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| Life is a missing punch line in 'The Clean House’ | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| By Chris Page, Get Out | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| April 30, 2008 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
Don’t worry; it’s in untranslated Portuguese. (If you’re curious, ask a bartender to tell you the gag that ends “Buck forty!”) The jokester is Matilde, a charismatic Brazilian maid who happens to be too depressed to tidy up. Her mother, you see, once died from a joke. Now Matilde grieves by trying to come up with the mother of all quips. So begins Sarah Ruhl’s sublime tragicomedy about the strange and sometimes glorious messiness of life — in which a doctor falls in love with an older breast cancer patient, his wife struggles for understanding, and a visiting sister with neat-freak compulsions strikes a sly deal with nonworking Matilde, who has bigger things on her mind than ironing: namely, finding the perfect joke — a joke, she says, “somewhere between an angel and a fart.” Swirling with humor and emotion, dotted with magic realism, “The Clean House” is now getting its Valley premiere, courtesy Arizona Theatre Company and director Jon Jory, at the Herberger Theater Center. The production comes in the wake of serious buzz. From its debut in 2004, “The Clean House” helped earn its 34-year-old playwright both Pulitzer Prize consideration and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. Following an off-Broadway run in 2006, the play has become a darling of regional theaters. (And it’s been at the top of this critic’s must-be-produced-here list since witnessing a charming 2005 staging at California’s South Coast Repertory.) Jory seems a natural fit for ATC’s “The Clean House.” For almost 25 years, he nurtured fresh talents and brave original works at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Ky. In recent seasons, he’s brought to ATC’s Tucson and Phoenix stages works like an adapted “Pride and Prejudice” and Steve Martin’s uproarious “The Underpants.” (Next season Jory will direct “Somebody/Nobody,” a comedy about Hollywood, written by Jane Martin — rumored to be Jory’s playwriting pseudonym.) Though the director admits it took him multiple trips through the script to grasp “The Clean House’s” essence, a kind of joyously absurdist existentialism. “It took me a while to understand — the play makes a case for the fact that we can’t fully understand the order of things,” he says. “So we’d best enjoy what’s happening.” In other words, life is a lot like a joke told in Portuguese. We may not know the words. But it can still have the power to make us laugh. ‘The Clean House’ When: 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sundays, closing May 18 Where: Herberger Theater Center, 222 E. Monroe St., Phoenix Cost: $30-$63 Information: (602) 256-6995 or www.aztheatreco.org Contact Chris Page by email, or phone (480) 898-5656 |
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