An Acclaimed Playwright on Masks and the Return to the Stage
The New York Times
Sarah Ruhl, after a long struggle living with Bell’s palsy, knows the feeling of being masked among the unmasked.
In the theater, we smile. We smile because the show must go on. We smile, to quote Nat King Cole, even when our hearts are breaking. Unless we are performers in a tragedy, we put on some glitter and we sail out into the night, toward the theater district. Even writers, the least performative of the lot, smile. I didn’t want to be an opaque, judging playwright at auditions; I wanted to mirror the actors’ joy, or sadness, and partake of the strange communion between performers and their first audience. I never expected that one day, during a pandemic, we would all come to the theater masked.
About a decade ago, I was nominated for a Tony Award for my play “In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play.” I was thrilled with the news, but you wouldn’t have known it from looking at my face. A month earlier, after giving birth to twins, I’d been diagnosed with Bell’s palsy, a paralysis of the seventh cranial nerve. I quite literally could not smile. When I went to a photo shoot to celebrate the Tony nominees, a phalanx of photographers shouted at me, “Smile!” When I tried and failed, one photographer looked up from his camera at me and said, “What’s wrong with you? Can’t you smile for your Tony Award?”
“No,” I said, “my face is paralyzed.” Chagrined, he quietly took my photo and the next dazzler in line on the red carpet stepped forward.
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