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The actress Blair Brown first read The Clean House as a judge for a playwriting contest. "It is so deceptively simple," Brown has said. She remembers laughing and crying, then laughing again, then really crying. "It's like water running over your hand, and then you find you are feeling some quite big, personal things."
Ruhl won the contest—and Brown went on to play the physician whose house Matilde won't clean. One award The Clean House didn't get was the 2005 Pulitzer. (The play was a finalist, but the prize went to Doubt by John Patrick Shanley.) Last year, however, Ruhl received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the honors just keep coming.
Early last fall, the New York Times' Charles Isherwood reviewed Ruhl's Eurydice, a retelling of the Orpheus myth from the point of view of the bride who dies on her wedding day. "Devastatingly lovely—and just plain devastating," he wrote. The production, at the Yale Repertory Theatre, preceded the October opening of The Clean House at Lincoln Center—which was to be Ruhl's official New York City debut. Isherwood hesitated, he said, to sing the praises of Eurydice too loudly, "lest a backlash spoil her belated entree into the city's theater scene."
In June, the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, D.C. introduced Ruhl's new comedy, Dead Man's Cell Phone, about a young woman who insinuates herself into a dead stranger's life by appropriating his cell phone. (The New York première is set for February). Another milestone came last September, when Chicago's Goodman Theatre presented a revision of her three-part Passion Play, A Cycle, which asks how it might warp a person's mind to play Jesus. Or Pontius Pilate? The Virgin Mary? And how much depends on the time and place? The play's settings are Elizabethan England, Hitler's Germany and Spearfish, South Dakota, during the Vietnam War years of the 1970s and the Ronald Reagan era of the '80s.
Playwrights lucky enough to seize the critics' attention have a way of getting snapped up by Hollywood. Some maintain a presence in live theater; others never look back. Is Ruhl hearing the siren song? "I lived in Los Angeles for four years," she says. (Her husband, a physician, was a resident at UCLA at the time.) "I couldn't avoid the industry entirely. But why should playwriting be an audition for the screen? The two art forms aren't the same."
Nevertheless, Plum Pictures, an independent film company in Manhattan, recently asked Ruhl to adapt The Clean House for the screen. She agreed, but realizes that turning a play into a movie may require smashing the vase, as it were, and starting over with the pieces. "That," she admits, "is a terrifying thought."
Writer Matthew Gurewitsch is based in Manhattan. His article about artist David Hockney ran in the August 2006 issue.
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