The Clean House Press Reviews

Moments after a tender dance between actors Paul Ugalde and Alicia Kaplan during a rehearsal for "The Clean House" devolved into a nasty near-brawl, director Cristina Alicea called for a break in the action.

"Hold on a second, let's go back," Alicea said as she interrupted the scene. "When you scream," she told Ugalde, "it's not an ‘ow.' You're screaming AT her." She then walked Kaplan through her part in the scene, where the actress comes in wielding "a frying pan in one hand and spices in another.

"There has to be, like," Alicea told Kaplan before pausing and smiling, "... you want to kill him."

Those scripted screams and threats of violence were about the only signs of angst at a rehearsal last week for a play that represents a milestone in the 18-year history of Vermont Stage. Alicea chose "The Clean House" to be the first production she'll direct at Vermont Stage, the Burlington-based professional theater company she joined as artistic director last summer. The play by Sarah Ruhl, which opens Wednesday at FlynnSpace, gives audiences their first glimpse into the type of script Alicea is drawn to, and also provides the initial signs of the directorial style of the woman who replaced longtime artistic director Mark Nash.

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There’s a scene in the Vermont Stage production of “The Clean House” in which Lane, one of the play’s central characters, alternates abruptly between laughing and crying. She has many more reasons to cry than to laugh — she just found out her husband, a doctor, left her for one of his patients — but Lane’s dual emotions capture the dichotomies that infuse Sarah Ruhl’s script.

The five characters grapple, as the title suggests, with clean vs. unclean, as well as order vs. disorder, ease vs. disease and laughing vs. crying. Instead of conflicting, the seemingly opposing forces blend seamlessly in the production that opened Wednesday at FlynnSpace. “The Clean House” represents the directorial debut of Cristina Alicea, who’s in her first season as artistic director of the 18-year-old theater company, and she demonstrated that she knows just what a tricky script like this requires to make it balance between laugh-out-loud funny and stifle-your-tears touching.

Alicea’s handle on Ruhl’s intent undoubtedly helped her draw terrific performances out of the quintet of actors, who make a potentially silly play about a Brazilian maid who’s more interested in her search for the perfect joke than in cleaning houses into something way, way deeper. “The Clean House” veers into the difficult-to-maneuver realm of magical realism — scenes taking place simultaneously in separate locations somehow manage to interact, for instance — but Alicea continually keeps things on track in a two-hour production that never loses focus.

That theme of duality is a continual, well-thought-out thread that extends to the set by scenic designer Jeff Modereger. Lane’s living room is all creamy, dreamy white, suggesting not only cleanliness but an otherworldly location that could be somewhere between heaven and earth. It’s as light as the tone, which floats above the play’s weighty subject matter of illness, death, the dissolution of love and, most significantly, the importance of people learning to accept when they need each other.

The catalyst for all of this — you could call her the one stirring up all the dust, if only she actually cleaned houses — is Matilde the housekeeper, played to intense perfection by Deanna McGovern. Her intensity, augmented by her black clothes against the white set, shows itself not only in the play’s more dramatic moments but in her childlike obsession with finding the perfect joke. It’s an obsession driven by a desire to connect with her late, comic parents and becomes an obsession to fix things in her current life. “A good joke,” Matilde says, “cleans your insides out. If I don’t laugh for a week, I feel dirty.” As Matilde, McGovern certainly helps the audience clean their insides, and her character in turn cleans more metaphorical houses than real ones.

The role of Lane is a difficult one — the doctor spurned by her doctor-husband is prickly throughout — but Dana Block avoids making Lane an ice princess and reveals her to be a tough woman who only really discovers how tough and human she is when she finally breaks down. Her sister, Virginia (played by Vermont Stage veteran Ruth Wallman) is the polar opposite of Lane — Virginia is not ambitious but does love tending to her own home (“If you do not clean,” Virginia asks, “how do you know if you’ve made any progress in life?”). Wallman makes Virginia just wacky enough to bring out her character’s humor but her feet never leave the ground so much that she loses her humanity.

Paul Ugalde and Alicia Kaplan create real sparks as Charles and Ana, the doctor and patient whose romance sends Lane into a world of emotions she never expected to enter. It’s impossible to hate the couple even if they’re home-wreckers; Charles’ explanation of how the romance happened is so naively charming and Ana is so likable that everyone in “The Clean House” comes to understand their love. Ugalde, a regular on local stages, gives one of his stronger performances as a man who seems to be driven only by good even as he’s doing things that aren’t so good — there’s that duality again — and Kaplan is all passion and energy (maybe a little too much in some early melodramatic moments) as the woman who never meant to bring pain to anyone and, in the end, brings a whole world of healing.

Kaplan’s brief stray into excess was one of the few missteps in a production that includes unnecessary use of projected slides on the floor — some in English, some in Portuguese and all distracting, especially for the large chunk of the audience that couldn’t see them clearly. But none of that takes away from a production that dwells very comfortably between black and white, funny and sad, and laughing and crying, those places where most of life is lived.

‘The Clean House" seems, at first, to be a silly surreal comedy, but it's not long before it becomes a deliciously funny and poignant portrayal of four women.

 Vermont Stage Company opened a charming and deeply touching production of Sarah Ruhl's quirky 2004 comedy Wednesday at the Flynn Center's FlynnSpace. Running through Feb. 12, the production represents an impressive directing debut for Cristina Alicea, the Burlington professional theater's new producing artistic director.

"The Clean House" opens with Matilde, the Brazilian housekeeper, telling a joke in Portuguese; in fact, all of the aspiring comedian's jokes are in Portuguese. She has been hired by Lane, a busy hospital physician, to clean her house - but Matilde finds cleaning depressing.

Fortunately, Lane's sister, Virginia, a frustrated housewife who loves cleaning, befriends Matilde and secretly does her work for her. But the real trouble begins when Lane discovers that her husband, Charles, a surgeon, is leaving her for another woman, Ana, one of his cancer patients. In short, Lane's world falls apart and those around her try to help - usually not quite successfully.

The story is full of wit while exploring the depths of its characters. Its surreal quality comes from flashbacks and a skewered timeline - and the bizarre Charles. While the tale is terribly funny, it deeply reflects the innate inner strengths of these human beings.

The Vermont Stage production proved imaginative and beautifully polished as well as funny and touching. Still, it was the women on stage who made Wednesday's performance truly delicious.

Deanna McGovern's charismatic Matilde proved the catalyst, thanks to a wryly funny and personal performance. Dana Block managed Lane's cynical exasperation effectively and added an underlying tender humanity.

Ruth Wallman and Alicia Kaplan were wonderfully zany as Virginia and Ana, infecting both characters with a deep tenderness. Paul Ugalde was convincing and funny as Charles, but the character is overshadowed by these wonderful women.

Only one scene felt inauthentic. When the women were drowning their woes in chocolate ice cream, it smacked of "The Golden Girls" - but that may have been the writing rather than the performances.

The production benefited from elegant and unexpectedly malleable staging by Jeff Modereger, lit most effectively by John B. Forbes. Catherine Vigne's attractive costumes and Martha Goode's poignant sound design added to the production's finesse.

Alicea is off to a great start, bringing refreshingly unusual theater that is truly satisfying.

Diverse cultures throughout history have embraced the healing properties of laughter. But, for the Brazilian protagonist of The Clean House, Sarah Ruhl’s 2005 play, not just any jest will do. Only the perfect joke will cure her gloom. Now if she could just come up with it. That effort, dramatized in the Vermont Stage Company production of The Clean House currently running at FlynnSpace, is a laudable laughing matter.

In her directorial debut as VSC’s new producing artistic director, Cristina Alicea distinguishes herself as resourceful and ambitious. This is a funny, clever play. But its humor derives from the complex interactions among characters struggling with thorny emotional circumstances. Under Alicea’s direction, the show wrangles this messiness into a breezy comedy that celebrates humor’s power to lift us out of darkness.

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, The Clean House is a masterpiece of amusingly incidental ironies and paradoxes. The main character, a Brazilian maid named Matilde (Deanna McGovern), is a would-be standup comic mourning the recent loss of her parents — “the funniest people in Brazil,” she claims. Her mother literally laughed to death at one of her father’s jokes, whereupon he killed himself. Matilde’s black attire contrasts with the stark-white furnishings of the American home where she works and lives. As she mopes about, racking her brain to come up with the perfect joke, her preoccupation prevents her from carrying out her duties — much to the dismay of Lane (Dana Block), one of the married surgeons who employ her.

Lane struts about in a cream-colored pantsuit — an imperious portrait of competence and order. Yet she can’t move her maid to do her job, and she appears blind to problems in her own marriage. Enter Lane’s sister, Virginia (Ruth Wallman). Despite her Bryn Mawr education, Virginia has domesticated herself so fully that, once she has completed her daily cleaning regimen at home, she can’t think of anything else to do. The moral and psychological boost she derives from house cleaning drives her to Lane’s house, where she volunteers her services to Matilde. It’s a perfect arrangement. Neat. Tidy. Until it’s not.

No sooner has Virginia taken over Matilde’s chores than the real dirt in this Clean House is unearthed. It’s a potent mixture of loss to which Matilde, Lane and Virginia all contribute. Matilde has lost her parents, Lane realizes that she has lost her husband, Charles (Paul Ugalde), and Virginia acknowledges that she has lost her sense of purpose. These realities are thrown into harsh relief when Charles bounds into the house with his newfound soul mate, Ana (Alicia Kaplan), one of his breast-cancer patients.

What follows is a comic meditation on love, life, death and laughter’s transcendent commentary on human existence. More dualities emerge: the objectivity of medical science versus the fated union of two lovers; the blossoming of love versus the dying of cells; and the spotless home where dirty laundry hangs everywhere.

Scenic designer Jeff Modereger’s set renders two different domestic environments — the aforementioned upper-class living room and, later, the front porch of a simpler seaside abode — with a level of verisimilitude that defies the confines of the FlynnSpace stage. John B. Forbes’ lighting design incorporates projections on the stage floor — Portuguese phrases and object motifs — that, while interesting to spot, were not clearly visible from many seats in the house. One suspects his intended effect was not fully realized in this production.

Technical considerations aside, playwright Ruhl’s storytelling gifts are on brilliant display from scene to scene. The Clean House conjures the kind of narrative universe where even the most minor details, such as the black olive that Lane must toss in her martini for lack of a proper garnish, appear to reinforce the work’s themes.

Director Alicea, too, demonstrates solid control of her material. She has elicited strong performances from every member of her cast. Most notable is McGovern as Matilde. Her sullen demeanor and deadpan delivery, adorned with a quirky yet infectious Portuguese accent, earn a chuckle nearly every time she opens her mouth. The more gravely she proclaims her intent to channel the perfect joke, despite fearing it may kill her, the more comical her character becomes. She could be mourning the fate of a world deprived of this mystical zinger as much as the loss of her parents.

As the frosty doctor Lane, Block walks a nuanced emotional line between devastation and rage. This allows her to become a basket case when news of her husband’s philandering hits, but also to show compassion when events appeal to her nature as a healer. As Charles’ paramour, Ana, Kaplan exudes an alluring, exotic appeal — her tango steps seem an extension of her personality. Her carefree persona shakes up the orderly world of The Clean House, forcing to the fore some of the play’s more poignant questions about living life to the fullest.

Alicea’s directorial skills also find impressive expression in Ugalde’s turn as Charles and Wallman’s portrayal of Virginia. Until this production, these local acting talents were quantities better known to Burlington audiences than to newcomer Alicea, so it’s worth noting how successfully the director has drawn on their signature strengths.

The ever-enthusiastic Ugalde brings to Charles a convincingly over-the-moon passion for his new lover, punctuated by a few well-timed comic strokes, such as when he rationalizes the union with a reference to Jewish law (neither he nor Ana is Jewish). Ugalde can run a little hot onstage, but in The Clean House he stays in the groove.

Wallman has earned a reputation for consistency and range, and this production showcases her keen theatrical instincts and comic timing. To be sure, her Virginia is a bit unreliable — maybe those furniture-polish fumes are taking their toll. But Wallman doesn’t take her character’s eccentricity so far over the top that she can’t turn back to express credible angst, anger and a girlish infatuation with her brother-in-law.

While spirited, well-rounded performances energize The Clean House, the story strays a bit in the second act — along with some characters — and takes on a looseness that contrasts with its crisp first act. In those spots where it becomes untidy, the play’s comedic luster also dulls. Not-so-comical complications — in Lane and Charles’ marriage, in Ana’s physical health — reveal the work’s more serious side. Matilde assumes a supporting role for a stretch, and her diminished presence is conspicuous.

There are other minor inconsistencies in the play’s overall tone. Ruhl’s humor is rich and resonant throughout The Clean House, but a few magical-realist flourishes and sporadic moments of utter absurdity come across as more ornamental than integral. Levity is both medium and message in this play — the jokes illuminating deeper truths — but some moments feel more like gags.

Any comic voice is bound to falter once or twice over the course of a routine, especially one the length of a play. Ruhl’s refreshingly original comedic vision, however, mostly buoys this work aloft on its punchy, poignant journey. That Alicea has chosen The Clean House for her VSC directorial debut reveals the talent, sensibility and technique on which she can draw in her tenure at the helm of the company.