After reading Eurydice and completely falling in love with both it and Sarah Ruhl, I decided to read another one of her plays. The first act of The Clean House was commissioned in 2000 by the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, NJ. It received its world premiere in its full-length form at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, CT in 2004. It was also produced at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in May 2006. An excerpt can be found here at Sarah Ruhl's website, but I read it in her anthology The Clean House and Other Plays, published in 2006. All of this information came directly from the text in the notes before the play.
Basic Plot
Lane and Charles, both doctors, are very busy and never see each other. Lane hires Matilde, a maid from Brazil, to clean her house. Matilde longs for her parents, who both died. Her father told her mother a joke, the best joke in the world, and she quite literally died from laughing, her father killing himself shortly thereafter. Matilde doesn't enjoy cleaning, so Virginia, Lane's sister, cleans for her while Matilde entertains Virginia with company and jokes. Coming up with and telling Brazilian jokes is Matilde's favorite thing to do.
One day when Virginia and Matilde are folding clothes, they come across red, silk underwear, "surely not Lane's". Charles is having an affair with one of his dying patients, Ana. Ana is Jewish, and their is a Jewish law, bashert, that states that if you find your soulmate, you are not required to stay with your married spouse, or feel guilty for leaving. Ana proceeds to take Lane's husband and maid, whom Lane fired, but then gets angry, everyone deciding to split Matilde's time between Lane/Virginia and Charles/Ana. While Charles searches for a cure for Ana, she moves in with Lane, who takes care of her. Finally, when Ana can take no more, she asks Matilde to tell her a joke so funny it will kill her. She does, Ana dies, Matilde tells the audience the story of how she thinks she was born, and the play ends.
(Note: The above is such a bland plot summary that I almost feel guilty for watering down Ruhl's play to these brief paragraphs. It's funny, beautiful, and I highly recommend giving it a read if you even slightly enjoyed Eurydice.)
Critical Take
The first dramaturgical choice Ruhl makes that I find noteworthy is the use of language as a binder and as a wall. Matilde, fluent in both American English and Brazilian Portuguese, has a very keen sense of humor that is hard to translate to English. Ruhl makes a note that all of her Brazilian jokes are just suggestions, and that she encourages the cast to come up with their own Brazilian jokes. Just like British humor, Brazilian humor is much different than what we're used to in the states. Lane and Virginia struggle to grasp her jokes, but Ana, from Argentina, delights in being able to communicate with Matilde in both Spanish and Portuguese. I find Ruhl's use of language very unique and exciting. When foreign languages are used in plays, we sometimes don't get translations (Chicago's Hunyak the Hungarian's "Not Guilty!" monologue is never translated). Ruhl included a section after her play with specific subtitles that are to be projected behind the actors. These subtitles include translating the Spanish and Portuguese that Ana and Matilde speak, as well as select stage directions that add another layer to scenes that are movement based and dialogue light. I thought it was brilliant that language could bond two characters together and simultaneously separate them from others.
The second dramaturgical choice that Ruhl makes is that the singular, unchanging set functions as both Lane's living room, Ana's balcony, and Charles' hospital. At the beginning of the play, lines between where we are in a scene are never blurred, and action only takes place one location at a time. We move clearly from Lane's living room, to an entirely different scene that takes place on Ana's balcony, etc. As the play progresses, and lives become intertwined as relationships and stories overlap, the physical spaces start to blur as how people are connected to one another starts to blur. Lane is sitting in her living room, feeling bitter about her husband leaving her for his "soulmate", while Charles and Ana are picking apples from Ana's balcony. During this scene, apples from Ana's balcony fall in Lane's living room. Lane notices these apples, as these falling apples are intentional and clearing falling into Lane's world, not just on the ground. This blurring of worlds and relationships happens again, when Charles is in Alaska looking for a cure for Ana's cancer, and it snows from the balcony into Lane's house. Although we get to see characters change and interfere with others lives when they're speaking to each other, Ruhl creatively shows how you can affect someone else's life passively by just living yours.
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