The Clean House and Other Plays by Sarah Ruhl

Or "Curiouser and Curiouser..."

I shall begin with a rationalization. Normally I don't like to count plays unless (a) they are Shakespeare and therefore sufficiently challenging and time consuming or (b) I am desperate. But in this case I am counting this as one of my books because it is a four-play volume, so I feel okay about the 4 Plays = 1 Book conversion factor.

As a playwright, Sarah Ruhl has her lovers and her haters. I had only ever read Eurydice (which I love), but after reading this volume I definitely see her polarizing effect. Her sense of whimsy can teeter on the edge of self-conscious, effortful, or overly clever, and not always to a satisfying end. I found The Clean House particularly challenging in that respect. In many ways the play is, although highly stylized in its form, pretty realistic and straightforward in its dialogue and characters. But then extraordinary, bizarre things happen, like a man carrying a tree that he has chopped down from Alaska (I think?) to his dying lover that disrupts the real(ish)ism in a not-entirely-seamless kind of way. Melancholy Play and Eurydice were more effective in terms of making Ruhl's surreality and lyricism an integrated part of the world, instead of a too-dominant style problem.

I do appreciate, though, how much Ruhl leaves up to the director, actor, and designers. Her stage directions and design suggestions are specific but not at all, giving the creators of each individual production quite a lot of freedom. As a director myself, I can definitely rally behind that level of trust - trust in her fellow artists as well as trust in her own material. The down side of that ambiguity (and I don't mean to be a Sour Kangaroo here) is that her material doesn't necessarily stand on its own, and in the hands of a bad director or sub-par actors, it could make for a pretty miserable evening of theater.

At the end of the day, this one woman jury is still out on whether I'm in the Sarah Ruhl Fan Camp or not. I'm interested to see how her style continues to evolve in the coming years.