Comedy shines in 'Clean House'
This tale of doctors, wayward housekeeper makes a satisfying mess
JULIE YORK COPPENS
Like your drama neat and tidy?
Then you might not feel at home in "The Clean House," an entertaining, emotionally satisfying but thematically messy comedy by Sarah Ruhl, playing at Actor's Theatre of Charlotte.
It's a polished presentation for ATC, now in its 19th season and just named Company of the Year at the Metrolina Theatre Awards. Director Scott Ripley, a canny design team and a solid cast cut no corners with Ruhl's hot property; the script's deadpan wit, narrative subtlety and full-hearted passion are all here.
Still -- and this, too, is entirely in line with the author's intentions -- the show will leave some viewers feeling like Lane, the harried doctor in the play whose new Brazilian maid has no affinity for housework. To her employer's mounting frustration, Matilde (that's "Ma-chil-gee," as it sounds in her native Portuguese) is too busy dreaming up the perfect joke, in tribute to the funny parents she's lost, to scrub the bathroom floor. Ruhl's own attitude toward her paying audience seems much the same: "Yeah, I'm the playwright. Mind sweeping up when we're done?"
Whether "The Clean House" is a profile in grief, a chronicle of midlife crisis, a cross-cultural social satire, an absurdist farce or a romantic fantasy -- Lane's husband, also a doctor, falls hard for an older Argentine woman whose mastectomy he performs -- depends on the beholder.
Ripley's staging, inventive and fluid but slow-paced on Wednesday's opening night, has elements of all the above. His well-chosen cast, led by Adyana de la Torre as Matilde and Claudia Carter Covington as Lane, move us to laughter, but also to tears.
Here's one of Ruhl's stage directions, coming just after Lane, in desperate need of cheering up, hears one of Matilde's jokes -- but it's in Portuguese, untranslatable, and not exactly what the doctor ordered: "Lane cries. She laughs. She cries. She laughs. And this goes on for some time." How does an actor do such a thing? But Covington lives the moment, credibly and beautifully.
Other authorial notes in the script call for projected scene headings ("Lane makes a house call to her husband's soul mate") and English subtitles of some of the characters' foreign phrases. But we don't need the help, and Ripley and company have decided, wisely and against past ATC habit, not to clutter the stage picture with a screen.
The whole look of the show is, aptly, clean -- at least until Lane's neat-freak sister, actor Elyse Williams, takes out 30 years of female frustration on the throw pillows and bric-a-brac. (Martin Thompson and Jorja Ursin convey a more believable eccentricity as the play's unlikely lovers.)
Chip Decker's set, in textured tones of sand and sea, strikes nice symbolic notes, but is, like a typical show house, more handsome than livable. Tight floor space on this island in Ruhl's "Metaphysical Connecticut," and a wide expanse around it, impair the actors' movements and leave viewers seated in the side sections with poor sightlines.
Costumer Donna Conrad gives the cast simple, role-defining outfits; clever how Lane descends from super-doctor to pathetic patient merely by removing her white jacket.
It might fail the dramatic white-glove test, but as a comedy, "The Clean House" sparkles. Theater REVIEW
The Clean House
Doctors with an ailing marriage hire a Brazilian maid who hates to clean in Sarah Ruhl's play. About 2 hours.
WHEN: 8 p.m. today, and various times through Oct. 6.
WHERE: Actor's Theatre of Charlotte, 650 E. Stonewall St. ADMISSION:
$23-$28; 7:30 p.m. Sept. 26 performance is pay-what-you-can.
DETAILS: 704-342-2251, or www.actorstheatrecharlotte.org. Julie York Coppens
