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| 'Clean House’ winds up being a beautiful mess | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| By Chris Page, Get Out | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| May 7, 2008 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
It can save a dreadful party. Spark a romance. A hearty laugh, science says, can improve your health. A good joke can win a crowd or break tensions. A great joke, a perfect joke? That can kill. Matilde, the central character in Sarah Ruhl’s play “The Clean House,” now getting a flawed but satisfying Valley premiere courtesy Arizona Theatre Company, knows this to be true. Her parents — the funniest people in Brazil, she says — died in the wake of a whopper of a punch line. Escaping to America, 27-year-old Matilde (played by Alexandra Tavares) finds herself working as a maid for a fussy doctor, Lane (Felicity La Fortune), and her doctor husband (“We fell in love over a dead body in medical school,” Lane says) in their antiseptically white house. Though, frankly, Matilde would rather ponder the perfect joke than tidy up. In short order, so much more than the laundry and dusting has fallen into disarray: Lane’s husband (Bernard Burak Sheredy) announces he’s leaving her for one of his patients, Ana (Rae Wright), a 67-year-old Argentine breast cancer patient. Against this, Lane’s frumpy sister, Virginia (Kate Goehring), distracts herself from her own life’s shortcomings, and her tense relationship with her sister — by cleaning Lane’s home for Matilde. If only the doctor of love, in all its varied forms, made house calls. “The Clean House” sets up a lot of plot to spin and resolve, so Ruhl uses projected surtitles and other narrative tricks to whip things along at the speedy pace of parable. The entire play has the lithe spirit of poetry, and it’s that lyricism, combined with some beautiful visual moments of magic realism, that make “The Clean House” a sublime gem. Unfortunately, that’s where ATC’s production falters most. Director Jon Jory aims to craft authentic characters from what could easily be 2-D caricatures in Ruhl’s occasionally over-whimsical text, and though he largely succeeds — Goehring’s Virginia may look like Velma from “Scooby-Doo,” but she forms a real, touching bond with Matilde — Jory seems to be straining to avoid the unabashed sentimentality at the heart of the story. Still, Jory has assembled a top-notch cast to tackle Ruhl’s sublime tragicomedy, and the production deftly balances both sides of the tragicomedy — the wink of wit and the depths of emotion that hit like a punch line at show’s end. This “Clean House” may have its messy corners, but all in all it’s a beauty to behold. ‘The Clean House’ When: 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sundays, closing May 18Where: Herberger Theater Center, 222 E. Monroe St., Phoenix Cost: $30-$63 Information: (602) 256-6995 or www.aztheatreco.org — Grade: B+ Contact Chris Page by email, or phone (480) 898-5656 |
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