About the Play:

Finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and Winner of the 2004 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize

The Clean House is a full-length comedy by Sarah Ruhl. A play of uncommon romance and uncommon comedy, The Clean House focuses on a quirky Brazilian maid hired by a serious career-oriented doctor, Lane. The only problem is that the maid hates to clean; she longs to be a comedienne. When Lane is deserted by her husband who leaves her for his older mistress your audience is shown that there is humour and beauty to be found in life's most unlikely messes.

The Clean House takes place in what Sarah Ruhl describes as "metaphysical Connecticut", mostly in the home of a married couple who are both doctors. They have hired a housekeeper named Matilde, an aspiring comedian from Brazil who's more interested in coming up with the perfect joke than in house-cleaning. Lane, the lady of the house, has an eccentric sister named Virginia who's just nuts about house-cleaning. She and Matilde become fast friends, and Virginia takes over the cleaning while Matilde works on her jokes. Trouble comes when Lane's husband Charles reveals that he has found his soul mate, or "bashert" in a cancer patient named Anna, on whom he has operated. The actors who play Charles and Anna also play Matilde's parents in a series of dream-like memories, as we learn the story about how they literally killed each other with laughter, giving new meaning to the phrase, "I almost died laughing". The Clean House is a theatrical and wildly funny play that is a whimsical and poignant look at class, comedy and the true nature of love.

The Clean House premiered in 2004 in a critically-acclaimed run at Yale Repertory Theatre, and was done to equal acclaim at several major regional theatres before winding up off Broadway at Lincoln Center, where it had an extended run and won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize honouring the best English-language women writers worldwide. The play is regularly performed in regional repertory, college, and community theatre productions.

The special edition also includes Eurydice, Ruhl's reinvention of the tragic Greek tale of love and loss; Late, a cowboy song and Melancholy Play.

Cast: 4 female, 1 male

What people say:

"Passionate. Show-stopping. Daringly over-the-top and impressively consistent in its delirious excess. The Clean House shines." — The New Haven Advocate

"The Clean House is not, by any means, a traditional boy-meets-girl story. In fact disease, death and dirt are among the subjects it addresses. This comedy is romantic, deeply so, but in the more arcane sense of the word: visionary, tinged with fantasy, extravagant in feeling, maybe a little nuts." — The New York Times

"A rich work about big themes from a young playwright with an original and audacious voice." — Variety

"Casts a spell that had me hooked." — The New York Daily News

"Touching, inventive, invigoratingly compact and luminously liquid, Eurydice reframes the ancient myth of ill-fated love to focus not on the bereaved musician but on his dead bride — and on her struggle with love beyond the grave." — San Francisco Chronicle

About the Playwright:

Sarah Ruhl is an award-winning American playwright, author, essayist, and professor. Her plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalists The Clean House and In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), also nominated for a Tony Award. A MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship recipient, she is known for charting complex currents of desire and broaching weighty topics such as bereavement with a light, whimsical touch. Her plays have been produced on Broadway and across the US as well as internationally, and translated into fourteen languages.