[Woody’s [rating: 3.5]
Livia Demarchi (right) plays Matilde, a would-be Brazilian comedian working as a maid, and Tamar Cohn is Virginia, a neurotic housewife looking for something to do with herself in “The Clean House.” Photo by Gregg Le Blanc.
- Clearly not seeing eye to eye in “The Clean House” are Sumi Narendran (foreground, left) and Sylvia Burboeck — while (background, from left) Steve Price, Livia Demarchi and Tamar Cohn look on. Photo by Gregg Le Blanc.
Sarah Ruhl tells anyone who’ll listen she hates that her plays and characters have been labeled quirky and whimsical.
She and her distorted creations are just that, of course.
Need proof? Check out the Ross Valley Players production, “The Clean House.” It’s filled with quirkiness and whimsy.
I’d actually gone there in search of those attributes.
But what I didn’t anticipate was for them to be intertwined so intricately with poignancy.
“The Clean House” is about many matters: falling in love, a search for the perfect joke, cleanliness and clutter, sibling rivalry, friendship and forgiveness, mourning, living life to the fullest.
But Act I evolves at such a slow pace, despite fitful turns, and is so surreal, so Dali-esque, I kept looking for clocks or Apple wristwatches that were melting.
I found none.
I did, however, locate an ingenious multi-leveled set, designed by David Shirk, that allowed me to easily follow characters from room to room, from New England to Alaska, from past to present, from reality to imagination.
It included a screen that projected pithy storyline and relationship summaries, translations of foreign phrases, and shots of falling snow, tossed apples and swimming fish.
True plot points.
But Ruhl, MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” winner, actually consigned her creations to “Metaphysical Connecticut,” whatever that means.
“The Clean House” is the play that put the then-31-year-old on the theatrical map in 2005, when it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize a year after first being produced.
Ultimately, it centers on a main character being overtaken by breast cancer.
My wife, who’s been free of that affliction for 20 years, found its climactic scenes tough to watch — despite a nuanced, uplifting performance by Sumi Narendran as Ana.
So did I.
But neither of us ditched the show. Nor did anyone else. The drama part of the comedy-drama had become compelling.
Ruhl previously dealt with cancer in her work. Her father had died of it in 1994, and she purportedly wrote “Eurydice,” a 2003 play, to “have a few more conversations with him.”
“The Clean House” is adroitly directed by JoAnne Winter, co-founder of San Francisco’s Word for Word.
She notes in the playbill that “everyone is a mess, broken, needy, and frightened, even the people who seem to have it all together. We may not ever fully understand the jokes life plays on us [so] it is a joy to be reminded…to embrace the messiness of life.”
Though “The Clean House” at first seems to be about disorder, it is, in fact, about putting your house in order.
Its plotline isn’t quite linear, but the evolution of its characters is.
A Brazilian maid, Matilde, who finds feather-dusters, vacuums and other cleaning materials abhorrent, lazes around the home of her employer, Lane (an uptight doctor married to a breast surgeon).
Lane’s sister, Virginia, is a compulsive-obsessive housewife seeking something to do with her life, so she offers to assume Matilde’s cleaning responsibilities and free her to work out “the perfect joke” in Portuguese.
Livia Demarchi makes Matilde believable in spite of the character’s being grounded somewhere in mid-air.
Tamar Cohn appropriately portrays Virginia as ditzy, childlike (innocent and primal) and desperately hungering to be helpful.
And Sylvia Burboeck effortlessly converts Lane into the kind of arrogant, stressed-out doc we all know (“I didn’t go to medical school to clean my own house”).
The sole male in the equation, Lane’s husband Charles, abandons Lane after being smitten by Ana, a patient.
But that ends up nowhere near as unloving as it portends.
Not incidentally, Steve Price runs a beguiling gamut as Charles — from abominable snowman-like seeker of a Yew tree and operatic/choreographic physician to compassionate human being hurt by not being able to heal.
I’m sure I wasn’t meant to immediately get some ruminations within the play.
Or ever.
Some enlightenment might have been expected to arrive hours — or days later. After all, Ruhl originally wanted to be a poet, and much poetry is initially unfathomable or mysterious, right?
Like an elongated Portuguese joke never translated.
I surely wasn’t sure what I thought of the whole eccentric, moving enchilada while watching it, nor instantly after exiting. Yet the next morning I recognized it had a deliciously subtle, flavorful aftertaste.
One that absolutely left me looking forward to the Bay Area’s next show by Ruhl.
“The Clean House” plays at The Barn Theatre, Marin Art & Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Ross, through June 14. Performances: Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Sunday matinees, 2 p.m. Tickets: $14 to $29. Information: (415) 456-9555 or www.rossvalleyplayers.com.
Contact Woody Weingarten at http://vitalitypress.com or voodee@sbcglobal.net
