Lincoln Center Theater

Hailed by New York Times as one of the ten best new plays of 2006, Sarah Ruhl's poignant and humorous The Clean House was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ruhl's work is at once intimate and theatrical, as grounded in the everyday as it is imaginative in its embrace of the magical and poetic.

For a choreographer, working on this deceptively simple and deeply moving comedy was especially exciting, because Ruhl imagines many key moments in the play entirely through movement and visual stage pictures. In several recurring sequences, the playwright has the protagonist (Matilde, a young Brazilian maid) remember her lost parents by imagining them in different scenes —dancing together, drinking coffee at a café, sharing inside jokes, singing her to sleep, and even giving birth to her—all without words. Other scenes told through stylized movement include: Charles (John Dossett), the doctor whose house Matilde cleans, operating on his lover Ana; Charles trekking through Alaska in search of the tree that he believes will save Ana's life; and Virginia's aria, a physical tour de force by the late, gifted actress Jill Clayburgh, in which she makes a mess of her entire house in an apotheosis of destruction ("a balletic feat of physical comedy" —NY Times).

PLAY by Sarah Ruhl | DIRECTED by Bill Rauch | CHOREOGRAPHED by Sabrina Peck | SCENIC DESIGN by Christopher Acebo | LIGHTING DESIGN by James F. Ingalls | COSTUME DESIGN by Shigeru Yaji | SOUND DESIGN/MUSIC COMPOSED by André Pluess. WITH: Vanessa Aspillaga (Matilde), Blair Brown (Lane), Jill Clayburgh (Virginia), John Dossett (Charles) and Concetta Tomei (Ana).

A videotape of The Clean House can be viewed at the Lincoln Center Library of Performing Arts in New York City. To make a viewing appointment, call the Theater on Film and Tape Archive at 212-870-1642.