Immaculate conception

CHANTILLY LACE Lemos, left, and Estabrook are startled to find unexpected panties in the weekly laundry mix.

Sarah Ruhl—a native Chicagoan who’s been produced almost everywhere, but rarely in Chicago—neatly orders her Clean House with the control of the obsessive cleaner: There’s dirtiness on one side (the passionate, the uncontrollable), cleanliness on the other (the clamped-down, the repressed), and it’s clear Ruhl’s pulling for dirt. So why do we leave this visually pristine production feeling pleased yet also so…unsullied?

On the clean side is Lane (Mary Beth Fisher), a doctor in her fifties who explains she didn’t go to medical school to clean her own home. For that she has 27-year-old Matilde (Guenia Lemos), a Brazilian maid who, unluckily for Lane, doesn’t care for cleaning. Luckily for Matilde, however, Lane’s sister, Virginia (Christine Estabrook), loves it. So Virginia covertly tidies while Matilde spends her days on her real passion: thinking up jokes. (Her parents joked so much, her mother literally died laughing.)

Ruhl sweeps up all the expected clean/dirty metaphors. Humorless white Lane in her stark white doctor’s coat wants her all-white house spotless. Housewife Virginia prefers to push back ever-looming chaos through Sisyphean vacuuming. When Lane learns her doctor husband, Charles (Patrick Clear), has fallen for one of his patients, Ana (Marilyn Dodds Frank), a 67-year-old Argentinean with breast cancer, he in effect craps all over Lane’s lily-white world. Yet for all the business about white women versus immigrant Latinas, Ruhl isn’t really interested in her premise’s social implications—a valid choice that permits a trite scenario: It takes the fiery South American women to enlighten the chilly North Americans.

It’s less Ruhl’s spoken metaphors than her visual ones that signal her burgeoning talent, and director Jessica Thebus and set designer Todd Rosenthal have realized those metaphors charmingly. In one magical scene, when Lane’s skylight transforms into Ana’s balcony, Ana and Matilde bite into apples then toss them over the rail and into the sea—a sea that’s also Lane’s living room below; a perplexed Lane watches the apples falling around her. Later, Virginia frantically messes up Lane’s living room to the operatic accompaniment of an aria played above by Ana on her balcony. Yet other such gestures—Charles pulls onstage an Alaskan yew tree to cure his dying lover—rely more on the show’s sizable budget for their success than on their inherent theatricality.

Likewise, Ruhl’s skeletal characterizations depend heavily on actors who can endow them with flesh and blood. Fortunately, two in particular are full-bodied: As Virginia, Estabrook has whiplash comic timing, while Frank’s Ana, whom the script describes as “impossibly charismatic,” is precisely that. While Fisher and Clear as the estranged couple do just fine (that is, they’re as nondescript as their characters), Lemos’s oddly unfunny Matilde seems incapable of telling a joke so riotous it could slay people (scrape them, maybe).

For all its celebration of metaphorical mess, Clean House is amazingly dirt-free. In small but telling moments, we see Virginia sorting through Lane and Charles’s underwear after they’re freshly laundered, never before. There are no embarrassing human stains in Ruhl’s tidy world, nothing that can’t come out with a whimsical gesture, like the supertitles that comment on the action: “They fall in love. They fall in love some more.” A tossed-off quip, and the world is manageable. Cancer? Ha. Death? Ha, ha. Ruhl’s message, though not exactly original, is certainly legit: Humor tempers and makes sense of tragedy. But if she doesn’t let us truly experience the tragic—to wallow in the grit and grime of infidelity, sickness, dying—the laughter seems more sanitizing than cleansing.

With this Pulitzer finalist, Ruhl shares with some recent Pulitzer winners a tendency to handle potentially heavy topics with an unthreateningly light touch. But it’s her knack for poetic imagery (which suggests her contemporary, Naomi Wallace) that marks Ruhl as a playwright with promise. The enjoyable if sometimes generic Clean House may resemble a new, well-built tract house, but one with enough original features to suggest that its architect is surely capable of more unique structures.