The Clean House
The maid, an aspiring comedian, tells all her jokes in Portugese. Despite her
delightful body language, we never get to know what her jokes are about. For
that matter, we never really make rational sense of all the cacophonous goings
on in THE CLEAN HOUSE. Fortunately, Sara Ruhl’s whacky and utterly divine
comedy about relationships, love, death and laughter is beyond translation.
While the setting, the doctor’s immaculate white house, is entirely
American, the affectual reality is more like Rio de Janeiro as the house is
not far from the city and not far from the sea. As the story develops, the
passionate relationships that evolve reflect Brazilian culture far more than
our own. But this tension between the Latin sense of living freely and the
American way in which we live rationally, realistically and with a sense of
predictability is certainly what ignites here.
Blair Brown is Lane, an accomplished doctor who carries on like she’s
narrating a documentary about herself, rather than living in the moment. Her
sister, Virginia, portrayed by a neurotically thin Jill Clayburgh is another
perfectionist. She suffers from OCD and only loves to clean.
As Act I ends, Lane’s husband the buttoned-up John Dossett has fallen
in love with another woman. And what should herald the beginning of the
play’s conflict, leads instead to a sense of union and a delightful moral.
It seems some dirty deeds lead to a beautiful ending while the cleanest things
are often cold and empty.
More importantly, the characters develop a sense of depth and an appreciation
of life that is filled with humor. It’s the character development
and the extraordinary performances that make this production so enchanting.
Blair Brown, especially, morphs from a stubborn, thick skinned scientist into
a loving, accepting and sensual woman. Jill Clayburgh’s Virginia also
transforms from anxious and fastidious to childlike if not actually childish.
Her transition occurs when, in an act of wrath, she dumps the dirt from Lane’s
plants all over her white rug.
And the catalyst for it all is Matilde, the Brazilian maid. As played by Vanessa
Aspillaga she is a woman of low social stature, who hates her job, but is content. She
doesn’t take any of these issues personally, to the contrary she finds
personal value where the others fail to. She’s joined in this sentiment
by ‘the other woman’, the Latin lover, played with astonishing
grace by Concetta Tomei. She doubles as Matilde’s mother and Dossett
as her father in flashbacks from her youth.
But it’s Dossett’s doctor who undergoes the greatest transformation.
A dignified husband and successful surgeon he turns into a fatuous romantic
and finally a brave explorer. His return from Alaska hauling a huge yew tree
into Lane’s white living room, now dirty of course, brings the plays
surrealistic ending, a triumphant unity of life and death, joy and pathos that
is just so uplifting.
That’s This Week Off Broadway. I’m Isa Goldberg.
