Review of _The Clean House_
Review of The Clean House by Sarah Ruhl, at the San Diego Repertory Theatre, directed by Sam Woodhouse.
I am grateful to Sam Woodhouse for his invitation to see his production of Sarah Ruhl’s play The Clean House, and I am happy to say that the direction was deft, the performances competent, and the set impressive. At the same time, I have nothing good to say about the play itself. Despite its author’s receipt of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the play exemplifies precisely what is so profoundly wrong with contemporary theater: namely, the incessant production of plays written in banal and manipulative language that convey absolute and uncritical worship of human emotion as the primary, indeed the only, meaning in life.
Here’s what the play does not touch on: virtues or spiritual gifts like heroism, justice, humility, compassion, patience, temperance, faith, and wisdom; the real and problematic powers of traditional values and practices in a world of increasing doubt; the pressing philosophical questions posed by science; the ironies of history; the mystery of the relation between body, heart, and mind, nature and spirit, free will and fate; the difficulty of balancing individual liberty and social responsibility. Instead the play, which like many another seeks to achieve universal human seriousness by depicting a death, dissolves all human concerns in a bath of bathos, feelings the only reality. The ultimate goal of theater today by implication? Sentimentality.
In The Clean House a surgeon betrays marital fidelity with an older woman with whom he has fallen in love when preparing to perform a mastectomy on her and then brings her into the home he has shared with his wife, a successful but repressed medical doctor, for the sake of becoming one big happy non-traditional family. In the meantime, the wife’s equally repressed sister is secretly cleaning the doctors’ house because the Brazilian maid is busy trying to come up with the perfect joke, defined as that joke at which one will die laughing—literally. In fact, the play shares only one joke with the audience (three, if one understands Portuguese), a joke that I first heard in 1980, here told badly. In the end everyone is healed by the power of sentiment.
The justification for the adultery and for the murder by joke is the “aura” surrounding the dying older woman, her ability to make people feel things like vitality, compassion, enjoyment of the taste of apples, and acceptance of death. It is not an aura the audience can share in perceiving. It is not evidenced by any moral vision, human insight, depth of compassion, or religious, philosophical, or intuitive genius. We are simply told of its existence and expected to believe in it. The production attempts to make up for this gap in meaning and authenticity with deconstructed, post-modern stylization, the only thing that distinguished it from a TV sitcom. It was not distinguished from a sitcom by its supposedly poetic language: The height of its inspiration by the muse was represented by such phrases as “something between an angel and a fart.”
My response during the play was ho-hum. Thinking about it afterwards, I was peeved. Feel good about adultery; feel good about love; feel good about breaking out of the repression hidden in order and cleanliness by making a mess of the living room; feel good about dying. Feel good because the dying woman with the aura tells you it’s all ok. When St. Francis or the Baal Shem Tov tells us to rejoice, we may rejoice. We see that they have won the dues of rejoicing from a triumphant battle with reality. When Sarah Ruhl tells us, in a play about jokes that is almost never funny, to rejoice because love makes adultery ok and comedy makes euthanasia ok, some may walk out feeling good. I walked out exasperated at the shallowness, the banality, and the waste of opportunity. If this is what passes for genius in the contemporary theater, then we are in bigger trouble than contemporary theater is willing to imagine.
P.S. There is one passage in the play that asserts that according to a law of Judaism, finding one’s “bashert”—which the play defines as one’s soul mate, the person with whom one is destined to share a perfect mutual love—justifies adultery and abandonment of one’s wife. The character admits that this was heard on NPR, which for some is sufficient evidence of its origin in whole cloth. Nevertheless, I feel obliged to say that, so far as I know, there is no such Jewish law. One’s “bashert” means the person one is destined to marry. Nowhere in traditional Judaism does falling in love justify adultery.
I am grateful to Sam Woodhouse for his invitation to see his production of Sarah Ruhl’s play The Clean House, and I am happy to say that the direction was deft, the performances competent, and the set impressive. At the same time, I have nothing good to say about the play itself. Despite its author’s receipt of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the play exemplifies precisely what is so profoundly wrong with contemporary theater: namely, the incessant production of plays written in banal and manipulative language that convey absolute and uncritical worship of human emotion as the primary, indeed the only, meaning in life.
Here’s what the play does not touch on: virtues or spiritual gifts like heroism, justice, humility, compassion, patience, temperance, faith, and wisdom; the real and problematic powers of traditional values and practices in a world of increasing doubt; the pressing philosophical questions posed by science; the ironies of history; the mystery of the relation between body, heart, and mind, nature and spirit, free will and fate; the difficulty of balancing individual liberty and social responsibility. Instead the play, which like many another seeks to achieve universal human seriousness by depicting a death, dissolves all human concerns in a bath of bathos, feelings the only reality. The ultimate goal of theater today by implication? Sentimentality.
In The Clean House a surgeon betrays marital fidelity with an older woman with whom he has fallen in love when preparing to perform a mastectomy on her and then brings her into the home he has shared with his wife, a successful but repressed medical doctor, for the sake of becoming one big happy non-traditional family. In the meantime, the wife’s equally repressed sister is secretly cleaning the doctors’ house because the Brazilian maid is busy trying to come up with the perfect joke, defined as that joke at which one will die laughing—literally. In fact, the play shares only one joke with the audience (three, if one understands Portuguese), a joke that I first heard in 1980, here told badly. In the end everyone is healed by the power of sentiment.
The justification for the adultery and for the murder by joke is the “aura” surrounding the dying older woman, her ability to make people feel things like vitality, compassion, enjoyment of the taste of apples, and acceptance of death. It is not an aura the audience can share in perceiving. It is not evidenced by any moral vision, human insight, depth of compassion, or religious, philosophical, or intuitive genius. We are simply told of its existence and expected to believe in it. The production attempts to make up for this gap in meaning and authenticity with deconstructed, post-modern stylization, the only thing that distinguished it from a TV sitcom. It was not distinguished from a sitcom by its supposedly poetic language: The height of its inspiration by the muse was represented by such phrases as “something between an angel and a fart.”
My response during the play was ho-hum. Thinking about it afterwards, I was peeved. Feel good about adultery; feel good about love; feel good about breaking out of the repression hidden in order and cleanliness by making a mess of the living room; feel good about dying. Feel good because the dying woman with the aura tells you it’s all ok. When St. Francis or the Baal Shem Tov tells us to rejoice, we may rejoice. We see that they have won the dues of rejoicing from a triumphant battle with reality. When Sarah Ruhl tells us, in a play about jokes that is almost never funny, to rejoice because love makes adultery ok and comedy makes euthanasia ok, some may walk out feeling good. I walked out exasperated at the shallowness, the banality, and the waste of opportunity. If this is what passes for genius in the contemporary theater, then we are in bigger trouble than contemporary theater is willing to imagine.
P.S. There is one passage in the play that asserts that according to a law of Judaism, finding one’s “bashert”—which the play defines as one’s soul mate, the person with whom one is destined to share a perfect mutual love—justifies adultery and abandonment of one’s wife. The character admits that this was heard on NPR, which for some is sufficient evidence of its origin in whole cloth. Nevertheless, I feel obliged to say that, so far as I know, there is no such Jewish law. One’s “bashert” means the person one is destined to marry. Nowhere in traditional Judaism does falling in love justify adultery.
posted by G.Rap | 10:02 AM
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