A Clean House With Dirty Jokes
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Sarah Ruhl, whose “The Clean House” has finally reached New York after several major regional productions, has been hailed as the standard bearer of a glorious new strain of populist antinaturalism — Christopher Durang, Mary Zimmerman, John Guare, and Gabriel Garcià Márquez all rolled into one young, photogenic package.
This is a lot with which to saddle any writer, let alone a 32-year-old, and the fact that “The Clean House” is merely very good will likely strike some as a disappointment. But Ms. Ruhl is the real deal, an arched-eyebrow optimist with the rare ability to embrace eccentricity without succumbing to whimsy. She scours with one hand while salving with the other.
And while not every gamble pays off in this loopy, magical/tragical domestic comedy, Ms. Ruhl and director Bill Rauch — who directed the play’s 2004 world premiere at Yale Rep — have constructed a durable, raucous exploration of why and how we love and laugh, bolstered by the knowledge that these essential questions remain unanswerable.
The house in question belongs to Lane (Blair Brown), an accomplished doctor who has hired a young Brazilian woman named Mathilde (Vanessa Aspillaga) as her cleaning lady. But Mathilde prefers writing jokes to tidying up; her theories on cleaning can be summed up as “If the floor is dirty, look at the ceiling.” Enter Lane’s fragile sister, Virginia (Jill Clayburgh), who doesn’t mind cleaning — who loves it, in fact, and couldn’t visit Europe without fighting the urge to sweep up the ruins.
So while Mathilde hunches over her index cards in search of the perfect joke, Virginia spends her days illicitly folding Lane’s sheets and rearranging her high-style knickknacks. (Christopher Acebo has designed the austerely tasteful living-room set, which ultimately shares stage space with an inviting seaside balcony, a surgery theatre, and the Alaskan tundra.) After establishing the mutually enabling Lane-Virginia dynamic along with Virginia’s rather sweet friendship with Mathilde, Ms. Ruhl shifts her attention to Lane’s husband, Charles (John Dossett), a surgeon who has fallen in love with one of his mastectomy patients, Ana (Concetta Tomei).
Without giving too much away, all five characters embark on a roundelay of love and dependency, complete with a Portuguese lullaby, a cathartic mad scene set to Ponchielli’s “Suicidio!” aria, several charming epigraphs, and two remarkable sequences that address breast cancer with unabashed sensuality. Even as the set fills with the literal and metaphorical clutter of these five intertwined lives, Ms. Ruhl and Mr. Rauch aim for an emotional simplicity that almost never sells their characters short. Or, as Mathilde describes her parents’ marriage, “They laugh until laughing makes them kiss. They kiss until kissing makes them laugh.”
From the play’s very first scene, a dirty joke told in unhurried (and untranslated) Portuguese, it is clear Ms. Ruhl luxuriates in her characters’ discursive, tart, unpredictable language. (“People imagine that people who are in love are happy. … That is why, in your country, people kill themselves on Valentine’s Day.”) She weaves short but insightful monologues through her oddball narrative, and the five actors clearly revel in the surprising new filigrees she adds to seemingly established characters.
Mr. Rauch’s crafty, fluid direction is at its most relaxed during the (relatively) straightforward scenes involving the three lead women, led by Ms. Clayburgh’s morbid, skittish, wonderfully touching Virginia. She and the compelling Ms. Brown create a plausibly prickly relationship; as the melodramatic plot developments pile up, the two sisters are forced to confront what they need from each other, and, more important, whether they’ll be able to ask for it.
Her questionable Brazilian accent notwithstanding, Ms. Aspillaga is enchanting as a young woman whose parents have instilled in her an appreciation of laughter, love, and labor. (Mathilde’s father spent a year devising an anniversary joke that ultimately resulted in the death of both him and his wife.) Whether Mathilde’s laughing her bawdy, slightly unnerving cackle, basking in the absurdity around her, or gradually finding her own voice as the mood thickens, Ms. Aspillaga makes even her most ridiculous tasks seem entirely plausible.
Mr. Rauch almost but not quite papers over some of Ms. Ruhl’s less graceful passages. That mad scene has an obvious, unearned feel to it, and Ms. Ruhl begins Act II with an intentionally ludicrous courtship that undermines the play’s otherwise clear-eyed take on the rationalizations that so often accompany love. And despite Mr. Dossett’s earnest attentions, Charles is a far less nuanced character than the four women surrounding him. But if a skipped metaphoric beat here or a skimmed emotional surface there is the price that comes with watching an innovative writer put down roots, so be it.
Sarah Ruhl is not the second coming, in other words, at least not yet. But she is a daring playwright with sharp instincts, a great sense of humor, and an admirable willingness to temper her affirmations with a dollop of pain. Anyone who believes New York could use a few more writers like that is encouraged to pay a visit to Ms. Ruhl’s messy but sparkling creation.
Until December 17 (150 W. 65th St., 212-239-6200).