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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2008 > July > 17 > Entry
Review: “The Clean House”
What’s not to find charming about Sarah Ruhl’s “The Clean House,” the delicate and soulful comedy now getting a whip-smart production at Zach Theatre?
Ruhl manages to translate to the stage the kind of magical realism usually found only on the page. In the world she crafts, absurdity becomes the norm, metaphor and imagination morph into reality and forgiveness is not only possible, but the actual path to peace and happiness.
And, oh, yes — it is possible to die laughing from the best joke in the world.
Lane (Lauren Lane) and Virginia (Barbara Chisholm) are two uptight middle-age sisters — both childless, both driven and compulsive, both ultimately unhappy. Lane is a successful doctor whose life is carefully circumscribed by her demanding career and her equally successful doctor husband. Virginia is a housewife who, out of boredom, compulsively cleans.
Entering into this sterile world — wonderfully realized by set designer Michael Raiford with minimal ultra-white and clear acrylic furnishings — is Mathilde (Smaranda Ciceu), a Brazilian woman in her twenties who has been employed by Lane as a housekeeper. Only the problem is, Mathilde gets depressed when she cleans. Daughter of “the two funniest people in Brazil,” it’s up to her to now by the funniest person in Brazil and so Mathilde longs to come up with the best joke in the world.
But when Virginia makes a deal with Mathilde to secretly clean Lane’s house so long as Mathilde pretends to do it, worlds begin to collide. And when Lane’s husband Charles (Tom Green) proclaims that he has found his true soulmate in an older yet life-loving woman named Ana (Alicia Kaplan), everyone’s carefully-constructed world unravels. Ruhl’s gift as a playwright is her subtle shifting between classic comedic realism and wonderfully imaginative flights of fancy. Brilliant and clever punch lines surprise. But then so do surreal dream-like scenes. A trip to Alaska to retrieve a cancer-curing tree? Sure, why not.
Lane and Chisholm are perfectly in synch as a comedic duo, each actress bringing loads of complexity and nuance to their terribly unhappy characters. As Mathilde, Ciceu charms with a combination of innocence and supreme wisdom.
Director Dave Steakley keeps a delicate hand on it all, leaving Ruhl’s sparkling script to sparkle on its own merits.
After all, it would be a shame to upset the balance of such an oddly balanced and charming world view.
“The Clean House” continues 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays. Whisenhunt Stage, Zach Theatre, 1510 Toomey Road. $28-$37 ($15 on Wednesdays). 476-0541, www.zachscott.com.
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