In ‘Lessons From My Teachers,' playwright Sarah Ruhl finds wisdom in art, motherhood, even grief

Los Angeles Times

14-05-2025

One of the mistakes of teaching, I've learned through my years as a part-time professor, is to prepare so much that the students have no choice but to become passive recipients of knowledge that has been predigested for them.
The problem is akin to that of an actor who works so assiduously on his own that by the time rehearsals arrive he only wants to perfect what he's worked out on his own. Scene partners be damned.
In 'Lessons From My Teachers,' playwright Sarah Ruhl ('The Clean House, 'Eurydice') derives lessons from her years of being, in the very best sense of the phrase, a perpetual student. Even as she has become a master playwriting teacher at Yale, she finds opportunities to learn from those she's paid to instruct.
One of the recurring themes of the book is that education, in its highest form, is a dynamic process. Showing up, paying courteous attention and being as willing to receive as to share information are fundamental to the collaborative nature of learning.
Even in the classroom, with its necessary hierarchies and rigorously observed boundaries, teaching isn't a one-way street. Authority is enriched, not undermined, by intellectual challenge. The most thrilling moments in my years of teaching drama have come when in the dialectical heat of class discussion, a new way of understanding a scene or a character's psychology emerges from conflicting perspectives.
The goal of good teaching, like that of any art, shouldn't be packaged wisdom but the excitement of thought. Being a playwright, Ruhl is perhaps more attuned to how we get smarter when we think collectively.
German playwright and novelist Gerhart Hauptmann insisted that 'dramatic dialogue must only present thoughts in the process of being thought.' Eric Bentley, inspired by this anti-didactic precept, commented that what sets Ibsen apart as a playwright is that, rather than offering summaries of existing knowledge, he allows us to be present at the dawning of new consciousness in his characters.
We are privy, for example, to the pressurized inner movement that leads Nora to realize at the end of 'A Doll's House' that she must leave her marriage to become her own person. The play ushered in a revolution in modern drama not simply because Nora slammed the door on her husband. What was so radical is that by the end of the play audiences understood why this then-unthinkable act was so necessary.
Just as the stage is most alive when actors, authentically responding to one another in the moment, allow unexpected emotions to break through the way they do in life, we are most fully activated when responding directly to the world and not to our assumptions about what we'll find there. For Ruhl, the greatest gift a teacher can give is being present.
In a homage to her playwriting mentor, Paula Vogel, Ruhl writes, 'But what strikes me most when I remember Paula's teaching is her presence as much as the content of her teachings. In this country, we are obsessed with content and curriculum, all the while devaluing presence and proximity, which are two teaching values hard to describe or quantify (or, indeed, teach).
As to whether playwriting is teachable, she asks in response: 'Is devotion teachable? Is listening teachable? Is a love of art and a willingness to give your life over to art teachable? I believe that these things are teachable mostly by example, and in great silences.'
Aristotle understood that human beings are an imitative animal. We learn through identification and imitation. One of my mentors, theater critic Gordon Rogoff, who taught generations of artists and critics at the Yale School of Drama, valued teaching as an exchange of sensibilities. By sharing what mattered to him most in the theater, the values and experiences that shaped him as a writer and teacher, he had faith that our own artistic foundations would become more secure.
Instructional manuals and study guides aren't what's needed most. The formative longing is for role models. Everyone could use a more extensive palette of human possibility than the one supplied by the crapshoot of an immediate family. Ruhl recalls Vogel bringing a small group of her students to her Cape Cod home, with its breathtaking ocean view, and asking them to say to themselves, 'This is what playwriting can buy.'
Life-changing teachers, like Vogel, expand the frontiers of the dreaming imagination. They can also broaden the ambition of your intellectual scope. From David Hirsch, another professor who shaped her education at Brown University, Ruhl learned not to be afraid of tackling vast questions in her work.
'Professor Hirsch taught me that if you ask a midsize question you will get a midsize answer,' Ruhl writes. 'And if you ask a question that is so big it can't really be answered, you can write and read into the great mystery of things, without being easily satisfied.'
When I think of the teachers who shaped my intellectual life, I remember their flamboyant theatricality, uninhibited moral fervor and extravagant articulacy. Above all, I remember their devotion to their subjects, the quasi-religious commitment to whatever their scholarly or creative discipline happened to be. This passion, more than any syllabus, is what engendered my own dedication.
These professors loomed as large as superheroes, yet the best weren't afraid to reveal that they were also human. The older I get, the more comfortable I become parting the curtain on my life to remind students that I once sat where they are sitting now, that I know their struggles and have likely made many of the same mistakes. The student-teacher bond is remembered long after the lecture has faded from memory.
In Mexico with playwright and legendary playwriting teacher María Irene Fornés, Ruhl entered a crowded taxi that didn't seem to have room for her. But Fornés, alert to the sensitivities of her writing students, reassured her, 'Come on, sit on my lap, I'll be your seat belt.' This playful exchange made a deep impression on Ruhl, perhaps because it illuminated something fundamental about Fornés' unconventional theater aesthetic, which rejected the notion that conflict was the soul of drama in favor of a vision embracing the waywardness and unpredictability of human relations.
Fornés believed that a work of art isn't an equation to be solved but an invitation for wonder, which Aristotle considered the beginning of philosophy. Knowledge can excite wonder but so too can a joking voice, a sympathetic gesture and an unforeseen act of kindness. Ruhl tracks the way life continually presents to us opportunities to become more impassioned scholars of the human comedy.
From a dying student name Max Ritvo, with whom Ruhl co-authored 'Letters From Max: A Book of Friendship' that was published after his death and later adapted for the stage, she learned 'not to wait for the slow reveal, to tell people you love them now and often' and that 'students sometimes make the best teachers.' From a crotchety neighbor who yelled at her daughters, she learned that responding with a homemade peach pie can establish a more harmonious relationship with a person undergoing his own private travails.
Loss is a perennial teacher. In Edward Albee's 'The Zoo Story,' Jerry, at the end of a torrential monologue about a vicious dog, has an epiphany that kindness and cruelty combine to form 'a teaching emotion' and 'what is gained is loss.' Which is perhaps another way of saying what is gained is consciousness.
Ruhl is a diligent student, learning not in just elite classrooms or before artistic masterworks but from the tyrannous demands of motherhood, the vicissitudes of marriage, the frustrations of modern medicine and the unhurried nature of grief. The sight of a sad-looking neighbor walking his ailing dog every morning teaches her that imagining someone's life isn't the same thing as getting to know the person.
The moral is to say hello to the familiar stranger, to write that note of gratitude and to appreciate that teaching and learning are a lot closer to love than we've been led to believe.
Ruhl's therapist, who is also a practicing Buddhist, relates a joke that he heard at a conference. 'What do Buddhism and psychoanalysis have in common?' The funny answer, that neither of them works, prompts Ruhl to ask, 'So, if nothing really works in the end, what is the goal?'
'Lightness,' he said. 'Lightness.'