Matilde, a Brazilian live-in maid with an inconvenient disdain for housecleaning, would have been right at home in World War II efforts to weaponize humour. That is, if she occupied a vintage Monty Python sketch instead of Sarah Ruhl’s new play “The Clean House.” Although the humour of using humour for military purposes wouldn’t gel with her, the kinship between the two scenarios isn’t so much of a stretch. Early in the play, she tells how her own ill mother died laughing at one of her father’s jokes. T, which is as good a way to go as a mid-coital shedding of mortal coils. Her own search for the perfect joke is laced with this particular memory, the death of her mother followed by her father a short time later, and manifested in the fear that discovering the perfect joke will kill her. Naturally, she spends her time trying to discover that holy grail of guffaws, although it would be wrong to make a case for suicidal tendencies. Rather, Matilde lives as if comedy is the highest form of human aspiration, a sublime art.
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Kathy Bell Denton and Caryn West
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Eileen Galindo and Kathy Bell Denton
With considerable spice and panache, Eileen Galindo performs Matilde in such a way that even jokes told in Portuguese, without translation, are funny. This goes to show to what extent humour rests as much, if not more, in the telling of a joke than in its meaning. Of course, humour can explode out of control, like a tomato plant or grapevine, without some straight-up support. The inspired cast offers contrast with verve and, it should be noted, some humour of their own.
Kathy Bell Denton’s Virginia plays the cleanliness-obsessed spinster with just the right kind of pathetic comedy and drives the play’s most poignant relationship, while the marvelously named Rob Roy Cesar hams it up on stage without upstaging either of his two characters, husband Charles and, in flashback, Matilde’s father. Also inhabiting a dual role – Charles’ extramarital lover and, in flashback, Matilde’s mother– is Nadia Nardini, a Brazilian actress making her U.S. debut at the ICT who delivers the bittersweet with considerable grace.
The most upright role of the lot belongs to the commanding Caryn West, whose straight-laced, rigid character is the kind writers love knocking off pedestals. She begins with a spirit like Stephen Gifford’s immaculate, modern, hospital-white set and is made to bend for the purpose of an ingratiating spiritual salvation; from orderly and stuck-up to unraveled and relaxed, thanks to a performance that works with The Clean House’s only developed emotional core. Here lies humour’s boorish counterpart, irony; the most sensible and put-upon character is made to surrender the high ground, which is awfully convenient for characters that consist of a lazy housekeeper who doesn’t perform the work for which she is hired, a sister too emotionally stunted to seek her own achievements, and a philanderer and his lover who shoehorn their adultery into hippie love by way of so-called Jewish law.
Is it a joke, then, that all these shortcomings and transgressions are excused because the victim isn’t sufficiently floppy and indulgent? In Lisa Kron’s “The Wake,” the liberal bourgeois protagonist was similarly afflicted by psychological rigidity, although she offered a greater complexity and sophistication that transcended the simple fact of seriousness. In the movies, Sarah Jessica Parker once played a high-powered New York professional in the generally forgettable dud “The Family Stone,” and was deemed so unacceptably tight that a Wilson brother was sent in to loosen her up. In all these cases, we see a stereotype of the Serious Person whose crystalline sense of responsibility and clarity is perceived as in need of shattering. Amidst the shards, we are supposed to rejoice in discovering the dandy, the libertine, the bon vivant, the carefree slacker or, in The Clean House, a woman liberated from her “shackles” by people who, on closer examination, callously trampled on her distress. Where Matilde is in all of this, except as a humorous ornament tucked into the other people’s drama, asks whether the ability to laugh isn’t more cover-up than liberator – a means of trivializing the uncomfortable – although it’s not the play that asks the question despite Sarah Ruhl’s wit or caryn dasai’s clever direction.
As a brief ode to the power of a good laugh, The Clean House is a happy little confection that presents an entertaining, if unfocused, scenario. Even the heavy addition of cancer in the second act can’t exert so much of a gravitational pull that the play loses its optimism or sense of conviction. Where it falters is in generating a sympathetic conviction beyond vague agreement. But who will notice when laughing?
The Clean House. Written by Sarah Ruhl. Directed by caryn dasai. Starring Caryn West, Eileen Galindo, Kathy Bell Denton, Rob Roy Cesar, and Nadia Nardini. On stage at the International City Theatre, Long Beach, Thursdays through Sundays, until Sunday, Sept.19. www.internationalcitytheatre.org.
