5-26-06
Truth on a Slant
Sarah RuhlSo how is it possible for her to write so clearly and so wisely about loss and pain, those permanent stains that mar the glossy surfaces of life? The Clean House seems at first to be a domestic comedy about an uptight doctor, Lane, and her Brazilian cleaning lady, Mathilde, who would rather devise the perfect joke than scrub toilets. But instead of a disquisition on class privilege and gender roles, what Ruhl creates is a moving and hilarious meditation on housework, love, marriage, divorce, death, and the paramount importance of humor in dealing with all the hard knocks and essential messiness life hands out.
“There’s something delicious about crying when watching a Sarah Ruhl play, and there’s something sexy about laughing,” says Paula Vogel, who taught playwriting to Ruhl at Brown University and now counts the younger writer as a friend and influence. “She has no emotional fear of reaching out and grabbing us directly. She directly exposes what’s in our hearts.”
Ruhl’s father died of bone cancer when she was 20, and that early loss has shaped her work, most notably in Eurydice, her take on the Orpheus myth with a father/daughter relationship that premiered locally with Piven Theatre in 2004. But Vogel’s influence also played a role in helping her find a voice for talking about grief, even before Ruhl set foot in her classes. Says Ruhl, “I remember the first time I saw The Baltimore Waltz was before I knew Paula and I was weeping. My father was sick at the time. Paula made the internal external. It wasn’t like peering through a living room seeing how people experience grief. Partly it’s that she goes at it indirectly.”
Both Ruhl and Vogel embody the famous admonishment of Emily Dickinson: “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” In The Clean House, apples fall from a balcony in one house into the living room of another. A man struggles to bring a yew tree home from Alaska in a vain attempt to make a medicine to save his lover, who is dying of breast cancer. And a woman literally dies laughing on stage.
“I do use ‘magical realism’ a lot to describe Sarah’s work,” notes Thebus, who also directed the 2002 local premiere of Ruhl’s Melancholy Play at Piven. “I think it gives people the right idea. In discussing Melancholy Play, I think that saying it’s a farce about melancholy is accurate and gives people an entry point.” In that earlier play, a melancholic young bank teller captures the hearts of everyone around her, men and women alike, until her quite-unexpected lapse into happiness discombobulates them even more.
Ruhl and Thebus share long roots with Piven Theatre Workshop, and both are the daughters of actresses – Kathy Ruhl and Mary Ann Thebus. Ruhl started classes in the Piven Workshop in fourth grade. She met Thebus, then a grad student, a few years later when she took a story workshop class at Piven taught by Thebus while Ruhl was still an undergraduate. “I think there is something specific about the training at the Piven workshop that comes into my work,” says Ruhl. “It’s an emphasis on transformation and discovery over and above a dramaturgy of Aristotelian conflict. There’s respect for language and the melody of a line that Joyce and Byrne instill in actors, rather than having a mannered or shaggy subtext. The playfulness they encourage comes into my work. You just can’t help but take in a respect for organic playfulness when you come through the workshop.”
Thebus says, “Melancholy Play was the first full-length play of [Ruhl’s] that I read. I thought I saw the structures of improvisation and theatre games and long-form within the play in a way that is hard to explain. I feel like the people in her plays are improvising together in a dynamic that is very familiar to me.”
Although the Goodman snagged The Clean House for its first full local production, Piven and Thebus were important in its development. One of the first sit-down readings featured Kathy Ruhl, Mary Ann Thebus, and Joyce Piven. (Ruhl’s ability to write interesting parts for older women is one of her other notable qualities, and one that may also figure into why The Clean House has been embraced by so many regional theatres looking for strong writing for actresses.) In 2004, the play received three performances as a workshop presentation with Piven.
Though Ruhl’s pregnancy prevented her being present during the Goodman rehearsals, Thebus credits their longstanding working relationship with helping ease the long-distance nature of this latest collaboration. “I would prefer for her to be there because I treasure my collaboration with her, and the tone of the play is unusual. It would have been much harder to do notes over the phone if I didn’t know her. I mean, we were e-mailing each other about the difference between acerbic irony and compassionate irony.”
At a rehearsal for The Clean House, Thebus’ emphasis on the compassion in Ruhl’s script is apparent. The first scene between Lane and Mathilde (Mary Beth Fisher and Guenia Lemos, who both had played the same roles earlier in different productions) starts off awkwardly – Lane is vocal about her discomfort in giving people orders in her home, but she really, really wants her house cleaned.
“People in difficulty get to you,” Thebus says to Lemos, which makes it easier for Mathilde to find a way for her boss to order her to work – she suggests that Lane pretend that she’s a nurse in the hospital, not her maid. “Emphasize the playfulness,” urges Thebus. Later, she says, “Everyone in this play encounters each other as if they’re a rhinoceros.”
An apt animal reference, as it turns out. In a phone conversation, Ruhl says, “I come back to the word ‘transformation.’ People can transform rapidly on stage, emotional states can happen very quickly on stage. In Melancholy Play, a woman turns into an almond. It’s totally acceptable in Ionesco, for example, but not acceptable in most kinds of American theatre.”
That sort of transformation can also make Ruhl’s plays difficult to embody in a straightforward staged reading, the preferred starting point in new play development at most regional theatres. Piven agreed to produce Melancholy Play without a slew of preliminary readings or workshops. “Piven doesn’t have one of these development models where there’s a staged reading and then dramaturgs develop it and then maybe they produce it or maybe they don’t. I can say, ‘I think a play is ready and can we do it?’ We did one reading in front of an audience in order to hear it. But theatricality happens in time and space and metaphors, and it’s a danger for people to get plays that are perfect plays for people sitting in chairs,” says Ruhl.
From whence comes this highly theatricalized imagination?
Vogel, whose friendship with Ruhl extends to officiating at the younger playwright’s marriage to her doctor husband, outlines “three gifts Sarah had given to her. One was the gift of Chicago. I get tremendous writers in my classes who are born in cities like Chicago or Toronto or Minneapolis, where theatre is embraced as an art form civically.
“Secondly, I think Sarah was given an extraordinary education by her parents. She was given the gift of parents who loved words, who loved education, who loved acting. It’s a remarkable gift for me as an educator – the impact that her parents had on her.
“Third, since her curiosity was encouraged and she lived in a city where the arts have been flourishing, she had tools for expression when she suffered loss. She could turn to the arts and writing at a young age when she had that loss. Her incredible emotional expansiveness in her work is a result of those three things. Unusual? Highly. There has not been another Sarah. I’ve taught at Brown for 20 years and I’ve had many extraordinary writers. I’m lucky I got to experience one Sarah Ruhl in my life and I know that.”
Upon hearing her former teacher’s encomiums, Ruhl notes, “Paula would have to be one of the top influences in my work. Of course she leaves herself off that list.”
Back in the rehearsal room for The Clean House, that emphasis on selflessness comes out in a discussion between Thebus and Christine Estabrook, who plays Lane’s cleaning-obsessed sister, Virginia. Lane has just met Ana, the woman with whom her surgeon husband, Charles, is having an affair (she happens to be one of his patients). Not knowing what else to do, Virginia offers to get Lane a hot-water bottle. Estabrook is concerned that the moment not seem too clever, or too self-indulgent on Virginia’s part, in that “look at how good I’m being to you” kind of way. Says Thebus to Fisher and Estabrook, “In these moments, the comfort you get is the hot water bottle.”
Later, Thebus talks about Ruhl’s ability to shift between emotional states. In a later scene between Lane and Ana, the jilted wife tells her replacement, “If you were really sorry, you wouldn’t have done it. We do as we please, and then we say we’re sorry. But we’re not sorry. We’re just – uncomfortable – watching other people in pain.” Then, after a sip of iced tea, Lane looks at a fishbowl and says, “What kind of fish is that?”
It’s the sort of exchange that happens all the time in life, but is rare enough on stage that it presents difficulties in tone for actors and directors. “Getting it right is challenging,” says Thebus after the play has opened. “It’s making the humor work and making the heartbreak work. And it makes it amazing. First, in previews, it was too fast, so we really had to create some more space for air in it and fewer commitments to the laughs. Then it got too slow with too much air in it.”
In talking about the tone in her work, Ruhl recalls, “Italo Calvino talks about the importance of lightness. People don’t understand lightness in our culture. There’s fluff, and everyone knows what fluff is, and people confuse that, like people confuse comedy with sitcoms. I don’t consciously put lightness into my work but I tend to respond to work that has some transparency and simplicity in it.”
“One of the things that Paula taught us about was Russian formalism and peering at the object at a slant. I think that’s one of the hugest things I learned from her aesthetically. Indirectness is not culturally valued right now. Everything is so head-on. You can’t enter into it on your own, because it’s coming right at you. I think it’s the Pilgrims and the fact that they didn’t like theatre much. Certainly they wouldn’t like theatre in which weird transformations happen. I come from a Catholic upbringing so I can talk about water turning into wine.”
Ruhl’s most ambitious project, which draws heavily on the social impact of religion, hasn’t been seen here locally. In Passion Play, the titular sacred play is performed in three different eras torn by religious and cultural strife. Ruhl is also working on several other commissions and learning how to juggle writing with the demands of an infant. “My baby is five weeks old and I went to my first rehearsal for Demeter in the City at Cornerstone Theatre in L.A.” (Ruhl and her husband will soon relocate to Boston, where he will work as a psychiatrist.) “I’m not thinking yet about how this will affect my writing. I’m thinking ‘This is the first time I’ve been out of the house in days!’”
The great thing about Sarah Ruhl achieving success at a relatively young age, notes Vogel, is that we can enjoy her work for many more years to come. “I wait for the next Sarah Ruhl play. Every time she gives me one of her scripts to read, I feel like I’m getting a tutorial. She’s got remarkable technique, a technique that is astonishing when I look at her age. She has that emotional maturity, and her mind is so brilliant. She is so generous with that. It’s never contentious – she has a real emotional generosity.”
Says Thebus, “She is telling true stories about real people in a magical world, with both comedy and heartbreak. And it should take people by surprise.”