Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House is on its way to becoming one of America's most produced plays this season -- in addition to this fall's expected Broadway engagement at Lincoln Center Theater. Ed Stern, producing artistic director of the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, recognized the play's merits even before it began collecting accolades a year ago. (It was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in drama, among other honors.) In Cincinnati, it's getting the kind of high-end production you'd expect from a Tony Award recipient for best regional theatre. The theatre's associate artistic director, Michael Evan Haney, has staged a production capitalizing on Ruhl's clever script with a scintillating cast and scenic design (by Narelle Sissons) that underscores the show's magical elements.
Magic is the operative quality in this inventively conceived play. Much like Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez's novels of magical realism, The Clean House presents mundane things imbued with magic. Matilde (Michele Vazquez) has come to the United States from Brazil, and Lane (Priscilla Shanks), a busy physician, has hired her to keep the doctor's dazzlingly white house, well, dazzlingly white. But Matilde prefers to conceive and tell jokes: Her parents were the funniest people in her hometown (her mother died laughing from a joke her father told). Into the breach steps Virginia (Susan Greenhill), Lane's sister, who is obsessed with cleaning, filling the voids in her own empty life with scrubbing, vacuuming, dusting, and more. As she and Matilde become friends, they discover that Lane's life has unexpected (and messy) complications.
Charles (Paul DeBoy), Lane's physician husband, has decided he's met his soul mate, Ana (Lynn Milgrim), and brings her to meet Lane. All the characters intersect in Act II, with Ana's terminal illness as a catalyst: Charles leaves "a metaphysical Connecticut" for Alaska to find a cure, Matilde brainstorms perfect jokes that might heal, Lane steps in to care for her "rival," and Virginia goes a little crazy.
None of it feels quite real: Ana, Virginia, and Matilde go apple picking with Charles. From a balcony they toss half-eaten apples that land in Lane's increasingly cluttered living room. Through an expanse of windows, we watch Matilde's late parents dancing on the beach and Charles trekking across the wilds of Alaska. Ana asks Matilde to help her die with a joke.
Each of The Clean House's four women is a component of a whole person. By play's end, they've each put their house in order and cleaned up. The perceived order and balance of the first act was actually turmoil; the tumult of the second evolves into a natural state of balance. This sounds more calculating than it plays on stage: The Clean House is a wonderful piece of comic writing. With this strong cast and superb design, it lands solidly as an entertainment that's also about finding out what makes life worth living -- a ripe apple, a good laugh, a sweet kiss.
The Clean House runs Jan. 24-Feb. 24 at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, 962 Mt. Adams Circle, Cincinnati. Tickets: (513) 421-3888. Website: www.cincyplay.com.