Smile
'Her story is intimate and revealing about what it is to smile and what it means when you can't' Cynthia Nixon
The extraordinary story of one woman's ten-year odyssey that brought her physical, creative, emotional, and spiritual healing.
With a play opening on Broadway, and every reason to smile, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high-risk pregnancy when she discovers the left side of her face is completely paralyzed. She is assured that 90 percent of Bell's palsy patients experience a full recovery, like her own mother. But Sarah is in the unlucky ten percent. And for a woman, wife, mother, and artist working in theatre, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior brings significant and specific challenges. So she begins an intense decade-long search for a cure while simultaneously grappling with the reality of her new face - one that, while recognisably her own, is incapable of accurately communicating feelings or intentions.
Smile is Ruhl's piercing, witty, lucid chronicle of her journey. She explores the struggle of a body yearning to match its inner landscape, the pain of postpartum depression, the story of a marriage, being a playwright and working mother to three small children, and the desire for a resilient spiritual life in the face of illness.
Brimming with insight, humility, warmth and humour, Smile is a triumph: an intimate examination of loss and reconciliation, and above all else, the importance of perseverance and hope in the face of adversity.
Sarah Ruhl is a playwright and writer of other things. Her fifteen plays include In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play), The Clean House, and Eurydice.
She has received many awards and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Tony Award nominee, and the recipient of the MacArthur 'genius' Fellowship. Her plays have been produced on- and off-Broadway, internationally, and have been translated into many languages.
Her books include 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write, Letters from Max, with Max Ritvo, and 44 Poems for You.
She teaches at the Yale School of Drama, and she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Tony Charuvastra, who is a child psychiatrist, and her three children.
SarahRuhlPlaywright.com