Customer Reviews

The Clean House and Other Plays

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Before Sarah Ruhl was a playwright, she was a poet. This is not a great surprise. I mean, just look at the format, imagery and dialogue found in The Clean House and Other Plays. This is drama, yeah, but it is drama that even contains poetic line-breaks!:

I feel I can deposit my pain
right there--like a coin, into a hole.
(from Melancholy Play, page 236)

In a March 2008 New Yorker interview, Ruhl calls herself "a fabulist." She is someone whose characters build rooms of string and travel in raining elevators (Euridyce). In another story, Ruhl echoes Monty Python's idea of jokes that can kill--only hers are used as mercy killings (The Clean House). Ruhl's lesbian cowboy seems natural riding imaginary horses in Pittsburgh (Late: A Cowboy Song); and watch where you step, because the depressed are turning into almonds at almost every turn! (Melancholy Play)

The experience of reading plays is a different one from that of reading other fiction or non-fiction works. Plays stretch the mind to consider subjects such as lighting, sound, and props. As a list given here, such material might be perceived as mundane and dull. In Sarah Ruhl's hands, they become magic. A lack of narrative and the addition of technical details doesn't mean that the nuances of emotion are left behind as something only the actors can manage. Tears, real tears, are no doubt regularly shed as Ruhl's readers feel the beautiful emotional-roller coaster moments on these pages: the strong father-daughter bond and ridiculousness of new romance in Euridyce; the love for parents and heartbreaking compassion of The Clean House; the true and false loves of Late: A Cowboy Song; and the sweet disorder of Melancholy Play.

Ruhl's characters are full of wonderfully playful, bizarre contradictions: For example, the psychiatrist in Melancholy Play, LORENZO THE UNFEELING, takes every opportunity to enlighten the people he comes in contact with to the sad, tragic details of his childhood and to the fact that he not only feels, but has gone completely overboard, falling in love with his melancholy patient, Tilly. A Brazilian housekeeper detests housekeeping, and longs to be a comedian. A woman is irresistible to all men when she is miserable, but the moment she finds happiness, the world shifts and almost no one can stand her any longer.

Perhaps most fun of all reading a Sarah Ruhl play are the stage notes, which one would never have the opportunity to enjoy if sitting in the audience and watching the thing. In Melancholy Play, for example, Ruhl has notes about the casting.

Frances and Frank, we learn later in this play, are twins. However, in the world of this play, there is no need for twins to resemble each other. If your Frances and Frank look nothing alike, simply change this line on page 315: "TILLY: My God! You look exactly like her!" to "TILLY: My God! You look nothing like her!" or even: "TILLY: My God! You look a little bit like her!"

The Clean House and Other Plays is a collection of silly, enchanting and weird stories that, despite their oddness and impossibilities, still hold the ring of truth. Ruhl writes in a way that is so human it is impossible not to be moved. Having never seen a Sarah Ruhl play produced, this writer can tell you that it's not the least bit necessary to enjoy this book. It stands on its own as a great piece of literature.

This review first appeared on Night Times.

Reading the work of Sarah Ruhl is, as reviewers before me have endeavored to point out, much like falling in love. It is, at times, highly surreal and gripping in a way that escapes logical reason. Her plays retain the air of the modern, but there is a very old, familiar quality lurking just at the peripheral edges of written consciousness.
Her plays are penned in the manner of transcribed dreams; filled with shifting imagery and and skewed perspectives that hit right at the heart, yet still contain an air of the delightfully absurd.

Take, for instance, her updated tale of love, "Eurydice".

"Eurydice" is a refreshed version of the ancient greek Orpheus myth, telling the story of a dreamy, absorbed musician the literary-minded wife as they span the breadth between the worlds. We are clearly reading the tale of two adults, yet they are characterized with an almost childishly overzealous approach to love, forgetfulness, life and death. Emotions range from startlingly neutral to forcefully passionate in an instant, keeping the audience swept up in her tempestuous story-telling from start to finish while hardly taking a breath.

Sarah Ruhl manages to be in the vanguard without being preachy. She manages modern surrealism without losing touch with her audience, keeping everything carefully bound together with a tender red-thread of a true artist. Throughout every literary journey, she takes you gleefully by the hand and drags you down her own personal rabbit hole (for truly, her work does have a certain delightfully obscure Lewis Carroll feel to it). This particular book is a marvelous anthology of her plays (although I DO wish it could have included Dead Man's Cell Phone).

The plays in this volume are outstanding, surprising, human, and yet totally magical and at times silly without being trite. The author really has an original voice, and seems to be able to breathe life into the everyday sources of our greatest emotions and fears and hopes. I saw one of her plays at Yale - The Clean House - and was blown away. Apparently her play Eurydice is coming, and I saw reviews for her latest play, Passion Play a Trilogy, which sounded totally interesting. She is my favorite author of plays.

Sarah Ruhl is arguably the most talented, inventive, and poignant female playwright of our generation. Her beautifully crafted plays glow with humor and a deep understanding of the human mind; Sarah Ruhl is a thought-provoking genius.

I read a profile of Sara Ruhl in THE NEW YORKER and was intrigued by the lack of psychologizing in her plays. So I bought a book of her plays. There's some good stuff in there, and some very cliched aspects as well. Ruhl seems to suffer from a bit of shame deriving from her white midwestern roots.

The language, the humor, the emotional connection to the characters...Sarah Ruhl is a brilliant playwright. This collection is a wonderful introduction to her work.

This is a collection of beautiful plays. Sarah Ruhl is quickly becoming one of my favorite playwrights, and I have not even seen a production yet.

You'll laugh out loud. I have to be careful to read this in public 'cause it makes me chuckle audibly. Besides that, the humor is very welcome. Theater can either be pure camp or too morbid these days. And I feel like Sara explores dark subjects with appropriate doses of funny. Thumbs up.

Sarah Ruhl is writing the very best contemporary drama. She's on fire in these plays.

This is a collection of beautiful, beautiful words. Inside these words lives possibilty. These are plays that are at once heartbreaking, and all the while lovely. They present worlds that seem familiar, perfect summer days, the kind open to wonder and reflection. I fell in love with each of these play worlds. If you are invested in the future of the American theater, you must read these plays.