The Clean House @ Venture Theatre
By Ken. Filed in General |Tags: General, Venture Theatre
You know how when you play tennis against someone much better than you and they hit the ball at you very hard and if you manage to hit it back it really moves, giving you the illusion that you are getting better? Well, that is the feeling I got watching the latest offering at Venture Theatre last night. In two ways: the first was the playwright whacking out some so-so lines toward the players and then they would whack it back even harder; and the second was the players themselves doing better because they knew they were playing with really good players.
That is the lady doctor on the left, her clean freak sister on the right, and the Brazilian cleaning girl in the middle, a welcome guest from out of town.
The Clean House is a contemporary play, and thus almost by definition post-modern, entertaining enough, but always worrying about the meaning of it all, even if the post-modern genre allows you to have fun or not without worrying about meaning: sometimes the characters, sometimes the playwright, sometimes the director. I suppose if they had an understudy—wait, they did have one, the first time I’ve ever seen that in Billings.—she’d be worried too. This is a pretty good review which gives you permission to laugh at the untranslated joke which opens the show. You get the idea that it is fairly raunchy anyway which is probably good enough for a laugh these days.
This was fun, it moved along, all the players were more or less the same good quality, and the playwright considered various topics of interest to most of us, i.e. the difficulty of understanding what we are saying to each other, and when we do manage to understand, even that can have an untoward ending, as in dying from an excess of laughter after a joke; the usefulness of stereotypes; how living is not just doing a job, no matter how exalted your position. It’s nice to have your imagination off to the side of the stage and it is convenient to have several characters played by the same couple. The accents were bad but then not many in Billings would know that. Have fun, go see it.
If you need some information on the playwright, Sarah Ruhl, in order to enjoy the play, you can go here for a dopey interview which I hope is not the full extent of her thought.
[Added 24 April: I saw another of Sarah Ruhl's plays last night at the Oregon shakespeare Festival: Dead Man's Cell Phone. I liked Clean House better. See my review here. I did find a good article about Ms Ruhl in the New Yorker by John Lahr. Check it out. This one is better than the interview I mentioned above.]