Sarah Ruhl's The
Clean House centers around Lane, a woman who requires her house to be a bastion of order, and the people who draw her from that order into the chaos that is life. Anne Byrd's direction of Normandale Community College's production of The Clean House was mostly well-acted and very well-set, but it could not overcome the superficiality of the script.
Molly J. Weibel portrayed the stiff, controlling Lane well in the first act, but failed to transition out of this stiffness when it was needed in act two. Haley Starr Sowden played Lane's obsessively clean sister Virginia; her witticisms stole the show. The characters were presented interestingly at first, but they lurched between emotions within an unnaturally short period of time, becoming caricatures rather than true people.
Molly J. Weibel portrayed the stiff, controlling Lane well in the first act, but failed to transition out of this stiffness when it was needed in act two. Haley Starr Sowden played Lane's obsessively clean sister Virginia; her witticisms stole the show. The characters were presented interestingly at first, but they lurched between emotions within an unnaturally short period of time, becoming caricatures rather than true people.
Sarah Bradner's white, sterile set gives us a sense of Lane's bastion of order; the slow accumulation of color and clutter beautifully illustrates the breakdown of this order and the introduction of humor and life.
In the end, the play felt contrived, less an artistic endeavor by someone passionate about their work and more a paint-by-numbers list of funny and dramatic moments strung together with a thin story.
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