Above: Mary Lea Floden and Colleen McCandless. Below, left: Craig Anton, Elizabeth Swain and Colleen McCandless.
All photos courtesy of Keith Ian Polakoff.
Virginia: I didn’t know jokes had time signatures.
Matilde: Oh, they do. Ask me what my profession is then ask me what my greatest problem is.
Virginia: What’s your profession?
Matilde: I’m a comedian.
Virginia: What’s your—
Matilde: Timing
The Clean House is a strangely touching and often times funny play that American playwright Sarah Ruhl wrote in 2003. On paper, its plot’s subject and characters may seem odd, yet the play’s themes appear in our daily lives and its characters are recognizable in their humaneness. As the action unfolds, the play’s eccentricities become poetic and insightful, and when the play is done well its action appears just as natural as it does surreal.
Matilde, a Brazilian woman in her late 20s loses her parents (“the two funniest people in Brazil”) and moves to the States. She finds herself working as a cleaning woman for Lane, a middle-aged doctor who’s is drifting apart from her husband, Charles, (also a doctor). Matilde would rather dream up jokes than clean Lane’s house. This is not only because cleaning makes Matilde feel sad but also because her parents love of laughing was only matched by the love they felt for each other, and they instilled in her a deep understanding of the necessity for humor in life. She dreams of one day discovering “The Perfect Joke” and this search above all else gives her hope. As the relationship between Lane and Charles starts to feel hopeless, we discover that Lane’s husband is having a love affair. The affair he is having, however, is not the sort of clichéd infidelity one sometimes encounters in middle age; Charles has found his soul mate. Her name is Ana and she is an older woman.
It is this relationship between Charles and Ana that sits at the center of The Clean House. It is a love story that is unconventional on the surface and is allowed only a little time to make itself believable on the stage. For it to gain the weight it requires to make the play resonate, it takes great focus of craft from the creative team and the unwavering dedication of its cast. This is also necessary for creating a cohesive tone for this play and, perhaps most importantly, for making it funny. For all of this to come together and for The Clean House to work, it requires a bit of magic; something that, like the joke Matilde searches for, can only take place if everything is perfectly aligned. The elusive magic that I’m talking about of course, is that of timing, and unfortunately for the current revival of The Clean House being staged by Cal Rep, the timing is off.
Great timing has made lines I’d have never thought were funny make me burst out laughing uncontrollably. Likewise, great theatricality has stretched time out before my eyes, allowing me to physically exist in this reality but emotionally and mentally exist in another. Many moments in The Clean House blur the lines between reality and the imagined. Likewise, there are a great many things that should be funny in The Clean House that rely on its actors’ delivery more than on a punch line. In fact, the most deliberate jokes of the play don’t have punch lines at all and those that do are untranslated to the audience, masked by Portuguese and whispers. In observing The Clean House it is more necessary to understand the importance of humor to its characters’ lives than it is to be in on the actual jokes themselves. Nearly all of the play’s laughs come from its situations. Nearly all of the plays transcendent power comes from its metaphysical theatricality. It is timing that is responsible for both of these elements’ successes.
Many of the characters’ behavioral changes take place with the aid of subtitles that help illuminate what they are thinking. While this device is supposed to help us follow the internal feelings of The Clean Houses’s characters, unless we see a believable representation of what we are supposed to be witnessing, the subtitles feel out of touch with the play we are watching. This requires a physical language that elevates the material from the literal world and into that of the theatrical. Unfortunately here, many of the theatrical elements feel misplaced and random, taking away from, instead of adding to, a cohesive theatricality.
Elizabeth Swain, Craig Anton and Valerie Stanford.
Miniature cleaning tools, an odd theatrical representation of a tree, a strange flood of dirt pouring onto the stage and a small handful of misguided projections were among the choices being made here that appeared stylized just to be stylized, instead of attempting to tie the play’s literal and metaphorical realities together.
Even more upsetting is the lack of believability in the relationship between Charles and Ana. When we meet them at the top of act two, the surreal enactment of Charles performing a mastectomy on Ana as well as the short scene that follows is supposed to convince us that the two of them are soul mates. This requires a grand, romantic and theatrical gesture of some kind during the surgery and an intense physical connection between the two in the scene that follows. Here the scene plays out like something from a forgotten silent movie, with the subtitles trying to clarify rather than helping enhance the action.
Joanne Gordon, who was the artistic director of Cal Rep for 25 years until she retired at the end of 2013, has directed this production of The Clean Houseand it is unfortunate that I cannot see her obvious theatrical expertise here. For someone so clearly in love with the theater who obviously knows what she’s doing, it is strange to see something so muddled take place under her guidance.
Colleen McCandless and Elizabeth Swain.
While the cast all seem to be well-seasoned actors, nearly everyone seems mis-cast here. Craig Anton as Charles seemed almost superficial at the cusp of such a serious new understanding in his life, and Elizebeth Swain felt sweet rather than overwhelmingly charismatic as Ana who is supposed to be “like anyone’s soul mate.”
Colleen McCandless unquestionably seemed at one with Matilde’s conflicted memories and feelings. Her eyes expressed a great complexity of emotions that resonated beautifully during her more introspective scenes, but believing that she was Brazilian or undeniably funny, two traits necessary for her character to really come together, was a stretch.
Lane’s clean freak of a sister, Virginia, cleans obsessively because it makes her unfulfilled life feel like it has some structure and meaning. Lea Floden found emotionally honesty in Virginia’s character but her comedic timing (there it is again!) was off. That comedic edge is a necessity for bringing understanding to her tragic flaws and also the great irony of her neurosis. Ultimately this made Virginia feel more pathetic than she should have.
Elizabeth Swain, Colleen McCandless, Craig Anton.
Only Valerie Stanford as Lane found the perfect balance for her character and managed to stay in the same world throughout nearly all of her performance. She got her laughs, even at her more tragic moments; her character transformed believably before our eyes and the scene in which she shifted back and forth between laughing and crying near the end of the first act gave me literal goosebumps. Lane is a role that she should likely play again. I have a feeling that she could find even more within her character when playing the role in a more cohesive production.
Cal Rep’s production of The Clean House is not altogether a bad time at the theater. It moves briskly, has some fine production values and at times, though they are more fleeting than they should be, illuminates the themes that Sarah Ruhl’s odd and prickly love-comedy sets out to. I was never bored while watching The Clean House but I was often more confused than I should have been.
Near the end of act one Matilde observes that “Love isn’t clean… It’s dirty. Like a good joke.” Love is also, like a well told joke, dependent nearly entirely on its timing. Without timing in love’s favor, a truly great romance may never come to be.
Great plays it turns out are much the same, and while the greatness of Ruhl’s Clean House may be debated, I know it is full of more possibility than it shows here. Perhaps, like Charles and Ana discover in one another, it just needs to find its soul mate.