A writer does not need to smile – on the page, words can do the smiling. This is something you are aware of throughout American playwright Sarah Ruhl’s extraordinary tale of being struck with Bell’s palsy a day after giving birth to twins. The first sign something is awry is when a lactation consultant casually observes that one of her eyes looks droopy. And when she gets up to look at herself in the bathroom mirror, she finds that the left side of her face has “fallen down. Eyebrow, fallen; eyelid, fallen; lip, fallen, frozen, immovable.” The smile she has, all her life, taken for granted is gone. She explains that, before seeing her reflection in the mirror, she was one person. Now she is another. But she is not self-pitying. Her prose is smart, quipping, pacy. It has the quicksilver mobility her face lacks.
