>>PREVIEW
THE CLEAN HOUSE
Alberta Theatre Projects
Runs until April 15
Martha Cohen Theatre (Epcor Centre)
It has been such a hard month. My cleaning lady – from Brazil – decided that she was depressed one day and stopped cleaning my house. I was like: clean my house! And she wouldn’t! We took her to the hospital and I had her medicated and she Still Wouldn’t Clean. And – in the meantime – I’ve been cleaning my house! I’m sorry, but I did not go to medical school to clean my own house.
– Lane, Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House
Without the context of the play itself, it’s extremely difficult to grasp the idea of a comedy like The Clean House, a Pulitzer-nominated work whose snappy comic rhythm plays with an ease that belies its simple but nuanced message. Following the lives of a Brazilian cleaning woman named Matilde (Carmen Aguirre), who may be the funniest woman alive; her type-A employer, Lane (Marie Stillin); and her philandering husband, Charles (Brian Dooley); Lane’s compulsively cleaning sister, Virginia (Valerie Ann Pearson); and Charles’s lover, Ana (Kyra Harper) – Sarah Ruhl’s play has already exploded across the scene, enjoying a host of performances across North America scarcely a year after its premiere.
Now, as Alberta Theatre Projects brings The Clean House to the stage as their second-last production of the season, artistic director Bob White looks forward to presenting its simple but artful honesty.
"It’s not pretentious and it’s not sentimental, and that’s the amazing thing, especially for an American play, if I can generalize hugely," says White, who is directing. "Americans just tend to go that way, the Hollywood version of everything, and (The Clean House) is not sentimental in the least."
In fact, where the premise of a housekeeper and a house of the distracted and moneyed could easily devolve into simple class farce, Ruhl’s script has rendered characters that are far more than simple ciphers.
"In a world where so many characters are dumbed down, especially in popular media, these are all well-educated and mature people," says White. "And that’s a real pleasure, working with those kinds of characters rather than the straw men that are set up in a lot of popular writing. It’s a great treat to meet them on their own level."
At their own level, these characters move the action of The Clean House with all the speed of what White calls a "boulevard comedy," while still remaining fully realized and true to the play’s focus on the nature of life and vitality, contrasted largely between the play’s North and South American characters. Matilde is no simple cleaning lady, but the daughter of parents who are so funny that her father has killed her mother with the world’s funniest joke, leading directly to his own suicide. In turn, Matilde’s new role as Lane’s housekeeper plays as a metaphor for Lane’s inattention to her own life, while Virginia’s hyperbolic obsession with cleanliness allows Ruhl to illustrate an equally ridiculous example of a sort of social myopia.
"I think that speaks to what a lot of us do, not just by contracting out services, but we park things in our lives and say ‘I’ll deal with that later,’" says White. "Here, circumstances force Lane to deal with it right now. So I think what the playwright is saying is that you have to take these things on, you just can’t bury your head in the sand, because sooner or later you’ll have to pay the piper."
But despite the play’s focus on themes as large as vitality and the simple appreciation of life as it is lived, The Clean House never loses its focus on the fundamental absurdity of life’s practice. As each character moves toward a more complete understanding of their lives, Matilde’s search for the perfect joke – the same one that has killed her mother – represents a fusion of the comic and tragic, the basic elements of life, into a holistic understanding that ultimately translates into the essential strength of Ruhl’s script: a truthful expression of life’s complete absurdity.
"It’s one of the strengths of the play," says White. "(Matilde)’s not the saint who comes in and changes everyone’s life – she’s a catalyst. But by experiencing everything that’s going on around her in a very soap opera way, she learns that life is made of suffering and pain and death, and all of those things have to be encompassed in your life to be whole.
"To be a good comedian, you have to be able to accept life," he says. |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.