Sarah Ruhl, like Beckett and other modern absurdist dramatists, requests a doubleness of us: to see that her world is simultaneously not quite real yet very real.
In The Clean House, her 2008 play now in its L.A. premiere at the Odyssey, we are asked to believe in the following: Lane (Colette Kilroy), a successful doctor hires a Brazilian maid, Matilde (Elizabeth Liang), to clean house for her. Matilde, child of "the two funniest people in Brazil," lives (and dies) for Portuguese-language jokes. She also hates to clean. Luckily, Lane's scatty sister Virginia (Shawna Casey, alternating with D.J. Harner), loves dust and doing laundry, so she slips into the house every day and, in effect, becomes the maid's maid.
Other oddball characters include Lane's surgeon husband, Charles (Don Fischer), who not only falls in love with 67-year-old Ana (Denise Blasor) while performing a mastectomy on her, but brings her home to meet his wife. Domestic warfare breaks out, some of it plausible, some of it not.
Ruhl, a finalist for the 2010
Pulitzer Prize for In the Next Room: The Vibrator Play, asks us to suspend disbelief throughout, something I found hard to do, yet she is such a skilful writer, a magician really, that I still enjoyed The Clean House thanks to its knockabout comedy and unsentimental exploration of death.
Ruhl's technique is to mix laughter and tears, light and dark, hope and despair. It takes stylish actors and a sure-handed director to bring her unique vision to life. The ensemble at the Odyssey rose to the challenge, aided greatly by Frederica Nascimento's striking set & costumes and Kathi O'Donohue's liquid lighting.
