The Coastal Rep Presents: The Clean House

If You Do Not Clean, How Do You Know if You’ve Made any Progress in Life?

The Clean House: A dark comedy about relationships and love

HALF MOON BAY, CA (May 22, 2017). The best things in life—a sublime joke, a fulfilling purpose, a soul mate—are infinitely worth waiting for. That’s the premise behind Sarah Ruhl’s bold and emotionally rich comedy, The Clean House. Presented by the Coastal Reparatory Theatre, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated play opens Friday, June 9 and runs Friday – Sunday, June 9 – July 2, 2017.

Directed by Elise Gasper, the play opens with a tantalizing untranslated joke, told with a raunchy exuberance by a young woman from Brazil named Matilde. Matilde is not a comedian, but a maid, and that is her problem. When Matilde is not thinking up jokes, she gets depressed—and when she gets depressed, she doesn’t clean.

Matilde has been hired to clean Lane’s house, and her allergic reaction to Windex and feather dusters has the even-tempered doctor on edge. And that’s not Lane’s only problem. Her husband Charles, a surgeon, has found his soul mate, and it’s not Lane. It’s Ana, a vibrant Argentinean woman, who is dying, and that is Charles’s problem.

Lane’s sister, Virginia, has her own problems. Unhappily idle, she sees the meaning of life in dust. If there is dust, she can remove the dust, and that’s progress. If there is no dust, she has no purpose. With that, Virginia persuades Matilde to let her clean Lane’s house on the sly, thereby setting in motion a series of events that gradually reorders—and deepens—the relationships among the play’s characters.

Playwright Sarah Ruhl pulls from her own view of cleaning. “We often dismiss the question of cleaning, as if it were something trivial,” said Ruhl in an interview with American Theatre Magazine. “But if you really start to talk to people about their relationship to cleaning, it reveals so much about our attitudes towards death and mortality and decay.”

For more information, or to purchase tickets, please contact Coastal Rep at 650-204-5046, or visit www.coastalrep.com. Coastal Rep is located at 1167 Main Street, Half Moon Bay.

Director and Cast:

Director: Elise Gasper

Matilde: Heather Skelley

Lane: Melanie DuPuy

Virginia: Ann Kuchins

Charles: Tom Woosnam

Ana: Monica Cappucini

Director’s Notes:

I feel passionate about this play for so many reasons. It’s a refreshing dark comedy, with timeless themes about middle age and getting older. I am incredibly inspired by the fantastic roles for middle-aged women. The empathy, humor, and gut-wrenching issues these women encounter in their relationships, that do not center around men. I am also in awe of our cast. Our fearless, cracker-jack veteran actors have taken the characters to a new level.

I would describe this play as magical; a theatrical approach to the subject matter: love later in life, sisters, social classes, and death, and all approached with humor. The play blends real life and memory/fantasy with each other creating an exhilarating and haunting cinematic experience.

You will leave this rollercoaster of a play moved, and will think about it for weeks to come.

Awards and Accolades:

Winner of the 2004 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize

Finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Drama

"Fresh, funny ... a memorable play, imbued with a melancholy but somehow comforting philosophy: that a perfect punch line can be as sublime as the most wrenchingly lovely aria." - The New York Times

"A rich work about big themes from a young playwright with an original and audacious voice." - Variety

About the Coastal Reparatory Theatre: The award-winning Coastal Rep surprises, inspires and delights its patrons with memorable dramatic, musical and comedic performances. For twenty years the Coastal Reparatory Theatre, a 501c3 non-profit organization, has passionately believed in the power of live performance art, and provided opportunities for creative development in all aspects of local theatre.