The Clean House and Twelfth Night

[January 30th, 2008]

The Clean House

Even before this whimsical comedy opened in New York last season, its author, Sarah Ruhl, was lauded as one of the finest playwrights of her generation. She was already a MacArthur fellow, and the play had been honored with a Pulitzer nomination and a breathless endorsement from Charles Isherwood, the notoriously negative critic for The New York Times , who called it “one of the finest and funniest plays” of 2006. But, after seeing Artists Rep’s production this weekend, all the praise seems terribly premature.

The Clean House starts out an entertaining series of encounters between stock characters: Lane (Susan Coromel), a humorless, uptight doctor, clad in white; Virginia (Marilyn Stacey), her humorless, uptight, neat-freak sister, in khaki; and Lane’s maid, Matilde (Amaya Villazan), who wears black, hates cleaning and would rather be a comedian—like her parents, the funniest people in Brazil, who died in a tragic humor-related murder-suicide when her father came up with a joke so good it killed.

There are some funny moments here, even though the material is hardly original (see Monty Python’s “The Funniest Joke in the World”), and feels more like the setup for an ABC sitcom than a Pulitzer nominee. Things really start to go downhill, though, when Lane’s husband, Charles (Shelly Lipkin), runs off with a 67-year-old cancer patient (Linda Williams Janke) and the whole thing degenerates into a maudlin mishmash of smug quirkiness and sentimentality, like a Lifetime movie penned by Gabriel García Márquez. By the time Charles heads for the Arctic to cut down a Pacific yew for his cancer-patient mistress and Lane overcomes her jealously to care for her, the play is beyond all hope of recovery.

It doesn’t help matters that Allen Nause’s production has some serious problems, the least of which is a set that relegates several scenes to a balcony behind the theater’s bleacher seating, forcing half the audience to twist painfully to see what’s going on. Worse is the ensemble’s stunted emotional range, which accommodates only loudly giddy and loudly distressed (although, with a script that alternates pithy observations about the wonder of it all with a woman’s slow death by leukemia, who can blame them?). The exception is Amaya Villazan, who delivers her jokes (in flawless Portuguese) with a warmth and sincerity that almost overcomes her material.

In Nause’s defense, he’s far from the only director to fall under Ms. Ruhl’s inexplicable spell—The Clean House is the second-most popular play among regional theaters this season. But if Ruhl is, as Nause describes her, “one of the most engaging and important playwrights” of the age, brother, we’re in trouble.

Twelfth Night (Portland Center Stage)

Fortunately, you can always fall back on the classics. At least, as long as they’re in the hands of a director as competent as Jane Jones, down from Seattle to helm Portland Center Stage’s Twelfth Night . Too many bored directors, forced by tradition and economics to stage another goddamn Shakespeare, try to shoehorn a perfectly decent comedy into an awkward fancy-dress conceit or inappropriate political statement, but Jones has the good sense to leave the play alone. Indeed, she embraces the theatricality of the mistaken-identity romantic comedy with playful blocking that reminds us that, yes, we are watching a play and, yes, we’re loving it. God bless her for it.

This is, without hyperbole, an entirely satisfying production. On the technical side, William Bloodgood’s set is modestly beautiful, Deborah Trout’s costumes are dazzling, Nancy Schertler’s lights are a show in their own right, and Joshua Kohl’s music is just delightful—but the ensemble, made up mostly of Ashland vets, could get along just fine without them. They’re all good, but Brad Bellamy stands out with an inspired take on Feste the fool that lands somewhere between Jack Nicholson and Sancho Panza. Trust me, he’s great. If you’re looking for real entertainment, this is it.