Is Sarah Ruhl the world's first quantum playwright?

I couldn't help but think in those terms as I read John Lahr's exquisite profile of her in the current (March 17, 2008) New Yorker.

Why?

Consider the following excerpts from Lahr's piece:
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Here the essential nature of the underworld — its sense of absence — is made visceral by the volumes of meticulously defined empty space that the string defines.

As a storyteller, Ruhl marches to Ovid's drum rather than Aristotle's. "Aristotle has held sway for many centuries, but I feel our culture is hungry for Ovid's way of telling stories," she said, describing Ovid's narrative strategy as "one thing transforming into another." She went on, "His is not the neat Aristotelian arc but, instead, small transformations that are delightful and tragic."

"I like plays that have revelations in the moment, where emotions transform almost inexplicably," Ruhl said.

"I'm interested in these kinds of state changes. 'I was happy, now I'm sad.'" She continued, "If you distill people's subjectivity and how they view the world emotionally, you don't get realism."

In Ruhl's plays, turbulent feeling can erupt at any moment, for no apparent reason.

She likes her actors to... be "touched with a little brush of the irrational."
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"... turbulent feeling can erupt at any moment, for no apparent reason."

Sounds a bit like a universe being born, what?

"Discoveries in astronomy and physics have shown beyond a reasonable doubt that our universe did in fact have a beginning. Prior to that moment there was nothing; during and after that moment there was something: our universe."

You could look it up.

Transformations and state changes — why am I reminded of quantum decoherence and wave function collapse into one thing or another?

Mirabile dictu: Luckily for you, this is one of the New Yorker's unblocked articles and so you too can read it, right here.

Her new play, "Dead Man's Cell Phone,"

currently at Playwrights Horizons Theater in New York, has garnered rave reviews.