Monika Essen, props designer for Sarah Ruhl’s “In the Next Room, or the vibrator play,” now being staged at Performance Network, has reportedly tracked down a 150-year-old doctor’s examining table for the show, as well as an antique version of the device named in the play’s title.

“She’s got this warehouse of stuff,” said “Next Room” director Suzi Regan. “It’s like ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ in there.”

In “Next Room,” Dr. Givings is the doctor who employs both items for the sake of his female, Victorian era patients who suffer from “Hysteria.” His wife, Catherine, while frustrated by her inability to nurse her baby, grows increasingly curious about the ecstatic cries coming from her husband’s examination room and decides to investigate. (The play is for mature audiences.)

“There’s so much in it,” said Regan, who was first introduced to the play when PN artistic director David Wolber approached her about directing it. “It’s a play about women finding their own voice, and oddly, about men finding (their) true voice as well.”

Inspired by the book “The Technology of Orgasm,” by Rachel P. Maines, "Next Room" is set in the 1880s—a time when people were just getting used to having electricity in their homes—but it made its Broadway debut in late 2009, yielding a Pulitzer Prize nomination and 3 Tony Award nominations (including best play) in 2010.

“There’s a lot of emotional stuff,” said Regan. “Control issues, power issues, social order issues, mother issues—not being able to feed a child, which is such a basic instinct—there are so many emotional pulls that would create a kind of gravity. But the thing about Sarah Ruhl is, she’s anti-gravity. You’ve got to remain light in spite of the gravity going on around you, which is almost anti-intuitive to actors and directors, who want to bite into richness of it all: the façade of hope and joy and trying to make it work, survival, and the sense of, ‘I can’t grieve the child I lost, because I’ve got 2 other children that I’ve got to take are of.’ That’s what the play is really about, is how we’ve got to carry on.”

Regan has experienced this herself, on a smaller scale, since she had to re-cast 3 roles between the time of auditions and the first rehearsal. Plus, she’s facing a new challenge, in that she’s never overseen a period piece that trades in corsets and petticoats.

But the explosion of productions of “Next Room” across the country, as well as the release of a similarly themed film called “Hysteria,” seems to indicate that people are ready to examine and talk about this period of history.

“Because it’s about feeling empowered, and taking responsibility and control - I don’t think that’s ever going to go out of style,” said Regan. “ … It is easily translatable to how we all feel powerless sometimes. How we erect certain rules so we’ll feel safe, but then we fall asleep and allow things to take over, and we wake up and wonder how got here. It’s an exciting and dangerous feeling to take back our own power.”

Jenn McKee is the entertainment digital journalist for AnnArbor.com. Reach her at jennmckee@annarbor.com or 734-623-2546, and follow her on Twitter @jennmckee.