Theater review: 'The Clean House'

CATCO presents Columbus premiere of hot script from young playwright

By Dwayne Steward

Metromix

The Contemporary American Theatre Company has a hot one this month with its presentation of "The Clean House," a quirky script from young New York playwright Sarah Ruhl. The show will run in Studio One of the Vern Riffe Center until April 26.

Rahl's Pulitzer Prize-nominated script offers two hours of laughter under Jonathan Putnam's direction, but it does try a bit too hard to drive its point home, seeming at times to be metaphoric simply for the sake of being metaphoric.

The play chronicles the lives of Matilde (Eleni Papaleonardos)—a sometimes overly delightful cleaning lady/comedian extraordinaire who hates to clean just as much as she loves to tell jokes—and the highly dysfunctional family for which she works. The play opens with her boss, Lane (Katherine Clarvoe), convinced her cleaning lady won't clean because she's depressed. A series of events leads to a handful of jokes in Spanish, a cheating husband, a sister whose obsessive-compulsive tendencies finds her cleaning other people's homes and the most awkward husband-wife confrontation ever.

Papaleonardos, a CATCO newcomer, leads the cast with a charming wit that often outshines her co-stars. She brings a child-like innocence coupled with spot-on comedic timing that gives each punch-line a slightly more seductive bite. Her brilliance is heightened by her pairing with Anne Diehl as Virginia, Lane's germophobic sister. The duo share some of the script's funniest dialogue.

After discovering a pair of red underwear in the pants pocket of Lane's husband, Charles (Chuck Gillespie), who's also a surgeon, Matilde describes how the steamy hospital drama might play out. "If it's a nurse, I bet they pass each other in the hospital and she would say, ‘Hello doctor,' and she knows and he knows ... no underwear," she whispers seductively. To which Lane declares, "No underwear in a hospital? It's unsanitary!"

Clarvoe, also a CATCO newcomer, doesn't quite hit her stride as the overbearing, overachieving surgeon until she discovers the affair at the end of the first act. Her blind-sided reactions during a visit from her husband, who's to end their marriage, are both tragic and hilarious.

Gillespie and Kerry Shanklin perform double duty as Matilde's parents during her imaginative flashbacks and the husband-mistress pair. Shanklin effectively counters the play's comedic bite, playing Anna, Charles' mistress, whose body is taken over by a fatal disease, while Gillespie infuses his role with a side of buffoonery that's endearingly ridiculous, but, at times, also off-putting and over-the-top.

Cast against an elaborate living room setup (courtesy of set designer D. Glen Vanderbilt Jr.), "The Clean House" is a play that dissects the effects of laughter and how a good joke could be the best medicine. Each character learns that a clean house isn't a substitute for a clean life.

Tickets for "The Clean House" are $11.50 to $40. For more information visit www.catco.org. You can also get a sneak peek of the show by checking out CATCO's "The Clean House" preview video on YouTube.