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AT the start of Sarah Ruhl's play "The Clean House," a character tells a long, apparently hilarious joke. In Portuguese.
That's the tip-off that this quirky and self-satisfied comedy seems to be straining for its effects.
The play has taken a long time to come to New York, having received great acclaim in regional theaters. It arrived last night at Lincoln Center in a beautifully designed and staged production, featuring a stellar cast, including the now-ubiquitous Jill Clayburgh and Blair Brown.
The latter plays Lane, a workaholic, cleanliness-obsessed doctor highly frustrated with her Brazilian maid. It seems that Matilde (Vanessa Aspillaga) would rather come up with the perfect joke than attend to her domestic duties.
"I'm sorry, but I did not go to medical school to clean my own house," the doctor sputters.
Lane's sister Virginia (Clayburgh) has exactly the opposite feelings. "People who give up the privilege of cleaning their own houses - they're insane people," she declares.
This sentiment leads Virginia to volunteer to assume Matilde's housecleaning duties, much to Lane's dismay when she finds out about it. But Lane is even more distressed to learn of the affair her surgeon husband Charles (John Dossett) is having with a 67-year-old breast cancer patient, Ana (Concetta Tomei), whom he calls his "soul mate."
The play's effectiveness is undercut by its heavily forced qualities, from Matilde's reveries about her late parents, seen dancing passionately in flashbacks (Dossett and Tomei again), to the cutesy projected titles that comment on the action ("They fall in love completely," one informs us), to such absurdist touches as Charles' wanderings through Alaska in search of the tree that will cure Ana's cancer.
The playwright, a MacArthur "genius" grant winner, clearly has imagination to spare, as well as a humanistic, comedic approach that holds great promise. But for all its qualities, "The Clean House" seems so pleased with itself that our appreciation feels redundant.
THE CLEAN HOUSEMitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, 150 W. 65th St.; (212) 239-6200. Through Dec. 17.
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