By: Jon Behm
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The Clean House - Publicity photo by Anne Marsden
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The Clean House is a recent play by the up and coming playwright Sarah Ruhl. Ever since Mixed Blood artistic director Jack Reuler first read her work back in 2004, he has been attempting to secure the rights to produce the show in his Minneapolis venue. Judging by the size of Sunday afternoon’s sold out crowd, Reuler made a good decision. The show has been very well received by a wide variety of theater goers, which is no small feat for a work of such emotional complexity. Though the meaning layered into the play can be somewhat abstract, it is never a chore to watch. For this, credit must be given to director Stan Wojewodski, in addition to the script he had to work with.
Ruhl has described her motivation for writing the play as partly a fascination with the “vast psychological expanse involved with cleaning.” She pursues the idea of “cleaning as emotional surgery,” and the relationships between cluttered lives and cluttered homes. While this could easily fall into Martha Stewart territory, Ruhl instead shows us a great deal of nuance in the different ways her characters deal with the act of tidying up. There is Lane, phenomenally played by Hollis Resnik, who is a surgeon obsessed with cleanliness and order, but who is unwilling to clean after herself. Her sister, Virginia, played by Karen Landry, was wonderful too as the neurotic neat freak who cleans her entire house by precisely 3:12 every afternoon and who cannot laugh for fear of losing her composure. Lisa Rafaela Clair’s turn as Matilde, Lane’s maid who doesn’t like to clean, at first turned me off. While I found that her characters “cutesy-ness” could be a little grating, I quickly warmed to her as she gave more depth to the role.
Jokes play a large part of the show’s motif. Though we hear all of the actual jokes in Portuguese, the undercurrent of humor runs strong throughout the show. Many of the best laughs came from watching Landry’s Virginia’s slow emotional unraveling. The show was not without its poignant moments as well, and could be quite moving. A perfect example of this is, while one of the play’s characters dies of laughter, her death is one of the more beautiful, poetic pieces of the performance. Ruhl obviously wants to pursue the ways that both sadness and humor affect human life, and has woven an intricate web linking the two in all of her characters’ lives. The balance she has found here is perfect, and The Clean House is a play that should not be missed.
Location Info:
Mixed Blood Theatre
Artist Info: Mixed Blood Theatre
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