Love And Loss In Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House

Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House is a play ripe for a director’s dissection, with deep reflections of love and loss. I consider the central character, Mathilde, a Brazilian maid, who has a job cleaning the house of an uptight American doctor (Lane), to be the axis from which the action of the play orbits around. Ruhl’s writing riffs on the roles and status ascribed by social class: “It’s a telenovela!,” Mathilde declares wryly. This piece is a myriad of fantasy, social commentary and dry humor. And, fortunately for the reader and audience, the play unfolds in a delightful maze of unexpected twists and turns. However, in my directorial vision, the developing events of the play are all a result of the grief and post-traumatic stress that Mathilde
The most basic being that Mathilde, the housekeeper, doesn’t like to clean houses. “When I was a child,” she recalls, “I thought, if the floor is dirty, look at the ceiling.” She spends her time inventing good jokes (which we hear in Portuguese) and dreaming about her deceased parents. Mathilde’s flashback memories (or are they fantasies?) of her parents are fully theatricalized on-stage throughout the script. We see her parents having a jovial time dancing, romancing each other, making love and telling jokes over the course of their lifetime. I feel that these ‘dreams’ are one way that Mathilde’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a result of her mother’s recent passing from an unknown ailment and her father’s death by suicide, is manifesting itself. Thus, as a director, I would stage these scenes with a sense of benevolence and paranoia. This can be accomplished in two ways: through ‘moment to moment’ text coaching with the actors portraying her parents and via a design landscape (lighting, sound) that presents Mathilde’s delusion in a more painful, dark and nightmare scenario. This would be include my choices of music for the production. I would opt for harder, throbbing, dance music and I’ve included some suggestions