Sarah Ruhl - The Clean House - Theater - Report - New York Times

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October 14, 2006

Playwrights Subjects: Greek Myth to Vibrators

By DINITIA SMITH

Jockeys have the Triple Crown, hockey players have the three-goal hat trick, but there is no equivalent in the theater for what has been happening to Sarah Ruhl
lately. Her highly praised 2004 play, The Clean House, is finally having its New York premiere on Oct. 30 at Lincoln Center, one of nine productions of it
scheduled this year around the country. Another of her plays, Eurydice, a version of the Greek myth, has been winning outstanding reviews at the Yale Repertory
Theater. (Devastatingly lovely, Charles Isherwood wrote of it in The New York Times, and just plain devastating.) Then, last month, Ms. Ruhl won a $500,000
MacArthur genius award, $100,000 a year for five years.
And thats not even counting her latest nonprofessional accomplishment, a round, rosy daughter named Anna, now 6 months old.
The superstitious part of me goes, Uh-oh, when is the other shoe going to drop? Ms. Ruhl said, nursing Anna in her airy and peaceful apartment in the East 20s
in Manhattan. There is so much happening at once. But the nonsuperstitious part of me is trying to enjoy it and see it as the result of 10 years of labor.
Ms. Ruhl, 32, is very small with strawberry blond hair; her voice is soft. When she was only 5, her mother, Kathy Kehoe Ruhl, an actress in Chicago and professor of
English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, parked her at the theater while she rehearsed, and the precocious Sarah would take notes on the production. I would
think they hadnt gotten it quite right, Ms. Ruhl remembered.
At first she wanted to be a poet. Then, as an undergraduate at Brown, Ms. Ruhl took a playwriting class with Paula Vogel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for How I
Learned to Drive. Ms. Ruhl planned to write a thesis on actresses in 19th-century literature and asked Ms. Vogel to oversee her thesis. She was very sneaky, Ms.
Ruhl said. She refused and said if I wanted her to be my adviser, I would have to write a play instead.
She had a hunch, Ms. Ruhl said. I felt a tremendous sense of relief. It was knowing in my bones that I was not really up to a 100-page thesis on actresses in the
19th century.
And so began a project about a man who wants to be Christ in a Passion play. Ms. Ruhl grew up Roman Catholic, but her faith lapsed when she was in middle
school. She showed the play to Ms. Vogel, who arranged a production at the new plays festival at the Trinity Repertory Theater in Providence. R.I. It was Ms. Ruhls
first.
If Virginia Woolf became a playwright, shed be someone like Sarah Ruhl, Ms. Vogel said in an interview, praising the epic intelligence of her former student.
Passion Play, a Cycle has grown into a three-and-a-half-hour, three-play cycle that jumps from the virulently anti-Catholic reign of Elizabeth I to Nazi Germany to
South Dakota during and after the Vietnam War, as it follows the production of various Passion plays. It has been produced at several theaters, including the Actors
Center in London and the Arena Stage in Washington, where it received mixed reviews. Ms. Ruhl said that even after a decade of writing, Im still working on it.
Eurydice was written in 2000, inspired by the death of her father, Patrick, a Chicago marketing executive, from cancer in 1994. In the play Eurydice meets her
dead father in the underworld and isnt sure that she wants to leave him to return to the upper world and to her husband, Orpheus. (Ms. Ruhl married Anthony
Charuvastra, a psychiatrist, in 2005.)
As for The Clean House, she was inspired with the idea for it at a cocktail party. A doctor walked in and said, Ive had such a hard month, she remembered.
My cleaning lady from Brazil wouldnt clean, and I took her to the hospital and got her medicated, and she still wouldnt clean. So I had to clean my own house. I
didnt go to medical school to clean house.
I thought, What does this mean about gender and about class? Ms. Ruhl said. I thought, What about the poor woman? Is she clinically depressed or does she
just hate cleaning? In the end, she said, The question is, how much responsibility do you have, not just literally, for the mess of your own life, and how much do
you try and avoid chaos? In many ways, Ms. Ruhl said, the play is about cleaning as transcendence, spiritual cleansing.
The Clean House has had dozens of stagings around the country and abroad and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. In this production, directed by Bill
Rauch, the doctor, Lane (played by Blair Brown), is chagrined to discover that her maid, Matilde (Vanessa Aspillaga), hates to clean. This maid wants to be a standup comedian. Lane has Matilde medicated to cure her, and Lanes sister, Virginia (Jill Clayburgh), a compulsive cleaner, happily takes on the role of cleaner.
Meanwhile, Lanes marriage to another doctor (John Dossett) disintegrates when he has an affair with Ana (Concetta Tomei). It is Matilde who comes to the rescue.
The Clean House is a blend of humor and lyricism, built of blocks of light and magic. The set designer, Christopher Acebo, has created an all-white environment
with hospital tile. In one scene the living room is also the sea. Swaths of action are conveyed in subtitles: Matilde tries to think up the perfect joke, and Virginia
has a deep impulse to order the universe. Jokes are told in Portuguese.
As whimsical as the play may seem, Ms. Ruhl has a razor-sharp sense of theatricality, Mr. Rauch said. Every instinct she has on a sound cue, lighting cue, prop, I
trust thoroughly.
She has a very strong sense of what she wants, he said. She is fearless in articulating it.
And her next play? It, too, deals with issues that feminists have taken up. Commissioned by the Berkeley Repertory Theater, in California, it is about the history of
the vibrator and was inspired by a book, The Technology of Orgasm, by the historian Rachel P. Maines.
Before the vibrator was invented, male doctors would give women paroxysms manually to cure hysteria, Ms. Ruhl said. It wasnt seen as a sexual thing but as
clinical. Then, at the dawn of the electrical age, they said: Im so happy about the new device. It used to take hours to get results. Now it only takes three minutes.

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2015-01-16