'Her story is intimate and revealing about what it is to smile and what it means when you
can't' Cynthia Nixon The extraordinary story of one woman's ten-year odyssey that brought her
physical creative emotional and spiritual healing. With a play opening on Broadway and
every reason to smile Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high-risk pregnancy when she discovers
the left side of her face is completely paralyzed. She is assured that 90 percent of Bell's
palsy patients experience a full recovery like her own mother. But Sarah is in the unlucky ten
percent. And for a woman wife mother and artist working in theatre the paralysis and the
disconnect between the interior and exterior brings significant and specific challenges. So she
begins an intense decade-long search for a cure while simultaneously grappling with the reality
of her new face - one that while recognisably her own is incapable of accurately
communicating feelings or intentions. Smile is Ruhl's piercing witty lucid chronicle of her
journey. She explores the struggle of a body yearning to match its inner landscape the pain of
postpartum depression the story of a marriage being a playwright and working mother to three
small children and the desire for a resilient spiritual life in the face of illness. Brimming
with insight humility warmth and humour Smile is a triumph: an intimate examination of loss
and reconciliation and above all else the importance of perseverance and hope in the face of
adversity.
