Nov. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Wonders will never cease. Sarah Ruhl, whose previous work I execrated, has written a smart, charming, iridescently funny-serious jewel, “In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play.”

Presented on Broadway by Lincoln Center Theater, it is about American women at “the dawn of the age of electricity” (circa 1880) achieving sexual emancipation thanks to the vibrator.

The device was prescribed for “hysterical” women -- more rarely men -- and applied discreetly to the private parts of undergarmented patients. The doctor would, with his fancy gizmo, reach under a pristine sheet and administer three to five minutes of electrifying vibration, at the end of which women in paroxysm would achieve something transcendent, for which they had no name let alone full understanding.

We get the story of Dr. and Mrs. Catherine Givings in “perhaps Saratoga Springs,” who have a very Victorian marriage and an infant daughter, Lotty. Catherine, mortified, cannot provide sufficient maternal milk; a wet nurse is required.

One of Dr. Givings’s patients is Mrs. Sabrina Daldry, whose hysteria is quite pronounced, but whose vibrator-induced orgasms are even more pronounced, what with earthquake-like paroxysms and eloquent outcries.

Sizable Contraption

Catherine, her inquisitive ear applied to the door of her husband’s “operating theater,” listens with intensely increasing excitement. The vibrator, by the way, is a sizable as well as irresistible contraption.

Profiting from a rare absence of both the doctor and Annie, his midwife assistant, the two ladies penetrate the inner sanctum and tumble onto the illicit but paradisiac ecstasies the mutually applied vibrator provides. Their prudish, unfulfilling marital relations forgotten, a brave new world intoxicates them.

As Ruhl traces it with wit and insight, and without the slightest prurience, the birth of this new era gives rise to colorful events, astute psychological revelations and endearingly apt dialogue. A parallel plot line centers on the black wet nurse, Elizabeth: Catherine is as jealous of her success with Lotty as her husband is of his male patient Leo Irving, a bohemian, Paris-based painter with whom Catherine is unrequitedly smitten.

Catherine, too, is a hysteric, although her condition masquerades as outbursts of indiscreet outspokenness, childlike rapture over Mrs. Daldry’s improvisations on the Givings piano and exultant walks in the November rain.

Crackling Wit

How neatly Ruhl’s dialogue crackles with sass or flows into lyricism, as when Leo declares, “I have loved enough women to know how to paint. If I had loved fewer, I would have been an illustrator; if I had loved more, I would be a poet.”

The lyricism yields to symbolism in the end, when the snow- covered garden evergreens take over the living room and Doctor and Catherine, impervious to the cold, frolic in the snow as they undress each other, discover the beauty of spousal bodies and yearnings, and drop down into a joint, sexual snow angel.

Here I felt a bit cheated: Plays today abound in male nudity, while women never strip beyond their underwear. I suppose rampant feminism is to blame. Even in this most Edenic scene, only Eve gets a fig leaf.

That said, Les Waters has directed compellingly on Annie Smart’s scrupulous set, abetted by David Zinn’s elaborately sober costumes and Russell H. Champa’s electricity-enamored lighting.

Laura Benanti is the most incandescent Mrs. Givings imaginable. She knows how to make flightiness winsome and gush graceful. Michael Cerveris’s Doctor is flawless in the exacting traversal from cool scientist through jealous spouse to liberated wife-lover. And as the bumpily recovering Mrs. Daldry, Maria Dizzia is enchantingly exuberant. Superb support comes from Wendy Rich Stetson (Annie), Thomas J. Ryan (Daldry), Quincy Tyler Bernstine (Elizabeth) and Chandler Williams (Leo).

At the Lyceum Theatre, 149 W. 45th St. Information: +1-212- 239-6200; hhtp://www.lct.com. Rating: ****

What the Stars Mean:
****       Do Not Miss
***        Excellent
**         Good
*          Poor
(No stars) Worthless

(John Simon is the New York drama critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: John Simon in New York at jis1925@aol.com.

Last Updated: November 21, 2009 00:01 EST