The Clean House. A play that is far beyond the capacity of this company!!

The Clean House. A play that is far beyond the capacity of this company!!

The Clean House       Photo: Poster thanks to  Three Sisters Theatre 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.

 

 

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