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Award-winning play lacks realism and imagination
Barb Stewart

Great theatre cuts across socio-economic and cultural boundaries. It draws you into unfamiliar worlds and brings those worlds alive.

Despite a Pulitzer Prize nomination and numerous awards, Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House is not great theatre. It’s theatre that breeds stereotypes and leaves you wondering if you can ever recover the two hours you lost watching it.

For all its billing as a quirky, new production, The Clean House has about as much edge as a silver dessert spoon.

Ruhl’s play tells the story of Lane (Susan Hogan), a successful doctor married to another successful doctor. Lane has a Brazilian maid, Matilde (Sara Henriques), who has stopped cleaning the house. Virginia (Patricia Hunter), Lane’s sister and fellow order freak, is a housewife so bored and unfulfilled that her only joy in the day is cleaning. Virginia convinces Matilde to let her clean Lane’s house, therefore allowing Matilde to work on her life’s mission, which is creating the world’s funniest joke.

Apparently Matilde’s parents were the two funniest people in Brazil and her mother was killed by a joke her father told.

Lane discovers her new cleaning arrangement the same day her husband, Charles (Andrew Wheeler), turns her world upside down by falling in love with his ‘soulmate,’ a 64-year-old South American named Ana (Nicola Lipman), one of his recent patients.

Of course, the rigid white North Americans learn important life lessons from the fiery, life-affirming Latinas, and Lane’s pristine house is eventually reduced to disorder as she takes in her husband’s dying lover. Matilde writes the perfect joke, which she uses to end Ana’s pain. Virginia learns there is more to life than cleaning, and Charles runs off to Alaska to cut down a tree.

With all the fuss that has been made over The Clean House, many people have obviously found this plot intriguing and innovative. Theatre circles are buzzing with talk of the play’s magical realism and the wonder of objects from one setting spilling over into another.

Just because two of the play’s characters are from South America does not mean you have a play full of magical realism. You actually need some realism for the fantastical to play against, and the characters and plot of The Clean House are simply too bland and stereotypical for magic to be of any use.

Similarly, the infusion of objects from one setting into another is pretty much beat-you-over-the-head symbolism.

At least John Thompson has created a lovely setting, but an interesting set does not a great play make.

The actors, especially Patricia Hunter and Nicola Lipman, do their best with what they have, but a significant change of direction is necessary to make The Clean House anything but a mess.