THE CLEAN HOUSE
by Sarah Ruhl
Vancouver Playhouse Theatre
Oct. 21-Nov. 11
$25-$53
604-280-3333
www.ticketmaster.ca
www.vancouverplayhouse.com
The Clean House is one of the strangest plays I’ve
seen in a long time, and that strangeness may be the best thing
about it. American playwright Sarah Ruhl has written an
absurdist sitcom with some of the flavours of both Gray’s
Anatomy and The Aristocrats. It’s full
of contrivances that are relatively easy to forgive because of
the pleasantly twisted ways in which it presents them.
Some of it feels familiar and straightforward in director Steven
Schipper’s Playhouse and Manitoba Theatre Centre co-pro. The
house of the title is not so much clean as sterile in the stark
modernity of John Thompson’s set design and in its emotional
emptiness, the latter a reflection of Lane (Susan Hogan), the
wealthy workaholic doctor who lives there. Too busy to
really inhabit her house—or her marriage or her life—she
has hired a young Brazilian, Matilde (Sarah Henriques), to clean
for her. Lane’s sister Virginia (Patricia Hunter),
in contrast, loves to clean. It gives her something to
do to fill up her emptiness.
At first, the only real wild card in this deck seems to be Matilde,
the cleaning lady who doesn’t like to clean because it
makes her sad. So why has she come to America to clean
houses? Okay, let’s move on. One fascinating thing
about Matilde is the story of her parents, the two funniest people
in Brazil, who expired as the result of a fatal joke her father
told her mother. They keep appearing to her and the audience
in passionate embraces, chuckling, giggling, and guffawing. Matilde
herself meanwhile, is trying to write the funniest joke in the
world. Oh, and all her jokes are in Portuguese.
Things get stranger and more interesting in the second act when
the actors who play Matilde’s dead parents (Andrew Wheeler
and Nicola Lipman) reappear as Lane’s surgeon husband Charles,
and his patient, Ana. When they fall in love after Charles has
given her a mastectomy, and Charles leaves Lane for Ana, the
plot thickens substantially. A complex and utterly contrived
relationship develops among the five characters. There
are curious alliances and remarkable revitalizations, predictable
reconciliations, and death by joke. Throw an apple from your
lover’s balcony and it may land in your wife’s living
room.
For someone writing a play about comedy, Ruhl is sometimes curiously
wide of the comic mark, making Virginia conventionally wacky
and sending Charles on a ridiculously goofy journey towards the
end. But much of the play is sweet and moving: the loving laughter
of Matilde’s parents, the surprising late-life passion
of Charles and Ana (played by Lipman with delightful vivacity),
the bond that develops between Lane and the woman who stole her
husband.
And there’s just enough mild weirdness to keep you wanting
more.
Jerry Wasserman
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