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    A Study Guide for Sarah Ruhl's "The Clean House"
    A Study Guide for Sarah Ruhl's "The Clean House"
    A Study Guide for Sarah Ruhl's "The Clean House"
    Ebook57 pages32 minutes

    A Study Guide for Sarah Ruhl's "The Clean House"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Sarah Ruhl's "The Clean House", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMay 15, 2018
    ISBN9781410393906
    A Study Guide for Sarah Ruhl's "The Clean House"

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      A Study Guide for Sarah Ruhl's "The Clean House" - Gale

      18

      The Clean House

      Sarah Ruhl

      2004

      Introduction

      Sarah Ruhl has dominated American stages in the twenty-first century. The Clean House (2004), a Pulitzer finalist, has remained one of her most frequently staged plays. The play has realistic elements—such as dealing with cancer, divorce, and death—interposed with the fantastic time, space, and imagery of magical realism. Characters eat apples on a balcony and throw the cores into the sea, but they land in the living room of another character. In this world of magical thinking, a joke can kill, and cleaning house can save one's sanity. Ruhl investigates the deeper reaches of love and grief but with a humorous touch. The spare dialogue cuts to the core issues with directness and clarity as the characters put their hearts on the line.

      Ruhl's fame right out of graduate school, along with her continuing list of hit dramas on a variety of imaginative topics, speaks of her mentoring at an early age by the Piven Theatre in Chicago and feminist playwright Paula Vogel, her professor at Brown. Ruhl has a grounding in the literary classics, having adapted Virginia Woolf and Anton Chekhov for the stage. She prefers a theater of poetry and symbolism to a drama of psychological realism. Her understanding of the power of drama is deep, and she gathers techniques from many traditional and ethnic sources, such as using puppets or untranslated languages.

      The Clean House begins with an untranslated joke in Portuguese from the Brazilian maid, Matilde, who tells jokes because she is in mourning. She has a lot to teach her boss, Lane, a doctor who thinks she knows everything until her husband falls in love with another woman. The play is a ritual for grief and loss that allows the audience to participate, but within Ruhl's characteristic mood of lightness and humor that leads to acceptance. The characters move from isolation to community and learn to forgive and let go of control.

      Author Biography

      Ruhl Was Born On January 24, 1974, To Kathy Kehoe Ruhl And Patrick Ruhl In Wilmette, Illinois. Sarah'S Mother Was A High School Teacher. Her Father Marketed Toys Before He Died Of Cancer When Ruhl Was Twenty, A Deep Crisis In Her Life As She Began Writing Plays. He Loved Language And History, Taking Sarah And Her Sister, Kate, To The Pancake House Once A Week To Learn Special Vocabulary Words. Sarah Was Raised As A Catholic But Left The Church As A Teenager Because Of What She Felt Was Its Bias Against Women. She Is Deeply Influenced By The Church'S Rituals, However, In Her Idea Of Theater.

      Kathy directed high school plays and acted in community theater, taking Sarah with her to rehearsals, so that she grew up in the theater. Kathy also worked in alternative theater in Chicago. Even as a child, Sarah took classes at the Piven Theatre Workshop in Evanston, Illinois, with her mother. The Piven Workshop teaches improvisational skills using myth, folktales, and fairy tales focusing on transformation, one of Ruhl's main themes. The exercises help the actors to live in the moment, also a characteristic of Ruhl's plays, and there are no props, only language, to tell the story. The Piven Workshop also helped Ruhl to develop The Clean House.

      Ruhl wrote whimsical stories as a child about vegetables and landmasses getting married. She first thought she would be a poet. She wrote poems and studied English at Brown University, spending her junior year abroad at Oxford. After graduation in 1997, she taught English in Providence, Rhode Island, at Wheaton College, before returning to Chicago to

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