THE CLEAN HOUSE

Reinventing Romantic Comedy, Telling the Perfect Joke
THE CLEAN HOUSE
By Amy Wegener

“There’s something compassionate about humor; it has a saving power,” argues Sarah Ruhl, whose breakout play, The Clean House, has been one of the most talked-about new comic dramas to grace American and international stages in recent seasons. “It seemed to me that if you took the most sublime version of a joke—the Platonic ideal of a joke—that it could transport you somehow. Humor pushed to an extreme, like any emotion, has a transformative power,” she tells Theater magazine. If Ruhl sounds like an original philosopher on the issue, the designation would be well-deserved: she and her play have been credited with creating a new breed of romantic comedy that’s characterized by delightful whimsy, spare yet lyrical language and heightened reality—imagining a world where people really do fall in love at first sight or die of laughter, and where the perfect joke told by an unruly cleaning lady can have enormous repercussions. “This comedy is romantic, deeply so,” proclaimed the New York Times after the play’s Yale Repertory Theatre premiere, “but in the more arcane sense of the word: visionary, tinged with fantasy, extravagant in feeling, maybe a little nuts.”

Delectably nuts though The Clean House may be, it also paints a complex landscape where laughter coexists alongside sadness and the disorientation of loss. For the play doesn’t just dust the surface of its inhabitants’ lives, but also lays bare the confusion and clutter that come to trouble their souls. At first, the premise seems deceptively simple: Matilde, whose parents were the funniest people in Brazil, has been hired to clean the home of Lane, a high-powered doctor who eschews the notion of having to touch her own dirt. The problem is that Matilde won’t clean: she’s too preoccupied with trying to invent the perfect joke, and her duties get in the way. (For Matilde, joking is its own form of cleanliness: “A good joke cleans your insides out,” she explains. “If I don’t laugh for a week, I feel dirty.”) Even though Lane has had her maid medicated, the problem persists, and the fastidious doctor doesn’t know what to do. Into this domestic deadlock sneaks Virginia, Lane’s unfulfilled homemaker sister, who finds a strange comfort in cleaning and offers to complete Matilde’s chores behind her sibling’s back.

This odd arrangement sets the stage for unlikely alliances and another set of surprises, as Lane’s neatly ordered life begins to unravel, forcing her to face the chaos that encroaches upon her once-pristine home. Out of the ensuing emotional and metaphysical muddle comes unexpected companionship as the characters learn to face (and even embrace) disappointment, change and forgiveness as an integral part of existence. And so out of a peculiar dilemma emerges a rich, humane work that explores some of the biggest questions that theatre can tackle. Writing about The Clean House in Variety, David Rooney aptly catalogues its virtues:

“This funny, tender play has screwy poetry and penetrating wisdom, oddball humor, deadpan soap, operatic arias, spirituality and a soaring sense of romance. Most of all, it has tremendous compassion.”

There’s that word again—compassion. It’s a term that frequently comes up in descriptions of The Clean House and of Ruhl’s work more broadly. Although in this case, Ruhl’s empathy for her characters’ struggles grew out of an initial moment of anger and political outrage that inspired her to write the play. “Oddly enough, it started with a true story,” she explains in an interview with Theater. Ruhl, whose husband and sister are both doctors, was at a party full of physicians when she stumbled into an odd, infuriating conversation where a woman complained about her depressed cleaning lady. As Ruhl tells it, “She said, ‘I’m sorry, but I didn’t go to medical school so I could clean my own house.’ It was all laid out right there, ready for the page. That statement is an amazingly efficient, clear description of a woman’s psychology, but it also contains all kinds of other cultural information. Here’s a woman who thinks she’s transcended cleaning because of her education. That fascinates me on a political level, but also on spiritual and psychological levels. What does it mean to be alienated from your own dirt?”

Ruhl was at first intrigued by these issues from the perspective of race, class and gender, but then the playwright began to look inside the emotional implications of the doctor’s statement. This trajectory is reflected in how the story, and her characters’ journeys, unfold. As Ruhl explains to American Theatre, the play “became less and less like a political treatise and more and more about the vast psychological expanses involved with cleaning.” These expanses include the way we clean to create the illusion of control, to keep chaos at a distance, and to cope with the passage of time. It’s a kind of “emotional surgery,” as Ruhl sees it. “Something in the play that fascinated me when writing it was the relationship between cleaning and death,” Ruhl elaborates in an interview in Women Writing Plays. “We deal with entropy on a daily basis: dust accumulates, vegetables rot. Even if we took no action in the world with our little paltry wills, entropy would still happen, and how do we keep that at bay?”

Certainly The Clean House will “change how you view dusting and Windex forever,” as the Washington Times puts it. Such has been the case for audiences around the country—among its recent productions was a successful run at Lincoln Center Theater in New York—and in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. Along the way, the play nabbed the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2004 as well as being named a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2005.

The Clean House has an imaginative team of artists working to realize the play’s particular blend of melancholy and wit—a mixture deliciously spiced by Ruhl, who clearly understands the power of a good communal laugh. “I believe laughter onstage can bring just as much catharsis as tears,” Ruhl has said. “When everyone’s laughing in the theatre, it’s an amazing release.”

Reprinted with permission from Inside Actors, a publication of Actors Theatre of Louisville.