Arts Listings

The lights go up onstage at the Gaia Center, the chords of a piano are heard (Rona Siddiqui, in the “orchestra” she makes right in front of the stage with her fine accompaniment of the action) and we see a young woman showing us a dance very familiarly while telling a joke. But the joke’s in Brazilian Portuguese. Is it about the dance? Or is she dancing to the joke? Or are joke and dance both expressions of her exuberance, joie de vivre? 

The beginning of Woman’s Will’s bright production of Sarah Ruhl’s A Clean House introduces Matilde (a charming Mayra Gaeta), a Brazilian living in the States as a maid, her physician boss Lane (Beth Chastain, the female straightman) and Lane’s sister Virginia (Marilyn Hughes, playing Virginia as a comic sensitive), one after the other, addressing the audience. Not exactly serial intros to the play; we’re already into it, and in it.  

The second act will begin by flashing back to a vignette, established by dialogue, that preceded the end of act one, then flash forward—back—as the couple in the vignette enter the scene that ended act one together. Conventions of “the Fourth Wall” and the unity of Time and Space have long been toppled; the toppling has become the convention.  

Lane—Doctor Lane?—touches on a few of the various juggled themes: she told her maid to clean her house; the maid wouldn’t. “So I took her to the hospital ... I’m sorry; I’ve been to medical school.” Virginia tells us nervously, “If it were not for dust, I would die ... I’m not a morbid person.”  

And Matilde, who confides she hates to clean, reveals she came to the States in order to deal with the sadness of the death of her parents, the funniest people she ever knew, the funniest in Brazil—her mother dying over a joke of her father’s, her father in anguish over the death of his beloved (and funnier) wife. Matilde spends her expatriacy avoiding her duties, dreaming up the supreme joke, afraid it’ll kill her. 

Virginia, a compulsive cleaner, and Matilde make a pact: Matilde will be Virginia’s front so Virginia may clean her sister’s house. There’s a strain, a stand-off in the sisterly relationship. Together Matlide and Virginia discover a pair of lace panties in the laundry, clearly not Lane’s, though Virginia remarks she’s never seen her sister’s underwear before. Could they be from Charles, Lane’s mostly absent doctor husband, whom Virginia has a crush on ... is Charles having an affair?  

Charles (Richard Massery, both polished and ever-active), a specialist in breast cancer, has an older patient, Ana from Argentina (Carolyn Power, who wears the part like a glove), whose survival he’s become dedicated to—passionately dedicated—while Ana is dedicated only to living, to the love of life, come what may. 

The various, unlikely threads tangle. Matilde finds herself serving, if not two masters, two or three mistresses; Virginia and Lane finally speak to each other, not just the audience, of their differences—and Charles, now a knight-errant, tears off to Alaska, to fly back with a tree ... and misses the telling of the world’s greatest joke. 

“The perfect joke makes you forget about your life. The perfect joke makes you remember ...” 

Jodi Schiller has directed her outstanding cast with sensitivity and humanity, following out what seem stray threads of story, or story-within-story, as through-lines, no easy feat with Ruhl’s plays, as other Bay Area productions (often by game professionals) have shown, both of other titles and of A Clean House. 

There’s a tale handed down from Antiquity about a man, told he will die on a certain day, who found the prospect of his death, prophecied so exactly, laughable—and when the predicted day came, died laughing. 

“I got a great deal out of life,” said Natalie Barney, the American Amazon of Paris’ salon scene, “Perhaps more than what was in it.” 

Woman’s Will has expertly realized the possibilities in A Clean House, even pointed beyond, truly getting more out of it than there was in it. The play is amusing, not humorous; well-meaning rather than profound. Its various conceits, in the poetic sense, are awkward, without true stylization—or style. It smells of the workshop, not of that “reek of the human” Dr. Johnson prescribed as the signature of real art.  

A Clean House plays with a few news topics, a couple old jokes and an endemic social dysfunctionality, seeming to defy old, long-ruptured stage conventions, trying to improvise a theatrical meaning. But there’s no sense of these markers “generating a set of ideas that both dominate and are subject to them"—to come back to stylization. There are touches of the usual cliches about latin women.  

It brushes past the subject of Melancholy—like social class, a topic verboten in America, glossed only as “depression"—which it brings up, only to resolve its paradoxes in a conclusion faintly Hallmark. It resembles somebody cluelessly trying to repeat a joke, or an overly literal translation of a poem.  

But Woman’s Will—with a committed cast and director, and the new artistic direction of Victoria Evans Erville, which from the start seems to be fulfilling founder Erin Merritt’s vision—has made an interesting, lively evening of theatricality from a mediocre play.  

It’s one of the contradictions of the art, what used to be called trouping. As one of its characters might have said, it happens. 

A CLEAN HOUSE 

Presented by Woman's Will at 8 p.m. Thursday–Saturday through Oct. 10. at Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way. $15-$25.  

420-0813. www.womanswill.org.