TUBE TWISTED

Review of "The Clean House"

By Colleen Brown, Contributor

    I had to pull over while driving home from seeing “The Clean House” at the International City Theater in downtown Long Beach, “Clean House.” It was impossible to see the road through my tears of laughter and half-closed eyes. The play was excellent. Even now, hours after the comedy has come to a close, my friend and I are still cracking up. One would think that a play about “four markedly different, yet intimately connected women” could end up as a shallow amalgamation of female gossip scenes, but “The Clean House” was a refreshingly humorous take on female lives and relationships.
     The play, which opened on August 27 for a four-week run, centers on Lane, a doctor who leads a successful life, but cannot get her maid to clean the house. The maid, Matilde, refuses to clean because she’d rather spend her time trying to discover the perfect joke. When Lane’s neurotic sister, Virginia, finds out Matilde hates cleaning, she clandestinely takes over the task because it helps clear her mind and gives her a purpose. The sisters and Matilde discover that Lane’s husband is having an affair with Ana, a vivacious Argentinean woman whose only mission in life is to live to the fullest. Though it seems Ana could be an antagonist to the women of the story, she ends up teaching the women valuable life lessons; they should always laugh and enjoy themselves.
     Theater can get a little. . . ridiculous. People are depicted as falling madly in love within five minutes, characters come up with some of the best “I’m about to die” speeches, and overcoming a deep seeded wound can be as easy as singing a song to an empty bedroom. One of the exceptional things about “The Clean House” was the way they poked fun at theatrical stereotypes. Lane’s husband and Ana (whose name romantically “goes forward and backward!”) fall in love as he performs a mastectomy on her, and later journeys from Connecticut to Alaska in order to chop down a tree that he believes will cure her cancer.
     As much as Matilde endeavors to ascertain the perfect joke, she also fears finding it because she is afraid to laugh herself to death (just like her mother did). Because Sarah Ruhl, author of the play, dramatizes the situations the characters are in as well their reactions, it effectively makes the point that we don’t need to take life so seriously, or make a colossal deal out of relatively small problems.
     But there are also serious moments in the performance that touch you. Sisters Lane and Virginia are constantly bickering about whether the best way to live life is by pursuing a demanding career or caring for those you love. This is a question many wrestle with at one point or another, without finding a clear cut answer. We also see Lane’s mourning process when her husband leaves her with the justification that a Jewish law states: if you find your soul mate, “you must leave everything else in your life to be with that person.” And he’s not Jewish. Virginia’s discovery that she cleans obsessively to fill her empty life is heartbreaking, and it can hit close to home as many people struggle with finding their purpose in life. Though the experiences of the characters are presented comically, you are able to empathize with them as a result of the clever writing of Ruhl.
     “The Clean House” is a play worth multiple viewings; it left me laughing all night as I remembered the witty remarks and just generally put me in a great mood. Matilde imparts a memorable piece of wisdom when she explains that if we can look at our problems as very small, and the world as very big by comparison, it will make it easier to laugh and overcome the complications in our lives.