Of the many insights that the late Jane Bowles contributed to American letters, perhaps the most lasting are her observations of female domestic life as it is lived in far-off corners of the world. In short stories such as “A Guatemalan Idyll” and “Everything Is Nice,” set in Morocco, Bowles—a wildly imaginative woman from New York—captured the ways in which the everyday and the domestic dictate the actions and shape the morality of a culture. By concentrating on elements of society that her fellow world travellers ignored—the travel writing of Waugh, Orwell, and Naipaul was usually restricted to politics, which is to say, to the recording of male voices—Bowles established a niche that remains under-explored. Most American writers who do venture overseas, rather than opening themselves to the unknown with curiosity and respect, drag otherness home, using it to incite dramatic heat—or farce. Unfortunately, that is just what the MacArthur-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl has done in her dramatic comedy “The Clean House” (at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse under the direction of Bill Rauch). Although the play’s central character, a maid named Matilde (Vanessa Aspillaga), is from Brazil, there is little here to differentiate her from, say, the Mexican maid in Paul Mazursky’s film “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” or the Mexican maid in James L. Brooks’s “Spanglish,” both of whom, with their comically broken English and foreign ways, wreak havoc in the households of the privileged.

Matilde’s nationality certainly matters little to her overachieving employer, Lane (Blair Brown). A busy, childless doctor, married to a surgeon, Charles (John Dossett), Lane has a slim frame and neatly trimmed red hair that bristles with discontent. “It has been such a hard month,” she confesses to the audience near the start of the play. “My cleaning lady—from Brazil—decided that she was depressed one day and stopped cleaning my house. I was like, clean my house! . . . We took her to the hospital and I had her medicated and she still wouldn’t clean.” Beat. “I’m sorry, but I did not go to medical school to clean my own house.”

That house, where much of the play takes place, is as white, closed off, and antiseptic as Lane’s sister, Virginia (Jill Clayburgh, who seems uneasy in her underwritten role). Virginia is a compulsive cleaner. “If you do not clean, how do you know if you’ve made any progress in life?” she asks. Her cleaning, Ruhl makes clear, is an act of sublimation. “If there were nothing to tidy up,” Virginia adds, “then there would be so much leisure time and so much thinking time and I would have to do something besides thinking and that thing might be to slit my wrists. Ha ha ha ha ha ha, just kidding.” Virginia’s sense of humor is as lame as her attempts to mask her sibling envy. She not only resents Lane’s success; she is mystified by her sister’s sense of entitlement. How did Lane come to believe that she deserved it all? Ruhl suggests that Lane’s ambition is also a form of sublimation: she maintains order in her professional life because she can’t do so at home.

One afternoon, in Lane’s living room, Virginia meets Matilde, who has aspirations to become a comedian; she wants to tell the perfect joke, which she defines, cutely, as being “somewhere between an angel and a fart.” (Like Virginia’s and Lane’s, Matilde’s most revelatory lines are addressed directly to the audience.) One thing leads to another, and Virginia, naturally, volunteers to clean the house for the less domestically inclined Matilde, who has better things to think about. Matilde is the stereotypical image of the dreamy Latina: lusty, heavy-bosomed, with more than a hint of pluck. In one scene, Virginia compliments her on her coffee. Matilde says, “We make good coffee in Brazil.” Virginia: “Oh—that’s right. You do!” Matilde: “Does that help you to place me in my cultural context?” Ruhl may poke fun at the trope of the Latina as invisible housecleaner, but she doesn’t actually try to go any deeper with her own character. Matilde feels less like a person than like a refugee from a film by Luis Buñuel. Like Buñuel’s various chambermaids and feckless women held hostage by an overdeveloped sense of duty, she cleans Lane’s emotional house by bearing witness to the folly around her. Dividing her duties between Charles, who ends up living with his dying lover, Ana (the elegant Concetta Tomei), and Lane, who learns compassion when she takes Ana in after Charles goes off on a tree-hunting expedition, Matilde remains no more and no less than the sum of her parts. By giving her the most self-consciously lyrical and philosophical lines of dialogue—“The perfect joke makes you forget about your life. The perfect joke makes you remember about your life”—Ruhl ends up performing her own version of literary typecasting. Latins are more poetic than whites, no? Always ready with a pithy phrase to organize the messy rooms of their Caucasian employers’ souls? At least that’s what we take away from Ruhl’s lazy romanticism about the proletariat, for whom she seems to have no real feeling at all.

Over the past forty-five years, Ellen Stewart, the founder and artistic director of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, in the East Village, has helped launch the careers of a long list of writers, directors, and performers—among them Sam Shepard, Tom O’Horgan, Andrei Serban, and Candy Darling—who, were it not for her visionary sense of what theatre can be, might never have found a home. It is a pleasure, then, to add a new company—Witness Relocation—to Stewart’s roll call of magnificent acts. The company, under the supervision of the director and choreographer Dan Safer, consists of about a dozen actor-dancers, who also contribute to the creation of each piece. Witness Relocation’s current show, “Dancing vs. The Rat Experiment,” is an hour-long work bursting with ideas, both visual and aural. As the curtain goes up, we see the performers lying on their sides, reading magazines, their faces lightly dusted with powder, like the bored inhabitants of a beach somewhere in Hell. Suddenly, we hear a young woman singing “Unchained Melody.” Her solo is followed by a stentorian voice describing the mating habits of women and men. Or so we think. Gradually, it becomes clear that what we’re hearing is really a description of the mating habits of male and female rats. The question raised: Are we so different from vermin? A woman confronts the male lover for whom her husband has left her. A fight ensues. The kicking and wrestling, and the contorted postures the dancers assume, drives the point even closer to home: we are never more like vermin than when our social order is disrupted.

While Witness Relocation’s influences are clear—the genre-mixing works of Pina Bausch, Richard Foreman, and the Wooster Group are definitely in evidence—there is plenty of originality here, too, as well as youth, joy, vulgarity, and an ironic distance from the media-saturated world that inspired the show. Still, the piece would have worked even better if Stewart had put it on a smaller stage. One’s senses are supposed to be overwhelmed by the marriage of music, movement, and madness hurtling across the metaphorical footlights. On the large stage of the La MaMa Annex, all of this is more diffuse than it should be. When I attended the show, there were more people onstage than there were in the audience. But not to worry—no one knew who Sam Shepard was when he started out, either.


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