ACTOR'S THEATRE SEASON OPENER

'Clean House' wrings laughs from characters' messy lives

Housekeeper doesn't care for scrubbing -- but she loves a good joke
JULIE YORK COPPENS
Theater Writer

She doesn't do windows.

Or much of anything else.

"At the outset, she is my housekeeper. I want her to clean my house," says actor Claudia Carter Covington, whose harried doctor character in "The Clean House" hires Matilde, a young Brazilian, played by Adyana de la Torre.

"She says she doesn't like to clean," de la Torre explains with a shrug. "She never has, even as a child."

And so, Matilde does not clean Lane's house. Instead, she tells jokes. In Portuguese.

As playwright Sarah Ruhl's imaginative comedy unfolds, we learn that Matilde's strange stand-up routine is a tribute to her mother and father, once the funniest couple in their small village and, possibly, the whole of Brazil. Now dead.

Lane's home, meanwhile, remains spotless, thanks to an under-the-table arrangement between Matilde and Virginia, Lane's lonely, neat-freak sister. Soon everyone in "The Clean House" -- including Lane's husband, also a doctor, and Ana, the older Argentinian woman who becomes Charles' patient and his lover -- is utterly dependent on Matilde, the live-in maid who does not clean.

Actor's Theatre of Charlotte opens its 19th season this week with Ruhl's acclaimed script, a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. "The Clean House" deals with depression, grief, betrayal, terminal illness, ethnic stereotypes, class distinctions -- but the play is hilarious, director Scott Ripley says, if acted well.

In addition to Covington, a veteran player with the late Charlotte Rep, the Actor's Theatre cast features Martin Thompson, who starred in "Art" at the Rep and played a sleazy antiques dealer in the long-running "Shear Madness"; along with Jorja Ursin and Elyse Williams, comedians familiar from past Actor's Theatre shows.

On a recent afternoon, a day after what Covington and de la Torre describe as a breakthrough rehearsal with Ripley, the actors felt they were finding the script's comic groove.

"For a while, I was butting my head up against the wall," de la Torre admits. "I was maybe thinking too much about the character of Matilde being lovable. But last night, it was like a light bulb went on. ... She puts up a wall. She becomes sarcastic to protect herself from allowing herself to feel."

Sarcastic, deadpan -- even, in her quest for "the perfect joke," a bit raunchy.

"If you see what this little chiquita does on that first joke," Covington says, laughing and pointing to de la Torre, who opens the play (per Ruhl's script) with a hip-thrusting monologue in which a doctor (we surmise) advises a male virgin on the eve of his wedding. "It is so sexy! It's worth the price of admission, I think, for a guy to see that. Even in Portuguese, there is no doubt what that joke is about."

Between the multilingual punch lines of Ruhl's play, Covington adds, come moments of surprising emotional power: "Matilde drives the story. We're here to find out if this very droll, dry woman can find her heart again after losing her parents."

De la Torre's own parents were émigrés from Cuba, so she grew up speaking Spanish.

"But the Portuguese was new," says de la Torre, who found some native speakers to practice with while in New York this summer. "It's a very musical language. And the accent is completely different."

"She sounds fabulous," Covington reports. "It's beautiful to listen to."

As for what the Actor's Theatre crowd might make of the beautiful mess that is "The Clean House," Covington and de la Torre can only guess. (The company's revised production schedule this season, with two discounted previews offered to the public before each show's official opening, should help.)

"The things that we find funny, they may not," de la Torre says.

"You just never know," Covington says, "until you have an audience."

THE CLEAN HOUSE

Two doctors with an ailing marriage hire a Brazilian maid who hates to clean in Sarah Ruhl's acclaimed play.

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, continuing through Oct. 6. 2:30 p.m. matinee Sept. 30.

WHERE: Actor's Theatre of Charlotte, 650 E. Stonewall St.
ADMISSION:

$23-$28; 7:30 p.m. Sept. 26 performance is pay-what-you-can.

DETAILS: 704-342-2251; or www.actorstheatrecharlotte.org.