Cleaning Solution
Laughter cures all in this play about women and messy houses
Jen Zoratti

‘Laughter is the best medicine’ and ‘Dull women have clean houses.’

You could sum up The Clean House in two fridge magnets, but Sarah Ruhl’s award-winning play is anything but clichéd.

This comedy, which makes its Canadian debut at MTC on Mar. 16, explores the lives of four very different yet very connected women.

The play focuses on Lane (Susan Hogan), a successful doctor who attempts to keep everything in her life in tidy boxes, ensuring that her personal and her public lives are separate. Her craving for order and control is almost compulsive — unless it has to do with her house, that is.

To deal with the mess on the home front, Lane hires Matilde (Sarah Henriques), a Brazilian maid who hates to clean. Lane’s sister Virginia (Patricia Hunter) has a cleaning fetish and ends up taking over Matilde’s undone tasks, freeing the ‘maid’ up to continue on her quest to find the perfect joke.

Lane’s emotionally sterile environment gets messy when she welcomes Matilde into her home. Her life is further complicated when her husband, Charles, leaves her for the vivacious Ana.

Canadian actress Nicola Lipman will play the temptress at MTC, and she says her character is a woman with a purpose.

“I think she’s a woman who has a lust for life. That’s her mission, to live out and investigate who she is to the fullest,” Lipman says. “That’s her appeal to everyone, not just Charles.”

You’d hardly expect ‘the other woman’ to be an audience favourite but Ana isn’t an everyday character. “She has a great sense of humour and she loves to laugh,” Lipman explains. “And the play itself is very funny. Matilde is searching for the ultimate joke and Ana is searching for the ultimate laugh.

“When someone makes you laugh, that moment when you lose control, that could be the best moment in your day. Ana has terrible things to deal with, but she turns to a human solution, rather than something from a doctor or a book.”

As you might guess, The Clean House is a slightly surreal comedy. What sets it apart is that the play is actually about laughter itself — and its inherent healing ability. Ana’s lust for life ultimately teaches Lane a thing or two about her own life, and she realizes that a clean house isn’t all that important.

“Everybody in the play is trying to do what Ana is doing. She has abandoned control of her life,” Lipman says. “We all think we have a certain amount of control over our lives, and we all have to deal with it when someone comes along and messes that up.”