 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com “Passionate. Show-stopping. Daringly over-the-top and impressively consistent in its delirious excess. The Clean House shines.”—New Haven Advocate “The Clean House is not, by any means, a traditional boy-meets-girl story. In fact disease, death, and dirt are among the subjects it addresses. This comedy is romantic, deeply so, but in the more arcane sense of the word: visionary, tinged with fantasy, extravagant in feeling, maybe a little nuts.”—The New York Times “Touching, inventive, invigoratingly compact, and luminously liquid, Eurydice reframes the ancient myth of ill-fated love to focus not on the bereaved musician but on his dead bride—and on her struggle with love beyond the grave.”—San Francisco Chronicle This volume is the first publication of Sarah Ruhl, “a playwright with a unique comic voice, perspective, and sense of theater” (Variety), who is fast leaving her mark on the American stage. In the award-winning Clean House—a play of uncommon romance and uncommon comedy—a maid who hates cleaning dreams about creating the perfect joke, while a doctor who treats cancer leaves his heart inside one of his patients. This volume also includes Eurydice, Ruhl’s reinvention of the tragic Greek tale of love and loss, together with a third play still to be named. Sarah Ruhl received the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2004 for her play The Clean House, which has been produced at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia, South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, DC. Her play Eurydice has been produced at Madison Repertory Theatre and Berkeley Repertory Theatre. |
Average Customer Rating:   Charming Reading the work of Sarah Ruhl is, as reviewers before me have endeavored to point out, much like falling in love. It is, at times, highly surreal and gripping in a way that escapes logical reason. Her plays retain the air of the modern, but there is a very old, familiar quality lurking just at the peripheral edges of written consciousness.
Her plays are penned in the manner of transcribed dreams; filled with shifting imagery and and skewed perspectives that hit right at the heart, yet still contain an air of the delightfully absurd.
Take, for instance, her updated tale of love, "Eurydice".
"Eurydice" is a refreshed version of the ancient greek Orpheus myth, telling the story of a dreamy, absorbed musician the literary-minded wife as they span the breadth between the worlds. We are clearly reading the tale of two adults, yet they are characterized with an almost childishly overzealous approach to love, forgetfulness, life and death. Emotions range from startlingly neutral to forcefully passionate in an instant, keeping the audience swept up in her tempestuous story-telling from start to finish while hardly taking a breath.
Sarah Ruhl manages to be in the vanguard without being preachy. She manages modern surrealism without losing touch with her audience, keeping everything carefully bound together with a tender red-thread of a true artist. Throughout every literary journey, she takes you gleefully by the hand and drags you down her own personal rabbit hole (for truly, her work does have a certain delightfully obscure Lewis Carroll feel to it). This particular book is a marvelous anthology of her plays (although I DO wish it could have included Dead Man's Cell Phone). late delivery! I ordered this book to be delivered in two days, and paid extra. It was delivered four days later. This is not only bad advertising, bad publicity, dishonesty, but clearly financial overcharging! It is a shame that Amazon will receive bad reviews from this incident from a university professor! Brilliant Plays The language, the humor, the emotional connection to the characters...Sarah Ruhl is a brilliant playwright. This collection is a wonderful introduction to her work. Experimental: good on the stage, less interesting to read I chose Sarah Ruhl's plays as a source of language for an advanced EFL course, wanting an example of contemporary American English. The situations and word play, however, make her work unsuitable for this. While I did appreciate her work from a literary point of view, I didn't really find her work on a par with what the hype had brought me to expect. She is definitely interesting, but perhaps she tries too hard to be different, with mixed results No Acting Necessary
Before Sarah Ruhl was a playwright, she was a poet. This is not a great surprise. I mean, just look at the format, imagery and dialogue found in The Clean House and Other Plays. This is drama, yeah, but it is drama that even contains poetic line-breaks!:
I feel I can deposit my pain
right there--like a coin, into a hole.
(from Melancholy Play, page 236)
In a March 2008 New Yorker interview, Ruhl calls herself "a fabulist." She is someone whose characters build rooms of string and travel in raining elevators (Euridyce). In another story, Ruhl echoes Monty Python's idea of jokes that can kill--only hers are used as mercy killings (The Clean House). Ruhl's lesbian cowboy seems natural riding imaginary horses in Pittsburgh (Late: A Cowboy Song); and watch where you step, because the depressed are turning into almonds at almost every turn! (Melancholy Play)
The experience of reading plays is a different one from that of reading other fiction or non-fiction works. Plays stretch the mind to consider subjects such as lighting, sound, and props. As a list given here, such material might be perceived as mundane and dull. In Sarah Ruhl's hands, they become magic. A lack of narrative and the addition of technical details doesn't mean that the nuances of emotion are left behind as something only the actors can manage. Tears, real tears, are no doubt regularly shed as Ruhl's readers feel the beautiful emotional-roller coaster moments on these pages: the strong father-daughter bond and ridiculousness of new romance in Euridyce; the love for parents and heartbreaking compassion of The Clean House; the true and false loves of Late: A Cowboy Song; and the sweet disorder of Melancholy Play.
Ruhl's characters are full of wonderfully playful, bizarre contradictions: For example, the psychiatrist in Melancholy Play, LORENZO THE UNFEELING, takes every opportunity to enlighten the people he comes in contact with to the sad, tragic details of his childhood and to the fact that he not only feels, but has gone completely overboard, falling in love with his melancholy patient, Tilly. A Brazilian housekeeper detests housekeeping, and longs to be a comedian. A woman is irresistible to all men when she is miserable, but the moment she finds happiness, the world shifts and almost no one can stand her any longer.
Perhaps most fun of all reading a Sarah Ruhl play are the stage notes, which one would never have the opportunity to enjoy if sitting in the audience and watching the thing. In Melancholy Play, for example, Ruhl has notes about the casting.
Frances and Frank, we learn later in this play, are twins. However, in the world of this play, there is no need for twins to resemble each other. If your Frances and Frank look nothing alike, simply change this line on page 315: "TILLY: My God! You look exactly like her!" to "TILLY: My God! You look nothing like her!" or even: "TILLY: My God! You look a little bit like her!"
The Clean House and Other Plays is a collection of silly, enchanting and weird stories that, despite their oddness and impossibilities, still hold the ring of truth. Ruhl writes in a way that is so human it is impossible not to be moved. Having never seen a Sarah Ruhl play produced, this writer can tell you that it's not the least bit necessary to enjoy this book. It stands on its own as a great piece of literature.
This review first appeared on Night Times.
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