Events
Victoria Petrovich's set - an elegant, creamy-white living room with faux marble floor - is so immaculate it's the kind of place people photo-shoot rather than inhabit. To the eyes of its owner, however, a workaholic surgeon named Lane, the joint's a sty. Worse, her Brazilian cleaning lady Mathilde refuses to work. She'd rather create a joke so perfect the hearer would die from laughter. "A good joke can clean out the insides," Mathilde says, and Sarah Ruhl's play scours static living and advocates life lived with the spontaneity of laughter. Using a hybrid style that combines farce, operatic aria, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "magic realism," the play jumps to unexpected places (the Arctic Circle among them) and alliances. The San Diego Rep's opening-night performance was tentative in spots (the various epiphanies could be more epiphanic, for example, and the cast could worry less about making the magic credible and just enjoy making it; in others, it reached the laughter-like spontaneity Ruhl requires). Annie Hinton stands out as Lane's sister Virginia. She's got such an obsession for cleanliness when she saw European ruins she wondered why someone hadn't swept them away. Throughout Hinton's a riot. And, as it wends its de-constricting way, Clean House is a very, very funny play.
Worth a try.
Through March 22
When:
- Sundays at 2 p.m.
- Sundays at 7 p.m.
- Tuesdays at 7 p.m.
- Wednesdays at 7 p.m.
- Thursdays at 8 p.m.
- Fridays at 8 p.m.
- Saturdays at 2 p.m.
- Saturdays at 8 p.m.