CHAPEL HILL -- Deep Dish Theater Company closes its seventh season with Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House, a lovely and often riotous comedy about a young Brazilian woman and the people whose house she tends. It will be directed by Tony Lea and performed May 1 to 24 at Deep Dish Theater in Chapel Hill’s University Mall.
Playwright Ruhl has said the idea for The Clean House, a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist, developed from a remark she overhead at a cocktail party. “My cleaning lady is depressed and won't clean my house," a doctor standing near her said, "so I took her to the hospital and had her medicated. And she still won't clean! I did not go to medical school to clean my own house."
That comment evolved into the show’s first monologue by Lane (Carole Marcotte), a successful, tightly-wound surgeon whose Brazilian maid, Matilde (Ashlee Quinones), finds cleaning depressing and would rather spend her time practicing her stand-up comedy. When Lane’s sister Virginia (Georgia Martin), who loves to clean, offers to secretly do Matilde’s work, and Lane’s husband Charles (Donnie Bledsoe) brings home a mysterious Argentinean (Delia Pantaleon), her perfectly ordered life is thrown into chaos.
Tinged with laughter, sadness, infidelity, illness, and an abundance of jokes, some in Portuguese, The Clean House creates a magically realistic world that the playwright calls “a metaphysical Connecticut.”
Director Tony Lea was immediately taken with Ruhl’s writing. “She creates a sense of heightened reality, showing us how we really live – in our minds – sometimes in the here and now, sometimes in the past, sometimes in fantasy, all with an intent to show the best in people.” Lea has staged a number of memorable Deep Dish productions, including Marvin’s Room, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Holiday, The Game of Love and Chance, and last season’s The Exonerated. He also appeared as Piet in Deep Dish’s fall production of A Lesson from Aloes.
The Clean House established Sarah Ruhl as one of the most exciting and imaginative new voices in the American theater. Her other works, including Eurydice, Passion Play: A Cycle, and Dead Man’s Cell Phone (which recently concluded its world premiere at New York’s Playwrights Horizons, featuring Mary Louise-Parker) have been produced throughout the U.S. and Europe. She was recently awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (nicknamed the “genius grant”), and, in 2000, a Kennedy Center Fellowship at the Sundance Theatre Laboratory.
Carole Marcotte appeared in Ancestral Voices, part of Deep Dish’s inaugural season. The remainder of the cast—Ashlee Quinones, Georgia Martin, Donnie Bledsoe and Delia Pantaleon—are all making their Deep Dish debuts. The design team for The Clean House includes Jennifer Becker (sets), Judy Chang (costumes), Scott Marlow (lights), Jon Byers (props), Adam Sampieri (sound), Joy Javitz (choreography) and Rachel S. Zielinski (stage manager).
Audience discussions will follow Sunday matinee performances on May 4 (featuring a conversation with the production's design team) and May 11. The Deep Dish Book Selection for this production is How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez. A discussion of the book, free and open to the public, will be held prior to the performance on Thursday, May 22 at 6:30 pm. You can also join the online discussion of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents at www.deepdishbook.blogspot.com.
For reservations and information, call (919) 968-1515 or visit the company's box office in University Mall Wednesday - Saturday from 3-6 p.m. Tickets for all performances are $16, $14 for seniors, and $12 for students. Thursday, May 8 is "Cheap Dish Night," when all tickets will be $7; no advance reservations will be taken for that performance.
For more information, call (919) 968-1515.
