THE CLEAN HOUSE

THE ECLECTIC VISION OF SARAH RUHL
By Charles Haugland

There’s something about playwright Sarah Ruhl’s delirious imagination that captures audiences far and wide. Her mind thinks in fantastical images that are funny, playful and yet unexpected: A woman walks onstage to tell a joke…and speaks in a foreign language.  Another woman is being pursued by three lovers…and plays “duck, duck, goose” with them. A man writes a letter to his daughter, at one point reminding her to change the lightbulbs…and he’s writing from beyond the grave.

The images are presents to the audience, gifts that we may laugh at as we begin to unwrap them or ponder as we examine what’s inside. With each of these moments, thinking can only take us so far—a move that is deliberate on the part of an author who wants to go beyond the logical. “I come into the theater wanting to think and feel at the same time, to have the thought affect the emotion and the emotion affect the thought,” Ruhl tells BOMB Magazine. It is her confidence in mixing grounded reality and fanciful sensation that makes it easy to forget that she’s been a playwright for just over ten years.

Ruhl’s rise from would-be theatre historian to internationally renowned playwright has been meteoric in a way no one could anticipate, even her. When Ruhl was an undergraduate at Brown University in the mid-1990s, her passion was writing about fiction. She had taken a playwriting seminar with Paula Vogel, prolific dramatist and head of the playwriting program at Brown, but instead asked Vogel to advise her on academic writing—a critical thesis on a novel. Her professor responded that if Ruhl wrote a play, she would advise that. Vogel reflects with pride to American Theatre on this moment of clarity: “My most significant contribution to the American theatre is just not letting her say no.”

For Vogel, Ruhl wrote the ambitious first act of what would become the epic Passion Play. Seen in recent seasons at Arena Stage and The Goodman Theatre, the play’s three acts each take place in wildly different settings as the characters stage the story of Jesus Christ. From Elizabethan England to Nazi Germany to post-Vietnam South Dakota, the play uses cultural contrasts to meditate on the intersection between religion and politics, private belief and public performance. Arena’s Molly Smith commissioned the third act and spoke to American Theatre about the richness of ideas in Ruhl’s work: “By drawing on different times in history, [Ruhl’s] able to shine a light on our own present moment. She isn’t afraid of big subjects.” Ruhl frequently gravitates toward the huge concept; The Clean House started from the interplay of gender, class and cleanliness both physical and spiritual.

The Clean House also has surprising echoes of what she finds to be her most enduring theme—mortality. “We live in a culture that’s totally afraid of death,” she explains. “It does seem to be a preoccupation of mine, this tenuous link between living people and dead people…I started writing seriously when my father got sick, and he died fairly young.” Ruhl’s father shows up metaphorically throughout her work, perhaps most poignantly in Eurydice, which premiered in 2003. As the title suggests, her retelling of the Orpheus myth is from the young bride’s point of view as Eurydice tumbles into the underworld, dying on her wedding day. Her long-dead father finds her there, and he teaches her how to keep her memories from being washed away in the river. When Orpheus comes to reclaim her, Eurydice’s devotion to her father divides her as she cannot both stay with him and leave with her lover. Reflecting on the nature of grief and moving forward, Ruhl posits, “When you have a loss like that, I think you keep re-experiencing it until you finally just don’t.”

Even after seeing more than half a dozen plays produced in her first decade as a playwright—and receiving one of the famous MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowships—Ruhl doesn’t show signs of slowing down, continuing to mix profound emotion with delightful silliness. Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company premiered her latest play, the story of a woman who takes custody of a man’s cell phone after she witnesses his death. Appropriately titled Dead Man’s Cell Phone, the play tracks her escalating engagement with his life as she answers his calls. In her encounters with his decidedly odd family—and his surprising occupation—audiences from Playwrights Horizons to Steppenwolf this season will find Ruhl’s characteristic layering of the recognizable and the surprising. It’s a winning combination that we are sure to experience here in her play about a maid…who just won’t clean house.

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