Clean House

When I was studying theater, professors used to warn student directors a lot about "premature closure." That's when the play gives away, too early on, what it's going to be about, what kind of attitude you're supposed to take to the characters, what the themes really are. When the audience reaches closure too early, they stop thinking. They stop watching the play and start just looking at it instead. As a director, you don't want this.

(You don't want it as a writer, either, and I try very hard in my columns to avoid premature closure. I don't want readers to be able to predict what my response will be; I don't always want the first line or paragraph of my answer to announce the conclusion I'll eventually come to. It's a fun challenge, trying to avoid that.)

I saw "The Clean House" at New Rep last night with a friend, and if there's one thing that play does not give you, it's premature closure. It's funny, sad, absurdist, naturalistic one moment and surreal the next. The author blends and mixes genres like a gifted chef creating a meal with textures and flavors you'd never believe worked together. The set is gorgeous and functionally clever--it's hardly the designer's fault that I was distracted during the first 10 minutes by the fact that I have that table lamp, too, and while I buy lamps at Target I am not for a minute believing that a Connecticut surgeon with a live-in maid would. And the show features three of Boston's strongest, most mature actresses--Paula Plum, the extraordinary Nancy Carroll (whose phenomenal Mrs. Lovett in 2004's "Sweeney Todd" is the main reason Mr. Improbable and I became New Rep subscribers), and Bobbie Steinbach, nicely balanced by newcomer Cristi Miles. Watching the four of them together is like ... watching four people who are really, really good at what they do working together, I guess. Similes fail me.

I hated the show.

I didn't figure out that I hated it until today, and I still don't hate the production--New Rep, as always, digs in and gets that show done. But what on the surface seemed so fresh and original turns out, on deeper inspection, to be just so much rehashed white liberal self-loathing and fear of women. (The play was written by a woman, incidentally, and it's not like men get portrayed much better. The sole male character, Charles, is a self-deluding twit--and the object of desire for three of the four women in the show.)

Lane (Paula Plum) is a successful surgeon married to another successful surgeon, and Mathilde (Cristi Miles) is her Brazilian live-in maid. Mathilde is depressed by cleaning and wants to be a comedian. Lane's depressive sister, Virginia (Nancy Carroll) likes to clean, so she offers to do Mathilde's job for her without Lane's knowledge. Then Charles falls in love with a charismatic (we know she is, because the script tells us so!) cancer patient from Argentina. Complications, hilarity, epiphanies, and tears ensue.

Yes, it takes a lot of tapdancing to avoid premature closure on this baby, because once again, it's the story of how those muy caliente Latinas teach uptight white norteamericanas to live, love, laugh. Arriba! 'Cause, you know, it's just not possible for a middle-class white woman to really get the true stuff of life, and why on earth might a woman of color have anything better to do than go around being a source of spiritual nourishment for some misguided Miss Ann? It's a pseudo-girl-power version of the Magical Negro, insulting to women of both cultures.

And the play is profoundly unfair to the protagonist, Lane. Her signature line--"I didn't go to medical school to clean my own house"--is supposed to point her up as a monster of classist entitlement. But her statement is problematic why, exactly? Do we want hospitals to be even more understaffed than they are because the (female) surgeons are off reorganizing their closets? (Surgeon hubby Charles doesn't seem that interested in cleaning the house, either, but no one's bothered by that.) Is cleaning your own house somehow more morally worthy than saving people's lives in the O.R.? I have a housecleaner, too. And I daresay my housecleaner has a mechanic, and a doctor, because she didn't become a housecleaner to fix her own transmission or cure her own colds. Division of labor is the foundation of civilization.

Paula Plum unfortunately plays into the nervous, uptight, privileged reading of Lane. It's not the only interpretation possible. At one point, Lane says that she comes home from work exhausted, and goes to work exhausted, and that that's how everyone lives. When she realizes her husband has never been in love with her, she says that she thought admiration was the best there was, all she could hope for. Why not play that? A woman desperate to play by the rules, to help others and ignore her own needs, trapped by the belief that to express weakness is to be despised--and above all, tired. So very, very tired. A woman whose need to be right all the time comes not from snotty superiority, but from the belief that no one could possibly love the flawed human creature that she is. She believes that she must be well-dressed, witty, accomplished, and aging well at all moments, or she simply doesn't deserve to take up space on this earth. No wonder the poor thing is exhausted.

Lane doesn't need a lesson in humility, she needs one in pride. And I'm really tired of the narrative of uppity women needing to be taken down a peg, to have their pride shoved in their faces, to be humbled and forced to admit the inadequacy of their lives. I am really tired of that narrative. And the strong implication at the end that Lane will forgive Charles and take him back--even as she knows he doesn't love her--is at this particular political moment, especially repellent.

Hmm. I think I've achieved some closure now.