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Peer Reviews Not a Clean Sweep By Joe Monroe, II
So all my friends wondered why I would go to see a play on the night the biggest game of professional football was being played, and I responded by saying, "Hey, I have TiVo. I won't miss a thing, and I can fast-forward through the boring parts." Well, if there was any time I should have let peer pressure win, this was it. It truly pains me to admit that my TiVo would have been in better use at the presentation of The Clean House by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Jon Jory. Where was the fast-forward when I needed it? The Clean House is about a maid, Matilde (Alexandra Tavares), that does not like to clean and is looking for the perfect joke. She encounters a doctor, Lane (Felicity La Fortune), whose husband, Charles (Bernard Burk Sheredy), leaves her for one of his patients, Ana (Rae C. Wright), that she eventually has to care for, and the doctor's sister, Virginia (Kate Goehring), is really the one who likes to clean. Let me begin again on a less critical note. This play had an outstanding cast. Before the show, as I read the bios, I was excited to see what they would do with their characters. I was also excited to see how the author was going to take a play about cleaning and speak about love, humor and emotion. The cast did well with the development of their characters, but the play never really developed. I am unsure whether to attribute that to the writing or the vision of the director. There were some comical parts, but the slow and confusing parts outnumbered those moments. Even so, the show's standout characters were Matilde and Virginia. The only things that might have made this show better would have been more jokes from Matilde and no intermission.
The Clean House January 29 - February 23, 2008 Posted Feb. 9, 2008
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