Playwright: Sarah Ruhl
At: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Phone: ( 312 ) 443-3800; $20-$65
Runs through: June 4
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
There are fundamentally two kinds of housekeepers: those who revel in the opportunity to forestall psychological distress through immersion in grubby physical activity ( claiming 'It relaxes me' ) , and those who long to wave a magic wand, instantaneously rendering their quarters immaculate from top to bottom. In this satirical comedy, Dr. Lane is one of the latter and her sister, Virginia, one of the former. Convention, however, dictates that Lane hire a maid—a Brazilian gamine, unfortunately also disinclined to domestic drudgery. Ah, but Matilde has a gift denied to her superiors—a sense of humor that defies discontent, disease and even death. So when Lane's husband unexpectedly falls for a dying Argentine widow, it is up to the clever servant to teach them all to laugh at society's artificial strictures.
Sarah Ruhl's wry parable could easily have knotted itself into a tangle of dramatic themes: the individual's search for cosmological stability, the importance of following one's own bliss, the elevation of emotion over intellect, earthy Latin passion versus sterile WASP propriety, the search for the secrets of the universe—the key to which, according to Matilde, lies in the perfect joke. The fanciful elements in this Goodman production ( Brechtian subtitles, simultaneous action in multiple locales, long stretches of dialogue in foreign languages and ticklishly on-point incidental music by the reliable team of Ben Sussman and Andrew Pluess ) likewise risk courting confusion. And a topic of debate in the lobby post-opening night was whether the brave martyr whose illness unites her caretakers is a flesh-and-bone woman or a magic-realistic spirit.
Under Jessica Thebus' sprightly direction, however, motifs that might have proved puzzling or excessive—a distraught lover singlehandedly fetching home an Alaskan Yew tree in a vain effort to heal his beloved, for example—instead elicit the most comfortable of chuckles, thanks to Guenia Lemos' irrepressible Matilde, whose candid observations keep us safely oriented from her first words ( recounting a funny—and probably bawdy—story in a language we may not understand, but applaud heartily, nonetheless ) . LIFE is a joke, says Ruhl, and its inevitable cessation is the most ironic punchline of all, so let us celebrate its messy joys with laughter while we still can.
