>>REVIEW
THE CLEAN HOUSE
Alberta Theatre Projects
Runs until April 15
Martha Cohen Theatre (Epcor Centre)
There’s an almost immediate sense of hyperbole in the pure white walls of Scott Reid’s set for Alberta Theatre Projects’ latest production, The Clean House. But where Reid’s design is striking, Sarah Ruhl’s Pulitzer-nominated script is understated – a passionate comedy whose constant laughs belie a message that is nuanced and deeply affecting.
Exploiting a seemingly simple conceit, The Clean House deals with the pathologies of modern western life as sisters Lane (Marie Stillin) and Virginia (Valerie Ann Pearson) deal with cleaning their homes in their own ways – Lane through her Brazilian housekeeper, Matilde (Carmen Aguirre), and Virginia through her obsessive-compulsive cleaning. For Lane, cleaning is a job best reserved for others with less demanding lives, while Virginia sees cleaning as a means of ordering one’s life. Between them, Matilde deals with the demise of her parents, the funniest people in Brazil in their own lifetimes, and her own quest to craft the perfect joke. But the order that forms between these women is quickly unbalanced by the revelation that Lane’s oncologist husband, Charles (Brian Dooley), has fallen in love with Ana (Kyra Harper), a breast cancer patient.
Artistic director Bob White tightly stages Ruhl’s often dreamlike work, pulling strong performances from his cast. While The Clean House is exactingly subtle in its subjects – uproarious comedy in the face of love, death and cancer – Pearson’s Virginia commands attention as the energy pent up by a life spent in denial bubbles to the surface in Freudian slips and explicit outbursts. Some of the play’s best comic moments are shared in the friendship that grows between Matilde and Virginia, with Aguirre playing the sympathetic outsider watching these poor Americans’ lives implode.
Where Pearson and Aguirre provide the play’s strongest comic moments, Stillin’s performance is dramatic without overpowering the larger comic arc. Able to maintain a disbelieving pain that carries her naturally through her comic surroundings, her suffering and eventual redemption add a layer of depth to the subtlety and fundamental humanity of Ruhl’s script. Along with the passion between Dooley and Harper, grasping each other with high school infatuation, the cast easily fills the Martha Cohen stage.
Technically, the play succeeds with Reid’s striking yet simple set design, and a soundscape that complements the production seamlessly, save for the intrusive and often grating sound of Ana’s seaside apartment – seagull squawks and all. Projected onto the stage’s back wall, the subtitles highlighting important moments in the play’s narrative – from falling in love to the conception of the joke – are also executed with finesse, a sly wink from Ruhl to the audience routed through the production’s lighting design (also courtesy of Reid).
The play only falters in its conclusion. In a rare moment of obviousness, Ruhl tries to bookend her story with Matilde’s reflections on the possibility of heaven, a conclusion so weighted that it betrays the play’s trust in its own story. While the poetry of Ruhl’s language is evident and the image vivid, Matilde’s final words seem awkward and moralizing, attempting to neatly close a story that does not ask for simple conclusion.
But one clumsy soliloquy cannot dampen the production’s otherwise subtle story, and the result remains a comedy full of life that simultaneously refuses to compromise its vision of obsession and our own mortality. Deceptively simple but wonderfully complex, The Clean House deserves a cast and crew capable of delivering Ruhl’s beautiful vision, and it has found them at ATP. |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.