CAPTIVATING CAST: Brazil, Duclos, and Strickland. |
Why is Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House, which is getting a slam-bang staging at Trinity Repertory Company (through June 3), a brutally funny comedy? Beats me.
It’ll batter you into laughter, too. The odd romp centers around a young woman from Brazil (a charismatic Angela Brazil, most certainly not cast for the coincidence) who starts working as a maid for a fastidious doctor, Lane (Cynthia Strickland). But Matilde doesn’t like doing housework, because it makes her sad. Why fret about a dirty floor, she asks, when you can look up at the ceiling, which is always clean?
Dressed in black, in contrast to Lane’s whites, she has additional good reason for sadness: death in her family. Her father, the funniest man in his village, didn’t marry until he was 63 because he hadn’t met his amusing match. Her equally uproarious mother recently died (thus Matilde’s escape to the States) — died laughing after hearing a joke her father had been working on for a year, to tell on their anniversary. Upon her mother’s death, her father went off and shot himself.
The play opens with Matilde telling a long joke — in Portuguese. We get no translation but rather an animated delivery, with the sort of cadence and motions that unmistakably declare this to be a joke. Even if we don’t catch the occasional cognate, we follow the drift and can even tell, with the concluding gesture, that it’s a dirty joke.
This sets up a key message of this comedy, that the hows in life can be so much more substantial than the actual whats.
Lane’s sister Virginia (Janice Duclos), in contrast to her strong-minded sibling, is a meek soul. Scuffing through a marriage to a husband we never see, not accomplished like Lane, she rises depressed each morning and busily cleans her house (“If you do not clean, how do you know whether you’re making progress in life?”). But she’s done and bored again by mid-afternoon. She tells Matilde that she’d like to clean for her, and a harmless conspiracy is hatched.
Most of this takes place in the sleek, modern, snow-white living room of Lane, as immaculate (okay, sterile) as an operating room. Set designer E. David Cosier has raised the white leather couch and coffee table at the center onto a two-step platform, an altar to the god of the left-brained and Architectural Digest.
Eventually thrust against that is the Caribbean-colored apartment and balcony of Ana (Barbara Meek), whose intriguing personality has smitten Lane’s husband Charles (William Damkoehler) to the core. As earnestly as if recounting an opera that moved him deeply, he tells his wife that he has found his soulmate. This comes across as plausible not because we know such things happen but rather because, with brilliant economy by the playwright, we are convinced that sometimes such things must happen. Charles is Ana’s surgeon and has performed her mastectomy (staged ingeniously by director Laura Kepley with slow-motion gestures of Noh-drama ritual, made further chilling by the art music sound design of Peter Sasha Hurowitz). In projected supertitles that frequently guide us through the action, we are informed when, eyes locked, “They fall in love.” Then “They fall in love some more” and immediately — here’s the beauty part — “They fall in love completely.”
Meanwhile, Matilde keeps trying to think up the perfect joke, one she knows is “somewhere between an angel and a fart.”
What allows this is Ruhl’s magical blend of the real and surreal. (She was one of Paula Vogel’s imagination-liberated playwriting grad students at Brown.) As Lane tries to sleep on her couch, on a balcony above her Ana and Ma¬tilde take bites out of apples, to find perfect ones, throwing the rejects into the sea — Lane’s living room. Breaking all rules of theatrical compartmentalization, Lane reacts baffled each time by their appearance. If Ruhl hadn’t pried open our minds to make room for magic, we’d feel this was cheating for cheap laughs instead of representing how Lane's mind is being expanded by her trauma.
Of course, if the acting weren’t captivating, the spell would be broken. Brazil is winsomeness personified, and she subtly makes Matilde’s sometimes succinct responses come across as a little saddened rather than curt. As the tidily minded doctor, Strickland gives great contrast, from politely hesitant to furious blowtorch. Duclos as timid sister Virginia and Meek as life-grabbing Ana are psychological bookends to Damkoehler’s Charles: he both thinks and feels too much, journeying off to Alaska to cut down a yew tree to save Ana, instead of staying to comfort her. Such a guy thing. Damkoehler nails a crucial aspect of the play, as Charles earns forgiveness through sheer childlike earnestness.
The Clean House is so brutally funny because it gets to us through tough love. It tickles us silly but then doesn’t stop until we’re laughing so hard it hurts — and laughing because it hurts. We’re told few jokes, and most of these are in a foreign language, to demonstrate the fact that the literal meanings are beside the deeper point.
Don’t be surprised if you recall this play at the next memorial service you attend, when yet another speaker feels compelled to tell a funny story about the dearly departed. Few of us manage to fully clean up our act in this messy world, but thank goodness artful geniuses like Sarah Ruhl are around to remind us why a sigh and a laugh can help make up for that.
