Messy relationships mark Steel Beam's poignant 'Clean House'

Never underestimate the value of a little chaos.

While most of us prefer our lives and relationships tidy, there's something to be said for a bit of disorder now and again. Those are the moments that test our mettle. Those messy times are when we learn on whom we can rely. Those are the times we form the emotional bonds and achieve the understanding that sustains us through our worst times.

So it is with the characters who inhabit “The Clean House,” Wilmette native Sarah Ruhl's amusing domestic comedy about love, loss and the value of a good joke currently in a revival at Steel Beam Theatre in St. Charles.

The action centers around three women: a somewhat impersonal physician too busy to clean her house, the Brazilian maid she hires to do it for her and the physician's sister, who desperately seeks a purpose, which housework apparently supplies.

We first meet the maid Matilde (a warm, engaging Tegan Rogers, who has a good sense of timing). She's a young Brazilian woman and budding comedian who introduces herself by way of a dirty joke, which she tells in Portuguese without translation.

Depressed over the deaths of her beloved parents, Matilde immigrated to the United States where she works cleaning the Connecticut home of busy, middle-aged physician Lane (a nicely aloof Jennifer Reeves Wilson) and her surgeon husband, Charles (played with a genial impulsivity by Geoffrey Maher, who recalls a young William H. Macy). But instead of keeping house, the still-grieving Matilde spends her time crafting the perfect joke, to the annoyance of Lane who insists she “did not go to medical school to clean my own house.”

In contrast, Lane's sister Virginia (Cheryl Rice), a regretful woman obsessed with order and desperate for a task, is happy to clean her house.

“If you do not clean,” she asks, “how do you know if you've made any progress in life?”

Unbeknown to Lane, Virginia proposes that she clean the house instead of Matilde. Matilde agrees to the arrangement, which Lane soon discovers. Around the same time, fifty-something Charles informs Lane he has fallen in love with another woman, a spirited, 67-year-old Argentine breast cancer patient named Ana (Julane Sullivan), whose mastectomy Charles performed.

It all makes for a messy, somewhat surreal situation.

Such situations are typical of Ruhl's delicate, lyrical dramas. But in “The Clean House,” a finalist for 2005's Pulitzer Prize, the playwright tempered her trademark “magical realism.” The result is a moving examination of love and compassion under the most difficult of circumstances.

The pacing in Marge Uhlarik-Boller's competent revival is a bit uneven. And not all the performances rise to the same emotional level. But Steel Beam's production has some nice moments particularly near the end when Wilson and Sullivan demonstrate quite poignantly the benefits of embracing the messiness of life.

“The Clean House”

★ ★ ★

<b>Location:</b> Steel Beam Theatre, 111 W. Main St., St. Charles, (630) 587-8521 or <a href="http://steelbeamtheatre.com">steelbeamtheatre.com</a>

<b>Showtimes:</b> 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday through March 20

<b>Tickets:</b> $23-$28

<b>Running time:</b> About one hour, 45 minutes with intermission

<b>Parking:</b> Nearby street and garage parking available

<b>Rating:</b> For teens and older; includes some adult content