Even the play’s title, “The Clean House,” is a poetic metaphor. Everyone knows that nothing is ever truly clean no matter how obsessively one polishes and tidies up. The playwright believes that life is an immense, untranslatable, cosmic joke, best gotten through while laughing. Simply put, that’s the message of Sarah Ruhl’s “The Clean House,” which plays through March 22 at San Diego Repertory Theatre’s Lyceum Theatre.
For optimal enjoyment of this surely wacky, ultimately wonderful production, take along a childlike sense of wonderment imbued with a love for magic realism, the inscrutable and the surreal. The payoff is poetry and manna for the deeper places in human existence, wrapped in a glossy veneer with many messes under the surface.
With her usual capable efficiency, San Diego actor Rosina Reynolds portrays Lane, an antiseptic and remotely pristine physician who’s long been married to a busy surgeon named Charles (Ron Choularton). Lane employs a Portuguese-speaking Brazilian maid named Matilde (Claudia Vazquez), who is averse to cleaning. She refuses to clean because it gives her the blues and interferes with her true calling, to be a comedian like her parents. Virginia (marvelous comedian Annie Hinton), Lane’s ditzy but wise sister, takes pity on Matilde and, unknown to Lane, cleans Lane’s house for the unhappy housemaid.
Matilde sees visions of her dead parents (Choularton and incandescent, Hollywood-based actor Ivonne Coll), who were madly, passionately in love, and whom she loved very much. She spends much of her time trying to make up jokes as funny as those they told.
The formerly solid surgeon, Charles, meanwhile, falls in love with his soulmate, an older woman named Ana (Coll) on whom he performs a mastectomy. One of the production’s delights is watching Choularton’s Charles skip through Alaskan blizzards, seeking the elusive yew tree; the bark of which he fervently believes will cure Ana. Though he seems somewhat uncomfortable as Matilde’s machismo, tango-dancing dad, Choularton skips very well indeed and, in what little bit of pathos he’s given during the far superior second act, is most affecting.
No matter how one experiences this piece, directed by Sam Woodhouse, beautifully designed by Victoria Petrovich, with costumes by Jennifer Brawn Gittings, lighting by Christian DeAngelis and music and sound by Stephanie Robinson, it is the much-admired Coll’s show all the way. Remembered for “Two Sisters and a Piano” at the Old Globe and “Adoration of the Old Woman” at La Jolla Playhouse, she can do no wrong here, capturing the rapture of one near death and immensity of her character’s love of life and others.
“The Clean House” may be seen at 7 p.m. Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, and 7 p.m. Sundays at San Diego Repertory Theatre, 79 Horton Plaza, San Diego.
For tickets and information, visit www.sandiegorep.com or call (619) 544-1000.
