by Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Alisa Palmer
A Canadian Stage Company Production
at the Bluma Appel
February 14-March 8, 2008

    Sarah Ruhl’s compassionate comedy, The Clean House, turns the rejection and celebration of house cleaning into an existential metaphor, and does it with such a clever mixture of domestic sitcom, surreal fantasy, ironic magic realism, and satiric monologue that the metaphor expands into something much larger than first expected. An audience at this play gets comedy and wisdom, metaphor and reality in a decidedly engaging mode that is as generous as it is risky. The play begins with an untranslated but seemingly raunchy Portuguese joke by a maid and virtually ends with the maid’s whispered joke to a cancer-ridden woman that cannot be heard by the audience, though it plainly allows the victim to die laughing. In between are other jokes, some uproarious, others sly and wry, and some set to music. There are numerous exotic touches in Ruhl’s world, where life has a way of working itself out beyond the conflicts of class, work, family, disease, and love. The exuberant theatricality allows the whimsical images to bloom with rich feeling and moral wisdom.

  The Clean House is set in what its young playwright terms “a metaphysical Connecticut,” which is to say—as Judith Bowden’s pristine but sterile white and beige set shows—that the architectural and domestic tidiness of a house can be symptomatic of a bleached, starched life. The house belongs to a yuppie couple, highly successful doctors, whose marriage is perilously empty. They had met as partners in anatomy class, where they had fallen in love “over a dead body.” Now their marriage is moribund. Lane is busy, childless, and uptight as she tries to have a clean, uncluttered house. Her husband, Charles, is preoccupied by his surgical practice, and it is in the course of a mastectomy that he falls in love with an older Argentine woman, Ana, a woman whose name “goes backwards and forwards” and whose spontaneity and zest for life are obviously things his own wife lacks.

   “I’m sorry, but I did not go to medical school to clean my own house,” declares Lane with righteous apology. So, she hires a young Brazilian maid, Matilde, to clean her house, but Matilde, who seems to be allergic to Windex and feather dusters, hates cleaning and yearns to be a professional stand-up comic. Her mother had literally died laughing at one of her father’s jokes, and Matilde wants to create a perfect joke in Portuguese that, though untranslatable, will have perfect impact. Before this point is reached, of course, there are conflicts aplenty. Lane does not get along well with her sister, Virginia, who is neurotically compulsive about house cleaning. “If you do not clean, how do you know if you’ve made any progress in life?” she asks rhetorically, our lady of the feather duster, iron, vacuum, and toilet bowl. Virginia suggests a clever solution: she will secretly clean the house, while Matilde can work on her joke. The solution seems neat enough, but life intervenes to accentuate the disconnectedness between characters and the pain of it all. Charles and Ana fall in love operatically. The cancer surgery scene becomes an arioso and then a duet of romance. Later, when Ana’s cancer returns aggressively, Charles journeys to snow-bound Alaska in quest of a rare cancer-curing yew tree. Ana dies after Matilde whispers a joke into her ear. Obviously, this is not quite Noel Coward or Neil Simon territory. It is more akin to the offbeat comedy of Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato, with wild flights of imaginative surrealism (a little reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s) and wry, even black comedy.

   Of course, the play has a difficult texture with tricky rhythms, and it requires a cast that is well attuned to shifts of register, tone, and tempo. It also requires a director who can negotiate these shifts with seemingly effortless ease without sacrificing the emotional richness or metaphysical wisdom. Fortunately, the present production has a very proficient cast and director. At the top of the cast are Fiona Reid and Seana McKenna as the somewhat estranged sisters. Ms. McKenna can always be counted on for unfussy truth about trenchant intimacies, but she is just as good in situation comedy. She never allows any clichés of emotion or situation to rule her acting. Her Lane is a cool, prim, pristine woman whose façade cracks just enough to allow rare glimpses of her distress and pain. “I don’t want an interesting person to clean my house,” she protests. “I just want my house cleaned.” Her tone is at once harried and edged with class-conflict. “My husband is like a well-placed couch,” she declares, allowing just a beat for us to see in the line a complex truth, just as she projects a complex psychological reason for not wanting her sister to clean her house. When the fact of her husband’s infidelity becomes as palpable as dirt, her tears brim with heartache. As depressed Virginia, Ms. Reid is a middle-aged underachiever in some ways but a distinct overachiever at cleaning. “If I had to die any time during the day, nobody would have to clean my kitchen,” she boasts with justifiable pride. Her life has gone downhill since she was 22, and she doesn’t like to laugh aloud because she dislikes her own laugh that sounds like a wheeze. However, she makes us laugh out loud—not simply because of her ironic comments but because of her spontaneous, simplistic yet disarming wisdom. Ms. Reid is funny, yes, but she is also touching as she declares, “I wanted something big. I didn’t know how to ask for it.” When she eventually erupts into comic anger, it produces a carnival of choleric distemper in its sweep of disarray and cascade of dust and debris. Ms. Reid has the rare and enviable knack of making most comic roles fit her like a glove, and in this case, the glove glistens with perfect shape and texture.

   As Matilde, the most reluctant cleaner, Nicola Correia-Damude cannot be faulted for the fact that the character’s Brazilian ethnicity is arbitrarily motivated. She exudes sensual warmth and has a deadpan comic delivery. She also negotiates the character’s flights into fantasy with easy credibility. Joseph Ziegler has only a sketch of a role as Charles, and his singing voice is weak, but he is, as ever, an actor who can effectively mix solemnity and whimsy. Impersonating Ana, his improbable lovebird, Mary Ann McDonald makes a welcome return to the Toronto stage, though her director does not encourage her to enlarge the exotic and charismatic romanticism of the role. Her Ana is a graceful, lyrical older woman who experiences love and death in quick succession rather more than she is a spicy temptress. Indeed, it is with this pair that Alisa Palmer’s direction falters. Ms. Palmer’s production does have its fair share of wonderfully mad theatricality—enhanced by colour washes from lighting designer Kevin Lamotte and the sound design of John Gzowski—but it doesn’t push the envelope the way earlier productions of this play have done. Nevertheless, it allows an audience to connect with characters in their various degrees of distress, pain, and metaphysical disorder, and it brings home with admirable tenderness the humane wisdom of a play that is strangely comforting for all its unusual anxieties and agonies.

Cover photo of Fiona Reid by Shin Sugino

Production Photos: Cylla von Tiedemann

pic 1: Nicola Correia-Damude as Matilde

pic 2 (L-R): Joseph Ziegler, Mary Ann McDonald, Seana McKenna, Fiona Reid


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