‘Clean House’ debuts

Haven’t you ever had the urge to make a mess?
That is what the characters of “The Clean House” desired as their lives became as unified as ripped pillows with feathers flying.

Playwright Sarah Ruhl’s award-winning play “The Clean House,” directed by Jonathan Michaelsen, opened Friday at the Wells-Metz Theatre to audiences who laughed on the outside but cried on the inside.

“We tap into the same place to laugh and to cry,” said graduate student Molly Casey, who played the role of Lane.

Lights came on as the maid, Matilde, played by junior Stephanie Feeley, performed a sexually gestured comedy act in Portuguese.

Humor broke language barriers as Matilde told the audience in English, “The perfect joke is somewhere between an angel and a fart.”

The play introduced each character to expose their issues and obsessions in a spotless white house dangerous to spill coffee in. By desiring what they did not have, they resorted to different ways of dealing with their grief. 

“The play says a lot about where women are in their lives,” Bloomington resident Miaa Michaelsen said.

In the play, the maid loathed cleaning and preferred to focus on the ceiling, where “it is always clean.”

Matilde met her match and struck a deal with her boss’s sister, Virginia, who was played by graduate student Abby Rowold, and conveniently kept yellow rubber gloves in her pockets.

As Virginia and Matilde folded consistently white laundry, red panties surprised both women. They assumed that Lane’s husband, a surgeon, was having an affair with his patient while Lane was buried in her work and oblivious.

A balcony that was set above Lane’s den beheld the love affair of Ana, a terminally ill cancer patient, played by junior Alana Cheshire.

Charles, played by graduate student Alex McCausland, was Lane’s husband and said he justified the adultery because there is a Jewish law protecting soul mates called beshert, although he was not Jewish.

“Even though they were not on the same stage, they were all connected,” Bloomington resident Bob Hyatt said.

Slowly, the characters began to dust themselves off and obtain a medium of peaceful sanity. Whether measures were chucking apples, drinking hard liquor or chopping down a tree in Alaska, insides were freshened. 

Obsessive clean freak Virginia broke down and crazily made a mess of the living room. While rolling in her pile of garbage, she exclaimed, “I feel fabulous!”

“The more you try to control, the more life takes over for you and becomes chaos,” Rowold said of her character’s madness.

Life in “The Clean House” began neat. A series of crises and disorder tied the character’s hearts together.

“A clean life is a wonderful idea, but it is not always practical,” audience member Nicholas Groves said.