• Someone who loves me unreasonably and unconditionally.
• I want to watch my boyfriend fuck another man. (I'm a girl.)
• To be fed chocolate cake by Jon Hamm.
• Someone who will be there for me without expecting anything or thinking about whether it's a good idea.
• I want to be taken in by a married couple and made their plaything for them to act out all of their deepest, wettest, weirdest gay and straight desires. I also want to have anal sex in public…again. :)
• I'd like somebody other than my husband to see me naked.
• My married-with-children Administrative Assistant.
• I want to make use of every flat surface in my home – furniture, counter tops, floors, bathtub, shower stall walls, front door…I bought a very sturdy coffee table and have never used it the way I want to.
• Passionate kisses and someone who will hold my hand in public.
• To shrink down to 6 inches in size and hike and explore all over my wife's now-mountainous nude body.
• I am in love with my best friend from my childhood. I went to her wedding this weekend.
• For Chick-fil-A to be open 7 days a week because I always crave it on Sundays.
• I feel like all my desires are either obvious, public, or fulfilled. Is that great or sad?
• To have sex with my ex without having to speak to him
• I want to be Harry Potter's underwear.
• I want to have sex with my husband and my ex-girlfriend…and Bjork. If my husband just wants to watch, that'll be fine, too.
• I am attracted to my husband's boss.
• I long for someone who has the same sex drive as me, or at least close.
• I want to have sex on stage in front of an audience.
• I wanna do it on a park bench.
• Comfort.
• To be thin and happy.
• I secretly long to quit my rewarding job to move to the suburbs, have four or five kids, and raise them Little Women-style. We would have family game nights and make preserves. My husband would never go for this.
• I still want to fuck most of my ex-girlfriends.
• Not proud of it, but enforced sterilization (of great swaths of humanity).
• Sometimes I wish I could be women's socks.
• If I had to choose between my husband and my dogs, I'd probably go with my dogs.
• Heavy S&M session with...well, I won't say her name, but she's in The Vibrator Play!
• I am seeing two people at the same time and wish I could tell the both of them that I simply cannot pretend to be monogamous anymore. I tried for years, but I can't do it.
• To be understood and loved completely and forever.
• A man.
• To spend a long weekend in a secluded ocean setting with three hot, big-breasted women.
• I want a threesome with my ex-girlfriend and current girlfriend.
• The perfect girlfriend (or boyfriend or transfriend) without the hassle of dating and finding them.
• To enter a room and inspire dirty thoughts from everyone.
• Tantric sex with a great lover.
• To use a vibrator with my man…and another woman.
• Dark chocolate. And my husband’s best friend.

 

The Woolly Blog is updated twice a week, once on Tuesdays and once on Fridays, and explores Woolly’s play production process.
Check in on Tuesdays to learn more about the artistic process behind our shows, and on Fridays to learn how we are connecting with our audiences.

 

 

Radio Woolly is Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company's very own radio station. Tune in to hear interviews with Woolly staff members, playwrights, artists, and community members. A new episode airs every Wednesday!
Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes!

Podcast on Podcasting

Woolly Staffers Cristina Alicea, Max Freedman and Alli Houseworth go, like, totally meta and talk about what makes a good podcast, and what might not make such a good podcast… all while podcasting!

On Internships at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

The 2010/11 Internship Class explores what it's like to work at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company.

Vibrators, Orgasms, and the Art of Healing

Connectivity Director Rachel Grossman talks with ladies who were waiting in the Pay-What-You-Can line for In the Next Room or the vibrator play about their vibrators, and chats with body and energy therapist Kathy English Holt and sexologist Dr. Fulbright about the use of vibrators, orgasms and the art of healing.

Inside Woolly Mammoth’s Electrics Department

Connectivity Director Rachel Grossman takes a look inside Woolly's electrics department and chats with Master Electrician Ann Allan

The Art and Science of Light

Rachel Grossman talks with In the Next Room or the vibrator play Lighting Designer Colin K. Bills and Dr. Robert Friedel, technological historian from University of Maryland, College Park, about light’s role in the play.

Inside the Woolly Mammoth Development Department

Rachel Grossman talks with Tim Plant, Woolly’s Development Director, and discovers the fun in fundraising.

vibrator Cast on Intimacy

Rachel Grossman talks with the cast of In the Next Room or the vibrator play about their characters'—and their personal—intimate relationship experiences

Props In the Next Room

Connectivity Director Rachel Grossman takes a look inside Woolly's props department and chats with Props Master Jenn Sheetz.

Aaron Posner on vibrators

Aaron Posner, director of In the Next Room or the vibrator play talks about vibrators, and what they reveal.

First Rehearsal

We talk with a director, a dramaturg, a cast member and Woolly’s production intern about the excitement, nerves and anxieties surrounding a play’s first rehearsal.

 

 

Love in the Electric Age

by Kristin Leahey, Production Dramaturg

The “War of Currents” marked the dawn of the
late 1800s electric age; Thomas Edison’s powerful direct current (DC) held sway over Nikola Tesla’s alternating current (AC). The battle of AC versus DC helped incite the invention of simple, full-throttle machines, such as the newfangled 1870s electric massager. This new home appliance, whose innovation and efficiency was compared to the vacuum cleaner, made young men’s sweethearts youthful and vibrant once again. By simply flipping an on-off switch and applying the gyrating head to the point of distress, physicians miraculously restored female patients to their finer selves. This curious and popular man-made invention treated common afflictions from headaches to backaches to hysteria—the malady associated with the weaker sex.

Around 300 BC, Hippocrates defined hysteria, from the Greek word hystera or uterus, as suffocation or madness of the womb. During medieval times, the renaissance period, and throughout the mid-twentieth-century, symptoms including women’s chronic arousal, anxiety, sleeplessness, nervousness, sensations of heaviness in the abdomen and lower pelvic region, and vaginal lubrication led physicians to the diagnosis of hysteria. Although “the disease” concerned the female nether regions, these items’ associations with pleasure, sex, eroticism, and physical love (or lack thereof) remained absent from the conversation. As Rachel Maines notes in The Technology of the Orgasm, men drew no association between women’s possible sexual dissatisfaction and hysteria. Paradoxically, a 1910 study by Havelock Ellis found that half of all American women were not sexually excitable, primarily because Ellis reasoned they lacked the sexual drive of men.

Second century Greek philosopher Galen believed that by coaxing the uterus back into the normal pelvic position, thus inspiring the expulsion of fluids, the vexing hysteria would subside. During the Elizabethan age, doctors believed vigorous horseback riding cured the illness. In the Victorian era, although it took time and precision, manual manipulation by physicians and midwifes induced a paroxysm (i.e., the orgasm) in an effort to alleviate the affliction. With the dawn of the electric age came the electromechanical vibrator to soothe the female syndrome that Freud characterized as “frigidity.” As with all high-functioning industrial machines, it increased efficiency and required little skill to operate. And while the device primarily served the physical (and sensual) needs of women, the instrument was created by men. Even its marketing targeted men and lacked any sexual connotation. A popular 1921 periodical, Heart’s International, advertised the latest home electrical appliance with the following slogan: “A Gift That Will Keep Her Young and Pretty: Star Home Electric Massage.” Sears, Roebuck and Company’s 1918 Electrical Goods catalog encouraged husbands to purchase the appliance to restore their wives’ bright eyes and pink cheeks.

The appearance of vibrators in 1920s pornographic films broke their wholesome, asexual image and solidified the connection between clinical orgasms and sex. The general public no longer associated vibrators with healthcare, but rather with amoral sexual pleasure. Not until the 1970s, with the embracement of free love and the continuance of the women’s movement, did vibrators reemerge in the popular American zeitgeist. In 1977 sex therapist Dr. Joani Blank opened San Francisco’s Good Vibrations, a shop that primarily serves female constituents and houses one of the largest collection of vibrators in the country. With women as designers, marketers, and consumers, vibrators became part of the contemporary urban landscape as tokens of pleasure, health, and free sexual expression. In concurrence with this movement, Dr. Annie Sprinkle (former porn star, current performance artist and professor) writes, “Our sexuality is not only something that can be used for the enhancement of an intimate relationship, for physical pleasure, or procreation; it can also be used for personal transformation, physical and emotional healing, self-realization, spiritual growth, and as a way to learn about life and death.”

With In the Next Room or the vibrator play, Sarah Ruhl examines the Victorian era’s foreplay: the beginning of when the sexual power dynamic between men and women began to stir under the glow of electric light.

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Wet Nursing in the Victorian Age...

• The bottle was an invention of the past 100 years.
• The act of suck sustains breast milk; a wet-nurse could produce milk for five or six years.
• Women often nursed their own sons but sent their daughters to wet-nurses.
• Breastfeeding is a natural form of birth control.
• A popular image of breastfeeding was a plump, healthy white baby attached to the breast of black nurse.
• A majority of wet-nurses were married.
• The wet-nurse’s morality was taken into account; it was undesirable for a wet-nurse to have sex while in the period of nursing.
• Contemporary wet-nursing has taken place, often in the form of relief and aid. For instance, in 2008 during the contamination of baby formula in China, a group of nursing mothers made a makeshift industry of wet-nursing.

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A Note from Sarah

I have always wanted to write a costume drama. With corsets, bustles and gloves. I’ve also always been fascinated by what the nineteenth century novel did not dare show, what it pointedly left out. In the 19th-century novel, no one has sex, no one goes to the bathroom, and certainly, no one uses a vibrator. But I was amazed to find, after reading Rachel Maines’ revelatory book, The Technology of Orgasm, that many women (and a few men) were treated with electric vibratory massage to ameliorate the symptoms of hysteria. What perhaps stunned me even more was that gynecologists and psychiatrists had used the “manual treatment” before this remarkable new invention came out, at the dawn of electricity.

Though the vibrator may have been the play’s starting point, ultimately I’m more interested in the relationships that expand around the device, and the whole notion of compartmentalization, of what goes on “in the next room”—literally, in the room next to the living room where the vibrations take place, but also in the next room of other people’s minds, and bodies. To what extent does marriage imply a “next room”?

Ultimately it is the silence between people, and how they manage to shatter it, that draws me to these characters. And I think as sophisticated as we moderns are, we certainly understand silence between people—and the comedy (or tragedy) that results when two people in adjacent rooms are unable or unwilling to speak.