Clean House contains so many puns and paradoxes, it is sometimes too witty for its own good. See, the house starts off clean, and then slowly gets dirtier as the characters’ dirty laundry, both literal and metaphorical, accumulates. Neat freak sisters, Lane and Virginia, learn to embrace their emotional issues when they learn to allow physical mess in their lives, with the help of Matilde, a Brazilian maid who doesn’t like to clean, and Ana, a “life force” who is dying.
Yet, what Clean House lacks in subtlety and realism it more than makes up for in punchy dialogue, solid performances, and natural chemistry. Their interactions, whether comic or dramatic, are entertaining and compelling to watch. The cast has great comedic timing, especially Joelle Thomas (SFS ’10) as Virginia. Thomas masters her character’s quirks, making someone who could easily be two dimensional and irksome delightful, yet full of pathos. Her rambling, stream of consciousness monologues hop from a peppy punch line to a heartfelt confession without losing a beat or the audience’s attention.
The weak link in Clean House is the pacing. The first act focuses mostly on Matilde (Allie Villarreal, COL’12) through a series of monologues, explaining her backstory and her dreams of becoming a comedienne instead of a maid. Most of Matilde’s jokes are told in Portuguese, and while Villarreal is sufficiently animated to express some of the meaning behind them, they are mostly lost in translation and fall flat. Aside from a few dramatic moments, Matilde spends most of the play in search of the perfect joke and her philosophical musings on humor quickly become redundant and circular.
No real dramatic action occurs until the end of Act I, when Lane discovers her husband’s infidelity, which shakes up her pristine home. From there Act II introduces two new characters and moves at a sitcom-style pace, almost racing to the finish while trying to cram all the emotional confrontations and revelations in before it’s too late.
But the play’s lack of a traditional narrative format prevents the pacing issues from becoming too critical. Playwright Sarah Ruhl constructed the story as a series of moments and interactions that always freeze at crucial emotional conflicts, only to skip to the next moment. The effect is almost like watching a series of related vignettes and monologues.
Faced with such an irregularly constructed play, director Laura Brienza (COL ‘10) has utilized the set in an imaginative way. Clean House often steps into metaphysical territory, choosing to show what the characters are thinking or imagining. Brienza blends the physical and mental worlds together by digitally projecting captions to explain subtext or serve as witty thought bubbles. The center of the stage features a platform, upon which characters’ thoughts are acted out simultaneously with their monologues. This not only makes the monologues more compelling, but the juxtaposition of the two worlds—one real and one imaginary, one clean and one messy—and the way they eventually bleed into each other is an intriguing process in itself.
The best choice Brienza made was the decision to score Clean House with Brazilian drumming. It adds an irresistible rhythm to the show, breathing energy and dramatic suspense into many a long monologue, and connects the disconnected moments together.
While the source material has its flaws, the cast of Clean House pulls things off with the gravitas and whimsy it asks of them. The end result is a spirited celebration of how physically and emotionally messy life can get, and how it’s best to just embrace it.
Clean House runs Thursday-Saturday at 8 pm, Saturday at 2pm, and Sunday at 7pm in Walsh Black Box Theater. Tickets are $9 and can be purchased online at performingarts.georgetown.edu or at the Box Office in the Davis Performing Arts Center.
