Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Roomor the vibrator play (***½ out of four), which opened Thursday at the Lyceum Theatre, is set in the 1880s outside New York City, in the home of an impeccably gracious physician who has grown fond of the aforementioned gadget – as a therapeutic device. He uses it on hysterics, as emotionally disturbed women were known in that era, to produce healing, um, "paroxysms."

"The congestion is your womb is causing your hysterical symptoms," explains Dr. Givings, played with gentle humor and great sweetness by Michael Cerveris, to one patient. "If we can release some of that congestion ..." Well, you get the idea. Sounds like some geeky medical student's pitch to a porn producer, right?

But here's the thing: Some doctors actually did use vibrators in this fashion, even after the advent of modern psychology. It seems the dawn of the electrical age predated the realization of female desire and its complexity, at least in our puritanical culture.

This is one premise of Ruhl's ambitious and surprisingly moving play, which has little in common with Ensler's feel-good feminist tripe. By turns deftly farcical and deeply poignant, In the Next Room raises questions that transcend gender and, for that matter, time.

The last Ruhl play staged in New York, Dead Man's Cell Phone, addressed the potential for alienation in our digital era. Here, too, she explores the limits of technology and scientific progress. Dr. Givings bubbles with excitement over Thomas Edison's ingenuity, but he can't understand why his wife, fetchingly played by Laura Benanti, is so intrigued by the gadget that elicits strange noises from his patients.

Thanks to Annie Smart's split set, we can watch the doctor tend to those women – and a man, in one case – while Mrs. Givings chats with guests in the living room or, lacking company, leans in toward the door.

The laughs that result (and there are many) are offset by the difficulties endured by Ruhl's female characters. In addition to Mrs. Givings' anguish over her inability to breast-feed her infant daughter – a source of despair that her husband, for all his sensitivity, can't understand – there is the more quiet suffering of her wet nurse, a black housekeeper who lost her own son, and the doctor's assistant, Annie, whose graceful stoicism belies a lonely soul.

The actresses all do justice to this vivid, bittersweet humanity that Ruhl affords them, as do their male castmates. By showing how women and men struggle with both pleasure and pain, In the Next Room offers something a lot more satisfying than cheap thrills or cheesy self-empowerment.

Enlarge By Joan Marcus Quincy Tyler Bernstine, left, plays a wet nurse and Laura Benanti plays the wife of physician in In the Next Room, on view at the Lyceum Theatre in New York.