Customer Reviews

Clean House, The

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Sarah Ruhl is emerging as an important voice in contemporary theater, and anyone who has read one of her scripts or seen a production of her work can understand why. Her voice is quirky and refreshing, and yet it doesn't become a gimmick or lose itself by being unrelatable. Cleanliness, the subject of this work, weaves its way through the lives of the characters as they struggle with family and relationships, grief, and the meaning of true love.

The two main characters, Lane and Virginia, are sisters with very different ideas about cleaning. The play opens with Lane talking about her Brazillian housekeeper, Matilde, who has given up trying to clean. Lane is infuriated; a successful doctor, she makes it clear that she did not go to medical school and work all of the hours that she has worked just to clean her own house. For her, cleaning is menial work, beneath her. Virginia on the other hand can't believe that anyone would give up cleaning their own house. How do you know progress, she asks the audience, if you don't know how quickly dust accumulates under your bed. For Virginia, cleaning is a refuge from the "dirtiness" of everyday living, of a world that isn't perfect and certainly isn't fair.

There are other characters and complex interactions, but the heart of this show is Lane's depressed housekeeper, Matilde. Determined to become a comedian and write the perfect joke, she is haunted by memories of her parents: her mother "died laughing" (because if you've heard the perfect joke, why would you continue to live?) and her father killed himself directly after. Her attempts to construct witty and ribald jokes, usually in her native tongue, are humarous; their juxtaposition with her memories of her parents and their magical love are heart-breaking. Matilde is one of the great tragic characters of contemporary theater.

Fans of magical realism will enjoy the playful use of space: actions on a balcony (imagined as another apratment) affect the characters below and disembodied words appear on the walls (translations of jokes, explanatory words, etc). Though not as spectacular as the staging of Ruhl's other great work EURYDICE (it's hard to compete with an elevator car filled with rain), the interplay between spaces helps reinforce the actions and consequences of characters and their decisions.

I would heartily recommend anything written by Ruhl, but this one is a special treat. Though not as emotionally-impactful as EURYDICE, it is a tender and often surprising meditation on love, and all of the clean and dirty emotions that it entails.