SETTLING INTO MATILDA: Brazil. |
Have you ever laughed at a joke before the punch line? Or after misunderstanding the punch line? Of course you have. Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House, the current production at Trinity Repertory Company (through June 3), is a comedy that depends not so much on appreciating jokes but on our need for laughter itself in this difficult world.
Three weeks into a 4-1/2-week rehearsal period, company actor Angela Brazil was still trying to figure out how that affects her character, Matilda, whom the play centers around. She and director Laura Kepley stuck around in the top floor rehearsal hall after another long day scratching their heads over that question and similar matters.
Matilda is a maid, an immigrant from Brazil who is too depressed from a recent trauma to care about tidying up for her employer, Lane (Cynthia Strickland). (Don’t worry. Lane’s sister Virginia, played by Janice Duclos, is equally depressed but is coping through obsessive neatness, so she secretly takes over the work. Barbara Meek and William Damkoehler fill out the cast.)
The Clean House doesn’t provide a gig for standup comedians, however. Jokes are referred to a lot but told infrequently. As Kepley, said, “The great thing that jokes are doing in this play is showing what we all have in common. Because even if she’s telling a joke in Portuguese and I don’t know a single thing that she said, I know from her rhythm that she’s telling a joke.”
Apart from not being provided with a drummer to cue in the audience about her character with rim shots, Brazil was having a harder time than usual in comfortably understanding Matilda. “When you read a piece, sometimes you go” — and she snapped her fingers — “ ’I got it, I’m in there, I get it — I know that.’ And this one was trickier. I went: ’I think I know who that is.’ ”
What she’s remained uncertain about is the tone with which to begin the play, as Matilda starts things off by telling us a joke. In Portuguese. (Supertitles will help us out here, as with many other passages in Portuguese or Spanish.) It didn’t help that Brazil came to the first rehearsal having memorized the wrong joke. Two versions had been provided by the playwright, and she soon learned from a dialect coach that one was much better, much more colloquial.
Brazil also came with all the Portuguese dialogue memorized.
“This play was tricky enough to figure out that I knew I didn’t want to be struggling with language stuff while I was trying to do that,” she said.
She also carried around a Portuguese dictionary for particular words, because the translations didn’t tell her what to emphasize. Although her parents are from the Azores, she doesn’t speak the language, which has a different cadence in the Brazilian version anyway.
But, again, The Clean House doesn’t rely on gag lines.
Brazil explained. “The characters connect in moments of humor, or moments that are like: ‘Doh!’ — where something takes you by surprise or someone does something unexpected to another person. In those moments, [playwright Ruhl] crafted these little tiny beats. I wouldn’t say they’re laugh-out-loud funny, but they are funny. And that’s what I respond to most — the storytelling is through these moments of . . . ” and she thought a moment. “I wouldn’t say comedy, but there’s a lift between people, a lift and connection. That’s what I respond to a lot, because that’s how we find ourselves through the day.”
Yes. How many times do we find ourselves laughing in various interactions with people when, at the end of the day, we could look back and realize that we hadn’t heard a single joke? That might very well be a day when we’ve heard news about Darfur or a bombing in Baghdad or the latest school shooting.
