Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
✭✭✭✩✩
by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Alisa Palmer
Canadian Stage Company, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
February 14-May 8, 2008
Sarah Ruhl much lauded 2004 play The Clean House does all the things people want from a Broadway play. You laugh, you cry, you learn bits of trivia and it’s all over in two hours including intermission. Ruhl relentlessly superficial play has the quirkiness of Latin American magic realism but is too bourgeois to be avant garde.
The story concerns high-powered surgeon Lane (Seana McKenna), who has hired the Brazilian Matilde (Nicola Correia-Damude) as her live-in maid. The trouble is that Matilde doesn’t like to clean. It makes her sad. Instead, she spends her time trying to think of the perfect joke. One has to wonder how Matilde ever got the job in the first place, but then Ruhl would have no play. Luckily for Matilde, Lane’s sister Virginia (Fiona Reid), who seems to have stepped straight out of the 1950s not the present, is a June Cleaver-like housewife who loves to clean and offers to do Matilde’s work for her. From the odd panties in the laundry it soon becomes evident that Lane’s husband (Joseph Ziegler), also a surgeon, is having an affair. Indeed, he claims to have found his soul mate in Ana (Mary Ann McDonald), one of breast cancer patients.
The Canadian Stage Company gives the play a beautiful design by Judith Bowden and just about the best cast you can imagine. McKenna’s familiar sneering tone is perfectly at home and Reid’s defense of Virginia’s obsessive compulsion and her grand attempt to counteract it are truly hilarious. Correia-Damude gives a solid performance though her accent needs work and Ziegler makes his extraordinarily goofy role seem as believable as possible. It is McDonald, however, who becomes the real heart of the show since Ruhl leaves her untouched by the sitcom-like dialogue she gives the others. Her character is the one source of genuine emotion in the midst of a conceptually confused play that trades on the old stereotypes of Latin Americans as passionate and extravagant and WASPs as passionless and restrained. Life is messy Ruhl too obviously teaches us and her clean-obsessed surgeons and housewives, but that’s about it. What that has to do with “the perfect joke” remains a mystery. Despite all the advance praise, The Clean House turns out to be little more than amusing trifle.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-02-18.
Photo: Fiona Reid and Seana McKenna. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.
2008-02-18
The Clean House