The Clean House, which premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2004 and opened Off-Broadway in 2006, was the first major play by celebrated American playwright Sarah Ruhl, whose other widely recognized works include Eurydice (2004), Dead Man’s Cell Phone (2007), and In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) (2009). The Clean House received a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2004 and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Ruhl also earned the 2006 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (also known as the “genius grant”) and a PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award (2008). Her Broadway debut, In the Next Room, was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist (2010) and received a nomination for the 2010 Tony Award for Best Play. Ruhl is known for her distinctive style, which pairs poetic language with absurdism and surrealism. Her plays approach the heaviness of everyday tragedy with lightheartedness.

Ruhl was inspired to write The Clean House when, at a cocktail party, she overheard a woman exclaiming, “My cleaning lady is depressed and won’t clean my house. So I took her to the hospital and had her medicated. And she still won’t clean!” This statement, which Lane expresses nearly verbatim at the beginning of the play about Matilde, suggests a deep discomfort with the untidiness and complexities of human emotion, as if it might be feasible to repair a woman like a vacuum rather than address her pain. Ruhl’s play highlights the absurdity of this disconnect between two women when one hires the other to enter her home, see her vulnerabilities, and erase the messes that betray her humanity. The Clean House is about love, grief, loss, and learning to feel instead of sanitizing uncomfortable emotions and experiences.  

Plot Summary

The play opens in the pristine living room of the suburban house that Lane, a busy doctor, shares with her husband Charles, a busy surgeon. Lane has hired Matilde, a young, newly immigrated Brazilian woman, to clean her house. Matilde, however, is depressed and won’t clean, not even after Lane takes her to a doctor for medication. Lane is frustrated that she has to clean the house herself. Lane’s older sister Virginia, a housewife who finds purpose in cleaning, doesn’t understand why Lane would hire a stranger to clean her house. All three women express discontent. Virginia confesses that cleaning her own house isn’t enough to fill her days. Matilde explains to the audience that she is sad because she is in mourning for her parents. After her mother died from laughing too hard at a joke Matilde’s father made, her father had committed suicide and Matilde moved to the United States. Matilde, a comedian herself, hates cleaning and would rather focus on her quest to write the perfect joke. When Virginia approaches Matilde and offers to secretly clean Lane’s house, Matilde agrees, and she and Virginia become friends.

While folding laundry at Lane’s house, Virginia and Matilde discover women’s underwear that doesn’t belong to Lane. Virginia attempts to ask her sister about Charles, but ultimately says nothing about the underwear. One afternoon, Lane returns home early and announces that Charles is leaving her and has been having an affair with a breast cancer patient who has had a mastectomy. When Lane realizes Virginia has been cleaning her house, she angrily fires Matilde and rejects her sister’s help. Matilde’s exit is interrupted when Charles arrives at the house with Ana, the woman he loves. Charles tells Lane that Ana is his soulmate, his bashert, and that their relationship was inevitable, but that he wants them all to be friends. Ana, who is Argentinian, becomes fast friends with Matilde and offers to hire her, but Lane and Virginia insist that they still need her, so Matilde agrees to split her time between the two houses.

At first, Ana and Charles seem to be living out a romantic fantasy, but Matilde reports that they fight passionately because Ana’s cancer has returned, and she refuses to go to the hospital or accept treatment. Charles decides to go on a romantic quest to Alaska to bring back a yew tree, which has been used to make a medicine with cancer-fighting properties. While he is away, Ana is alone. Virginia and Matilde persuade Lane to check on her as a doctor, and Lane ends up inviting Ana to move in with her. The four women bond with each other until Ana decides that she is in too much pain and asks Matilde to tell her a joke that will cause her to die laughing, like Matilde’s mother did. Matilde agrees and the women say goodbye. Once she hears Matilde’s joke, Ana laughs until she dies. Charles arrives with the yew tree, but he is too late. Matilde ends the play by describing her own birth, during which her father told her mother jokes, and imagining heaven as a place where everyone is laughing.