What are People Saying About it?

Key Quotes:

"Comedy, drama, romance, fantasy, magic and more"
Columbus Dispatch

"Moving and amusing affirmation of life and love amid loss and change"
Columbus Dispatch

"You'd hate to miss even one joke"
Columbus Dispatch 

Read the full reviews:
The Columbus Dispatch review.

The Metromix.com review.

Read the New York Times's rave review of the NYC production.

Who's the Playwright?

Sarah Ruhl

Sarah Ruhl (Playwright) (born 1974), an internationally known 21st century playwright who has earned two degrees from Brown (B.A. in English in 1997 and an M.F.A. in playwriting in 2001), her works include Eurydice, Passion Play, Melancholy Play, Late: A Cowboy Song and Dead Man's Cell Phone. Ms. Ruhl has won several awards and recognitions for her work that include the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2004. She was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in 2005 for The Clean House and she won the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in 2006. She is also one of the founding members of the magazine One Factorial.

Play Notes:

What Is The "House" That Needs Cleaning?
Martine Kei Green, Dramaturg

The genesis for The Clean House came from an amusing anecdote. In an interview with NPR's Susan Stamberg, Ruhl admits that the inspiration stems from an overheard remark-"my cleaning lady is depressed and won't clean my house...so I took her to the hospital and had her medicated and she still won't clean." From this story, Ruhl creates a play in the magical realism genre (a genre that infuses reality with fantastical moments) that embraces the metaphysical to deal with the power of humor, love and death.

On the subject of the metaphysical, Ruhl tends to morph one place into another - crossing the spans of time - to illustrate how characters' lives are intertwined. Lane's living room transforms into an expansive ocean outside of the balcony of Charles and Ana and things thrown off their balcony land in the middle of her living room - where they remain. As Ruhl mentions in an interview, "If you've got a living room...I'm interested in what's below it and what's above it...I guess I'm interested in those more invisible terrains (Weckworth 31). Those "invisible terrains" eventually come to symbolize the interconnectedness of all humans - how moments that occur in others lives, directly or indirectly, affect us all.

Ruhl then melds this love of the metaphysical with an Ovid-esque manner of storytelling. Ruhl explains that Ovid's way of storytelling is "not the neat Aristotelian arc, but, instead, small transformations that are delightful and tragic" (Lahr 4). Ruhl muses that "plays have revelations in the moment, where emotions transform almost inexplicably" (Lahr 4). Accordingly, characters in Ruhl's plays are subject to their in-the-moment emotions and the lack of logic and reason that usually accompanies these emotions. Therefore, Ruhl's plays encourage an audience to think about the irrationality of human behavior and action, to be comfortable with not always understanding a character's action or the events in her plays, and to ultimately, expect the unexpected.

To push this idea further, Ruhl focuses on the transformative power of humor in The Clean House to create the unexpected. Over the course of this play Ruhl heals both characters and audiences through the humor and philosophical conversation on humor that she plants within the script. Through this humor, we are guided into questioning the possibility that our desire for power, money and respect has caused us to forget about the basics of everyday existence (love and humor) and the nourishment of our souls that they provide. In essence, we come to Ruhl's play and this production expecting a story about a maid who cleans houses and walk away questioning how to "clean up" our own lives.

Selected Production History:

• The Clean House won the 2004 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, awarded annually to the best English-language play written by a woman, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
• South Coast Repertory (West Coast premiere, January 2005)
• The Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington, D.C. (July 11 - August 14, 2005)
• Goodman Theatre (spring 2006, in Ruhl's native Chicago)
• Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater (New York premiere, October 2006)
• Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, England (April 2006, European Premiere)
• Yale Repertory Theatre (September 2004, World Premiere)