Messy Fun in Fell's Point's THE CLEAN HOUSE

According to a story reported by Dinitia Smith in the New York Times, Sarah Ruhl was at a cocktail party one evening when she overheard another guest, a doctor, complain that his Brazilian cleaning lady had become too depressed to do her job. “So I had to clean my own house,” the doctor continued. “I didn’t go to medical school to clean house.” From this casual comment—an almost too-good-to-be-true well of inspiration—came Ruhl’s 2003 play The Clean House, an unexpectedly moving comedy (and a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama) currently making its Baltimore premiere at Fell’s Point Corner Theatre.

In Ruhl’s play, the Brazilian cleaning lady is a young woman named Mathilde (the exact pronunciation is one of the show’s best jokes). Mathilde (Jessica Behar) describes herself as a “student of humor”—her parents were the self-proclaimed funniest people in Brazil until their sudden, tragic, beautiful deaths. Cleaning houses for a living makes her sad, and so rather than clean she spends most of her time trying to think up the “perfect joke.” Naturally this poses a problem for her employers, a workaholic doctor named Lane (Holly Pasciullo) and her husband, Charles (John Cramer), a gifted surgeon.

Lane has a sister, Virginia (Dianne Hood), who loves to clean—indeed, it has become her only source of accomplishment—and it is not long before Mathilde agrees to “let” Virginia clean in her stead. As the two women bond over the ironing board and hide their deception from the oblivious Lane, Ruhl seems content to travel down the pleasurable if well-worn path of light farce—at some point Lane will realize the truth, and hilarious chaos will ensue.

Then, the play throws everyone a curve. While folding laundry, Virginia discovers a pair of lacy panties that is definitely not her sister’s. A distraught Lane confirms Virginia’s suspicions—Charles has run off with another woman … only the “home-wrecker” is not the sexy young nurse Virginia imagined but an older woman, Ana (Amy Jo Shapiro), whom Charles has treated for breast cancer. In a brief flashback we see Ana and Charles meet and fall in love at first sight—the scene is so tender, and they are so innocent together, we cannot help but sympathize. By play’s end every assumption has been challenged, everything we thought we had known about the characters must be reconsidered, and the question of whether to laugh or cry seems absurdly simplistic—we do both simultaneously.

Director Steve Goldklang has assembled a marvelous cast, beginning with Pasciullo and Hood as the dysfunctional sisters. I have heard few actresses with voices as comically strident as Pasciullo’s—she delivers her lines with the force of cannonballs fired from someplace deep within her gut, particularly when Lane gets angry (which is often). Yet in spite of such moments (“I HAVE COMPASSION!” she bellows at one point), she also finds the softness in Lane that makes her for me the most fascinating character in the play.

As the soft-hearted Virginia, Hood’s role is no less juicy; nor is her voice—a perfectly rounded falsetto that glides effortlessly from beat to beat—any less integral to her performance. Ruhl provides few concrete details to flesh out the sisters’ pasts, yet watching Pasciullo and Hood negotiate their way through increasingly painful conversations, one senses that Lane and Virginia share a long, rich history.

Behar is immediately likeable as Mathilde, a natural comedienne who must rely on gesture and inflection for laughs, as she has not bothered to translate her jokes to English. (Watching the play must be an entirely different experience for those who speak Portuguese—I would love to know whether Mathilde is as funny as she seems.) Shapiro achieves a similar effect as Ana (who is also Brazilian). Both actresses sound authentic in their roles and maintain consistent (and, I can only assume, accurate) accents.

Like Ana, Charles does not appear until the second act. Though he is described as the kind of gorgeous, godlike doctor one sees on prime-time television dramas, Cramer plays him as an ordinary guy who has stumbled into an extraordinary love, and the result is effective and quite funny. The entire cast is particularly good at the perhaps underappreciated skill of laughing convincingly onstage.

The set, designed by Roy Steinman, consists of a spacious lower level for Charles and Lane’s Connecticut home and a rather more cramped balcony for Ana’s apartment; it looks great, though the balcony gets a bit crowded when occupied by more than one person. Bob Dover’s lights can shine a bit too bright for interior scenes but are otherwise appropriate. Choreographer Beth Weber contributes several nice moments as characters are remembered (or imagined) dancing in happier times.

At intervals throughout the play, “title cards” are projected on the back wall. They say things like “Ana and Charles fall completely in love” or “Lane calls Virginia”—in other words, things that are perfectly obvious from the staging. I assume these are instructions from the playwright. (Ruhl, for all her talents, is not immune to “cutesy,” artificial quirks such as these.) If instead they were imposed on the play by Goldklang and the design team, it would mark the one misguided impulse in an otherwise stellar production.

The Clean House is playing at Fell’s Point Corner Theatre, located at 251 South Ann Street in Baltimore, on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8 PM, and Sundays at 2 PM, through December 6^th. Tickets are $10-$17. For more information, visit http://fpct.org/ or call 410-276-7837.