Airing Dirty Laundry in ‘The Clean House’

×

Expand

PHOTO CREDIT: Elizabeth M. Havican

In The Clean House by Sarah Ruhl, Matilde (Emily Condon) is a cleaning woman who doesn’t like to clean but dreams of being a comedian like her parents. In fact, her mother literally died laughing at one of her father’s jokes. She works for Lane (Jackie Benka), who is a doctor, and her husband, Charles (Joseph Ellman), also a doctor. Lane’s sister, Virginia (Kathy Fitzgerald-Landry), loves to clean; she works out a secret deal with Matilde to clean Lane’s house. While folding laundry, Matilde and Virginia find sexy lingerie—definitely not Lane’s—and realize Charles is having an affair.

The Clean House does eventually air its “dirty laundry” using imaginative and surreal situations. Attribute that to playwright Ruhl’s larger-than-life approaches to her quirky characters who skirt the edges of realism and over-the-top absurdism in funny and bizarre ways. How else to deal with love, loss and life itself?

In the Village Playhouse production that opened last weekend, director Scott Sorensen teases out the humor in the sorrow at hand: The loss of Matilde’s parents; Lane’s loss of her husband to another woman; the other woman’s impending death due to cancer; Virginia’s loss at what do to with her life. As the centerpiece of the play, Emily Condon does a fine job as Matilde, making the character believable and even mastering her Portuguese accent. Kathy Fitzgerald-Landry anchors the play as Virginia, the true obsessive “cleaner,” who is the glue to this increasingly wacky situation throughout this production. 

The Clean House demonstrates that given all our conflicts, there’s still common ground in hope—and love.

Through Sunday, Oct. 13, at the Village Playhouse, 1500 S. 73rd St., West Allis. For tickets, call 414-207-4879 or visit villageplayhouse.org.