5-26-06
Astonishing Imagination
in Clean House
Mary Beth Fisher, Christine Estabrook and Guenia Lemosin the Goodman's production of
The Clean House.
The play is highly theatrical and imaginative. The plot takes astonishing turns – as when one of the characters leaves for Alaska to chop down a yew tree, and actually drags the entire tree back on stage. Ruhl’s power as a playwright seems to be her blindness to limits. But we know that’s not true. The Clean House’s power is that it seems to have no walls, but is, in fact, very tightly constructed.
Even those farcical moments have weight. The yew tree is meant to cure the adventurer’s “soul mate,” who is dying of cancer. It represents the lengths people will go to in order to save what they have. It also represents the ineffectualness of grand gestures. It’s not an accident that the Alaska exploit is undertaken by the only man in the play (Charles, played by Patrick Clear), whose lover (Ana, played by Marilyn Dodds Frank) just wants him to stay home and be with her while she’s dying. It’s Ruhl’s not-so-subtle comment on the differences between men and women. It’s also a commentary on two different views of practicing medicine: to help people or to save them.
Ruhl comes from a medical family. Both her husband and her sister are psychiatrists. And her father died of cancer 12 years ago, when Ruhl was 20. Clearly, the themes of “helping” and “saving” have played a role in the playwright’s life.
The plot of The Clean House is surprisingly straightforward. Lane (Mary Beth Fisher) is a doctor (specialty unknown) who does not have the time, nor the inclination, to clean her house. But she’s ambivalent about having to give orders to someone in her home – Matilde (Guenia Lemos), the Brazilian maid whose quest is to find the perfect joke and who gets depressed by cleaning. The savior for both characters is Lane’s sister Virginia (Christine Estabrook), a well-educated, complicated woman who chose not to pursue a professional career. Virginia simply lives to clean – and to be appreciated by her sister.
Ruhl strays off the straightforward path in the second act, with the introduction of Ana, an older woman who is the patient of Lane’s husband, Charles, and with whom he falls in love. Charles has saved Ana once, and can’t accept the idea that his work is not permanent.
But the more circular construction in the second act only deepens the play. It is Ana whom all the characters swirl around. It is Ana who is the catalyst for the characters’ transformations. Matilde, who seems to be the force in the first act, moves back to the role of a Greek chorus in the second.
This excellent cast doesn’t miss a beat. Thebus has many tops spinning on stage and they never seem like they’re each a single act. Todd Rosenthal’s set is clean and surprising. And costumer Linda Roethke does a fine job of differentiating between “clean” and “messy.” But it is ultimately the ideas that shine in this play; the ideas of a forceful theatrical mind.
The Clean House – Goodman Theatre
Chris Jones, Tribune – “But this remains a delightful play. And director [Jessica] Thebus, who has known [playwright Sarah] Ruhl for years, seems deftly in sync. With the help of a smart set design from Todd Rosenthal, Thebus wisely resists any temptation to overproduce work that could have been drowned on this stage. The piece is skillfully cast. Vulnerable and credible, [Mary Beth] Fisher is in fine fettle as Lane, a repressed if fundamentally decent woman trying to adapt to life’s shifting clouds of dust. And although [Christine] Estabrook’s Virginia seems straightforward, domestic and confined, that actually masks considerable profundity. Much the same could be said of the play.”
Jennifer Vanasco, Reader – “In Sarah Ruhl’s wonderful play, a 2005 Pulitzer finalist, love and happiness blossom in the dirt of life’s disorder. Jessica Thebus directs a crack cast with such wit and panache that the plot’s surprising twist not only makes complete sense but resonates with a deep tenderness. Mary Beth Fisher as Lane, the coolly efficient owner of the clean house, and Christine Estabrook as her fanatically tidy sister sustain the story’s tension while Marilyn Dodds Frank adds effervescent color as a patient of Lane’s husband, a surgeon.”
Fiorello! – TimeLine Theatre Company
Chris Jones, Tribune – “But Timeline, now wrapping up the best season in its history, is an ensemble operating in a North Side black box. Its work is rooted not in a Broadway aesthetic but in a Chicago one. And Timeline’s heart has always been in those period American dramas from the so-called fervent years. And if you can make yourself see Bowling’s production in that context (something not everyone will manage), you will be bowled over by what is achieved here.”
Jack Helbig, Reader – “This 1959 musical about New York’s colorful Depression-era mayor is a seldom performed gem. It holds up remarkably well thanks to Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s ear-pleasing tunes and to Jerome Weidman and George Abbott’s well-structured, unsentimental book… Director Nick Bowling has filled TimeLine’s intimate stage with ingenious stage pictures. And Kevin Hagan’s set, a warren of interconnected platforms and cubicles, evokes both the feeling of working in LaGuardia’s crowded law office and of living in overcrowded Manhattan. Packed with marvelous musical-theater performers, the cast puts as much energy into the characters as the songs.”
Lawrence Bommer, Free Press – “Director Nick Bowling delivers too, in this warmly wrought and surprisingly intimate venture, TimeLine’s first musical. Thanks to Doug Peck’s awesome musicianship, the score soars, especially the Damon Runyon-like choral classics ‘Politics and Poker’ and ‘A Little Tin Box.’ If the story’s larger than life, the characters are achingly human, beginning with PJ Powers’ bulldog LaGuardia. If Powers comes perilously close to making the private Fiorello as overwhelming as the public LaGuardia, better too much energy for this role than not enough.”
Scott C. Morgan, Windy City—“Director Nick Bowling’s intimate production is a winner all around thanks to many factors. Ever resourceful with its dramaturgy, TimeLine’s dramaturg Brennan Parks and projection designer Mike Tutaj fill in any historical blanks about LaGuardia through marvelous video footage (both period and mock) that flickers on the hanging laundry around Kevin Hagan’s ingeniously designed multi-level set of dense skyscraper-suggestive ladders. Bowling has also assembled a hard-working ensemble cast that acts and sings wonderfully as they assume a multitude of roles ranging from immigrants to insider politicians.”
Hecuba – Chicago Shakespeare Theater
Chris Jones, Tribune – “This kind of fearlessly focused writing cries out for a production with the kind of visceral force that would make you want to exit the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, face outward toward Lake Michigan, and emit the kind of primal scream they’d hear loud and clear in Argos, Ind. Sadly, such a production is not forthcoming here from the seemingly over-cautious Irish director Patrick Mason, who has created a new American Hecuba and yet has run too fast and too far from the national jugular. When this adaptation premiered in London in 2004, it was regarded as a historical howl of political anger. Here, its visuals tend dangerously toward the generic.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times – “Working with the blistering, often acerbic, always accessible adaptation created by [playwright Frank] McGuinness, director Patrick Mason has crafted a production that reflects the play’s strong, searing, clear-cut language. And Michael Philippi’s spare, global village set, along with Lindsay Jones’ haunting soundscape, add to the eerie devastation. The director also has surrounded his star with a cast that can pick up the slack when her crucial performance leaves something to be desired… Her performance seems to be still a work in progress.”
Kerry Reid, Reader – “Irish playwright Frank McGuinness has tackled the horrors of war before. But he’s outdone himself with this translation of Euripides’ grimmest tragedy. McGuinness’s Hecuba is transcendent in its stark nihilism yet studded with well-placed contemporary locutions, as when one of the women in the chorus contemptuously refers to ‘kiss-ass Odysseus.’ With painful acumen, Patrick Mason’s U.S.-premiere staging captures the numbed, blighted atmosphere of a postwar world. When Marsha Mason’s Hecuba whispers, ‘There is no light in life, no joy left, nothing,” it’s far more powerful than if she’d screamed it.’
Fabrizio O. Almeida, New City – “Any actress taking on the demanding role of Hecuba – here stage and screen star Marsha Mason – must traverse a demanding emotional arc requiring the degree of intense on stage suffering that tests the mettle of even the most established tragedienne. But the biggest challenge is that she must also clearly convey that shocking moment when she embraces the brutal patriarchy she has thus far condemned and, deciding that V can be for vengeance as well as victim-hood. It’s clear what this moment is from McGuinness’ direct, compact and subtly lyrical adaptation, but Mason’s sustained bouts of anger and sadness never quite reach that harrowing breaking point. Lacking a grab-you-by-the-throat intensity, I was sadly underwhelmed.”
Jonathan Abarbanel, Windy City – “In many respects this Hecuba is admirable, but the color bloc passions are missing. In the title role, Marsha Mason offers commitment and clear intellectual understanding, but she internalizes the remarkable emotional path Hecuba takes. The audience sees and hears little difference between Mason’s grief-stricken reaction to her daughter’s fate and her determined anger at her son’s murderer. But we cannot fully appreciate Hecuba’s steely and vengeful resolve unless her grief and anger first have been made visible and towering. Running just 80 minutes, there isn’t time for a subtle, naturalistic journey; this play needs raw power.”
Lawrence Bommer, Free Press—“In this American premiere from Chicago Shakespeare Theater, strongly staged by Tony-winning Patrick Mason, Irish playwright Frank McGuinness reinterprets the 2,000-year-old tragedy as a very contemporary crisis. As played by film and stage star Marsha Mason, Hecuba is one more internal refugee confined to a chicken-wire concentration camp, her only solace the sympathy of a female chorus who no doubt did double duty in Trojan Women… Like the character, Mason ranges from a kind of staggering sorrow to the local anesthetic of denial, finally erupting in a highly theatrical confrontation with her Thracian enemy.”
Venus Zarris, Gay Chicago—“Golden Globe Award-winning and Oscar-nominated Marsha Mason plays Hecuba with impressive technique but offers few moments of real emotional truth. And the attractive production struggles to find its way out from under the shadow of her celebrity. She is competent and confident in the role but creates an uneven dramatic tone of restrained and at times conversational delivery compared to the more forthright performances of the rest of the cast. The play is thought-provoking and disturbing but somewhat chaotic, never totally coalescing into a completely realized vision.”
The Old Curiosity Shop – Lookingglass
Chris Jones, Tribune – “This uneven show, frankly, is at its best when [Raymond] Fox, who plays The Single Gentleman and the show’s main narrative voice, is standing on the stage framing events. He grounds the piece, and it has a tendency to lose its urgency when he’s not around… The show is well-meaning and right-headed, but there’s still a sense that too much has been packed into too small a space without an entirely consistent visual vocabulary. And we still don’t get a good look at the Old Curiosity Shop, surely the central visual symbol of the piece.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times – “The Old Curiosity Shop was conceived by Raymond Fox (who also plays The Single Gentleman, an Englishman who has returned to London after years in America and who serves as both narrator and participant in the tale). He adapted it seamlessly in collaboration with Laura Eason and Heidi Stillman. Director Tracy Walsh has devised the fluid, ingenious, almost balletic staging that makes every aspect of the storytelling come into focus with an instantly memorable clarity, speed and vividness.”
John Beer, New City – ”’One would have to have a heart of stone,’ Oscar Wilde tells us, ‘to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.’ Lookingglass adaptor Raymond Fox and his collaborators Laura Eason and Heidi Stillman deserve some plaudits, then, for the simple feat of making Nell’s death moving again, stripped of the bathos of one of Dickens’s weaker moments. Fox and his friends have set themselves a thankless task on the whole.”
Lawrence Bommer, Reader—“Lookingglass calls it a “Victorian fairy tale of joy and woe,” but Dickens’s 1841 serial novel is weak tea compared to Hard Times, whose 2001 staging was a triumph. Snapshots of London life—violent Punch and Judy shows, dens of iniquity—don’t suit a fairy tale, but the black-and-white characters do. Long-suffering Little Nell (an uncloying Lorri Hamm) is too good to be true while the gratuitously dwarfish, melodramatic villain (a spiderlike Thomas J. Cox) is too nasty to be real and too clumsy to be threatening. Tracy Walsh’s staging is delightfully comic, however.”
Brian Kirst, Free Press—“Lookingglass Theatre Company’s funny and touching production of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop gets traction from the author’s swift-moving, adventurous serialization technique. But Lookingglass also appreciates the more tender and sentimental aspects of the work. In fact, adapters Raymond Fox, Laura Eason and Heidi Stillman focus on the heart and goodness of heroine Nell, who flees with her grandfather from the evil machinations of the hideous Quilp. He has taken over the grandfather’s curiosity shop to cover gambling debts, and he plans to make Nell his next bride.”
Quote of the Fortnight
“Sure, it’s all well and good to deal with the sense of despair that the post-college crowd might be feeling in this decidedly grim post- Sept. 11 world. But at a certain point you do want to say: Enough! Get past the self-pity, rouse yourself out of a state of arrested development and get on with it.” – Hedy Weiss reviewing House Theatre of Chicago’s production of The Boy Detective Fails in the Sun-Times.