The Clean House. A play that is far beyond the capacity of this company!!
The Clean House by Sarah Ruhl
I have become suspicious of local productions that advertise a version of the same play that has been a big hit in New York!! This assumes that the audience cannot distinguish between a production in one city and a production in another city . In the case of the Three Sisters production of The Clean House, that New York reference created enormous expectations that were soundly trounced by this show at the Gladstone.
And I must say, it was enough to read the program to expect a good show. Director Mary Ellis has an excellent reputation in this city as an actor as well as the way she works with actors. Cindy Beaton as the Virginia always gives a very good performance and is well known in local circles. As well, the other members of the cast have impressive bios in the program so there was no reason for any doubt.
Why then did this production make me so uneasy? First of all, the play is not an easy piece of writing because it involves a subtext that is important and must be referred to at all times without making it too obvious. Nuance is important. Then the humor is often cruel and that double level of fun and less fun points to one of the meanings of this show which in fact takes a lot of feminine fantasies , obsessions, problems that are real , women confronted by illness, infidelity, workplace pressure, lack of focus in life, fear of failure , brings them all together and builds a cruel sort of whimsy with flashbacks, with wishful thinking and lots of poetry. Imagine a lover who would run to the end of the world to bring back a plant to cure your cancer!! So far off the grid it became strangely self-destructive ! How “awfully” romantic!!
But the production betrayed it all. The first part of the play moved so slowly and so awkwardly that it was unbearable. No spark, no emotion, and the timing seemed to be off most of the time. This did not have the rhythm of a comedy. I wondered where this was going because it almost appeared to be a high school performance and at that level, one could understand how the moments of “fun” became annoying when we heard the “Brazilian “ maid telling jokes in the wrong accent, This was a professional production after all!! Later the same problem came up with Ana the mistress speaking Spanish in the wrong accent so we knew they had trouble and since language was one of the sources of humour here – telling jokes is not only the linguistic content but the music of the language which I was listening for..- is very important. I am sure the director could have found native speakers who would have had more fun with the language by making it into something playful that these actresses could not do.
The whimsical images of the parents as tellers of jokes and dancers that suddenly appear as flashbacks when the sisters tell their stories, are also awkward because the parents, apparently great dancers in Brazil were doing Argentinian tangos at first which confused things. Or perhaps that is the joke ! They are not really supposed to be Brazilians at all!! The music became a lot more subtle and attractive later as sounds like music from Bahia came wafting across the stage but here, the director had an excellent chance to try more diverse casting with people who knew how to dance and who could really bring us into a cultural origin that would be more meaningful in this context. A high school performance, one could have understood but this is a professional company . The point is that the ‘difference’ which is outlined in the play, does not have any impact because this professional staging shows us local people trying to do something they can’t do and that becomes a real distraction. How disappointing.
Perhaps the most awkward moment in the play that was not well performed was the meeting of all the women …the new mistress, the shocked wife, the sister and all the stereotypes of a woman’s world that came crashing down. . The mistress appears to be calm, the wife’s emotions are not particularly clear, the Brazilian maid sits there like an afterthought, there is no emotion anywhere , the only sentiment is a great feeling of malaise on the part of the audience because the situation is actually not very funny…It is cruel. More could have been done to lighten it all perhaps by making the male the brunt of a huge joke as he runs around the North Pole looking for a special cancer curing plant. ! That is the funniest thing in the play which in fact is not funny at all. How does one perform such a strange situation of exacerbated romanticism!! The dilemma is very tough to solve. In fact isn’t it the man who becomes the fool because the illness unites the women..and the man is totally useless. But in spite of all these magnificent contradictions which could have fueled much emotion, it all remained rather bland.
Even that scene where they are eating apples. The essence of the feminine mystique, the myth of Eve in the garden of Eden a mixture of nastiness and ridicule as the totally unsexy Eve who tosses her apples of knowledge away! That didn’t work either !!! Even Ana herself (Rebecca Benson) didn’t seem to realize what she was doing!!
Cindy Beaton as the older sister who liked cleaning, who had a grasp of her character’s dilemma was often fine and Puja Uppal who was supposed to be the Brazilian maid but who became the antithesis of a maid, was basically a sweet young thing who wanted to be a comic , but not at all in her character because she was not able to go much further with her performance. That was the play.. so full of excellent contradictions, aimed at destroying feminine stereotyping that it should have been very very funny but it was so bland, I felt nothing but irritation except for Andrea Steinwands set which was really quite beautful, even when it was messy !!David Magladry’s lighting contributed perfectly to the atmosphere as well.
The Clean House plays until February 24 at the Gladstone.