Sarah Ruhl's "The Clean House" @ ACT Theatre

ACT's production deserves special notice for the set, by Matthew Smucker. Performed in the round, the recessed square playing field—reminiscent of the stark set for Yasmina Reza's Art—is brilliantly Zen. The couches and carpet are immaculate, sterile white and beg to be dirtied (which happens with aplomb in Act 2). But for all its strengths, ultimately the play felt too didactic; the question is where the fault lies.

The play has an agenda, and ultimately the characters and action are in service of that agenda, which threatens to make the characters sort of stale and one-dimensional. Lane is snobby and wry because she’s a career woman; Virginia is mousy and nervous because she’s a frustrated homemaker; Matilde is ebullient and funny because she’s a carefree Latino immigrant. The actors give strong performances, but somehow the characters never really flesh out. Suzanna Bouchard (Lane) is a great comic foil to Matilde's dazzlingly comic logorrhea, delivering her downbeat lines with withering dryness. Anne Allgood (Virginia) seems to struggle a bit with her character's voice, whose nervousness, always threatening to cause stuttering, makes delivering a comic punch-line tough. Priscilla Hake Lauris (Ana, the older woman Charles leaves Lane for) brings a radiant beauty to her role as a carefree older woman, but this too feels like a character type with which we're familiar. The real standout is Christine Calfas as Matilde, who deftly manages to deliver lengthy jokes in rapid-fire Portuguese in such a way as to get the audience rolling with a joke they can’t even understand. But even she has trouble finding out what Matilde’s trajectory is.

The question, I suppose, is whether that's a fair criticism to lay on an actor in a comedy—comedy, after all, requires the actor to perform like an instrument to get the laugh. Timing is everything; your only room to develop and expand is in the margins. But in a play that moves from smart comedy to a very serious, touching finale (wherein the characters finally embrace the act of cleaning when they dress a corpse for burial), the result is that the actors have trouble forcing their characters to grow and develop. Perhaps that's why we left the play feeling that Charles, the staid husband turned passionate lothario (played with comic brilliance by Allen Fitzpatrick, a dead-ringer for Rob Corddry, strangely enough), was the most believable character, despite the fact that he was the least developed of all.

But that's not to say we don't whole-heartedly endorse the play. The cast, with the minor misgivings above, nevertheless gives a truly hilarious and moving performance. The set is brilliantly conceived and the play cleverly directed (by Allison Narver) to maximize both the script and the space. In the end, we left extremely impressed.

Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House plays at ACT Theatre through April 29. Visit their website for tickets.

Photo left to right: Suzanne Bouchard and Christine Calfas in Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House at ACT Theatre. Photo by Chris Bennion, courtesy of ACT Theatre.