"The Clean House"

Theatre review
"The Clean House" at the Kitchen Theatre
Ithaca Times
September 5, 2007
715 words

"The Divine Comedy"

full text here

The Divine Comedy
By: Mark Tedeschi
09/05/2007

The Clean House, by Sarah Ruhl. Directed by Sara Lampert Hoover. With Ursula Cataan, Leigh Keeley, Olivia Lawrence, Charles Stransky and Addie Walsh. At the Kitchen Theatre through Sept. 23.



We rarely realize that a well-told joke extracts more laughs from timing (or its "time signature") and style of delivery than from straight content. When a woman opens a play with a joke in Portuguese in front of the projected words "a woman tells a joke in Portuguese," it's clear that although an audience might not understand it literally, their response indicates they can recognize and appreciate a hilarious joke when they hear one. The universality of humor is as encompassing as that of love, and Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House succeeds in illustrating both.

The Kitchen Theatre opens its 17th season with the Pulitzer-nominated comedy The Clean House, here directed by Sara Lampert Hoover, a complex but enjoyable example of the passionate work that the Kitchen consistently shares.

Lane (Walsh), a doctor who dislikes giving orders and hates laughing out loud, has a prim demeanor that fully fits the set design of her immaculate, all-white living room. She hires Mathilde (Cataan), the Brazilian jokester who considers humor as crucial to life as oxygen, to keep the place clean.

The problem? Mathilde hates cleaning; it makes her sad and uninspired. The solution? Lane's sister, Virginia (Keeley), an unemployed lady with a housecleaning regimen so familiar that she can spend her spare time secretly cleaning Lane's house for Mathilde while the two of them "talk and fold laundry, as women used to do."

Lane has a husband named Charles (Stansky), also a doctor, who remains unseen (though Stansky does appear earlier in flashbacks playing Mathilde's father opposite Lawrence as her mother) until it's revealed that he's having an affair with his 67-year-old breast cancer patient, Ana (Lawrence).

Ana's moxie counterbalances Lane's inflexibility, and Charles has no apologies about being forthright with his feelings. He even brings Ana into their home in order to introduce his wife to his mistress and uses the Jewish concept of a basherte (soul mate) to justify the "metaphysically objective" choice he made - even though he's not Jewish. Fortunately, the ensuing conversations avoid painful awkwardness - they're just plain funny.

The writing and acting cooperate to create layered characters. They evolve, and so does the set - you'll be surprised at how much a few furniture rearrangements and half-eaten apples can change one's perception.

Mathilde finds a muse in Ana, and decides to split her time evenly between Ana's and Lane's houses. When she's not apple-picking with Ana or pretending to clean for Lane, Mathilde is trying to come up with "The Perfect Joke," an elusive creation with the power to make someone die laughing and an equilibrium of purity and scatology that, she says, puts it "somewhere between an angel and a fart."

The structure of The Clean House follows no conventions, but still stays coherent. We move briskly from a peaceful seashore to an Alaskan snowstorm and back, helped along by swift lighting and sound design changes. Boel's original score also moves us through time and space with rich music that, as a whole, transcends genre.

Characters' initial introductions are set aside from the story with excellent monologues and mini-stories giving clues to their backgrounds and their attitudes about life.

Eventually, they confront and challenge those attitudes; Mathilde is asked to actually tell the world's funniest joke, Lane accepts that she needs (even likes!) help from others, and Virginia revels in making a complete mess. Ana looks like a totally different person by the end of the loopy second act, and her transformation has little to do with makeup.

The acting gives credibility to the changes and helps underscore the thematic underbelly: Life is a conglomerate holding immeasurable amounts of love and death, laughter and sadness, transition and confusion. Lane chuckles at a joke, then cries, then laughs, then sobs.

The four women characters represent different schools of emotional approaches to life. Mathilde sees humor as perhaps the purest of the emotions, or at least the most worthy of attention. She wears black because she's in mourning but always thinks fondly of her parents' life together, imagining them laughing through good times and bad.

The perceived humor in the opening joke demonstrates Ruhl's command of all-embracing storytelling and sophisticated language. Only a skilled team can execute such a production, and in its opening show this year, the Kitchen has done well.