The Clean House

FORTUNE THEATRE COMPANY MEDIA RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN A SCOTSMAN, A GERMAN, A SOUTH AFRICAN, AND AN AMERICAN COME TOGETHER TO PRODUCE A PULITZER PRIZE NOMINEE’S PLAY ABOUT A BRAZILIAN CLEANER?

Fortune Theatre audiences will be the first in New Zealand to see the play that's sweeping the United States, Sarah Ruhl's prize-winning comedy, The Clean House. With a production team rivaling the United Nations this is sure to be a spirited comedy!

The Clean House is an unforgettable, life-affirming play that enlists the healing power of laughter as a cleansing antidote to the inevitable messiness of life. It centres on Lane, a career-focused doctor who has hired a quirky Brazilian cleaning woman, Matilde, who happens to hate cleaning! She would rather search for the perfect joke. Meanwhile, Lane's surgeon husband, Charles, falls madly in love with an Argentinian patient, Ana. Then there's Lane's sister, Virginia, who loves to clean! Everything looks good for Matilde until she, too, finds herself swept up in the family's affairs of the heart.

Critics agree that this is a genuinely original, insightful theatrical experience, at once funny and moving as it counterpoints American obsession with orderliness against Latin American appetite for life!

Of life and art Sarah Ruhl says,’ I think that human beings do live in extremes. In life we’re kind of in a wobbly boat all the while between comedy, tragedy, melodrama, satire and all of that.’ The Clean House in turn, does not stick to the limitations of a particular genre, but runs the gamut from melodrama to satire and romantic comedy and even takes on aspects of magic realism.

The Clean House premiered at the prestigious Yale Repertory Theatre in 2004 and has gone on to have numerous productions in regional theatres across America, reaching New York late last year for an extended off-Broadway run at the Lincoln Center Theater in a production starring Jill Clayburgh and Blair Brown. It has also been seen in Britain, Canada and last year received its Australian premiere at the Melbourne Theatre Company.

The author, Sarah Ruhl, was born in Chicago in 1974. She studied playwriting at Brown University, an Ivy League college, where her tutor was the feminist dramatist, Paula Vogel. The Clean House won for Ruhl the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2004 and saw her nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Ruhl has also won the MacArthur Genius award and it appears more may follow: of her work Vogel says, ‘her plays are taking us back to the importance of theatre as myth, as community’.

The Clean House will be directed by American director, Jef Hall-Flavin. He has been the Artistic Director of Outward Spiral Theatre Company in Minneapolis, Associate Director of The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC, and Education Outreach Associate at the famous Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Among his productions as director at these theatres and others have been As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Falsettos, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Steel Magnolias, Antigone and The Imaginary Invalid. A graduate of Hofstra University in New York, Jef has also lectured at a number of American universities.

The Fortune is delighted to welcome Anna Henare back to her home town in the role of Matilde. Anna studied at Logan Park High School and appeared in Dunedin Repertory Society productions of The Snow Queen and The Wizard of Oz before training at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington, from which she graduated with a B.F.A. in
Theatre. She has subsequently acted at the famous Seattle Rep in Romeo and Juliet, and appeared in American productions of Antony and Cleopatra and Harvey. Her American film work includes Disparity and The Unspeakable Art of Seduction. She made her Fortune debut in 2005 in the important cameo role of the exotic dancer in the hit comedy, The Graduate.

Jen Wolfe will return to the Fortune to play Ana. Dunedin audiences have enjoyed her previous appearances here in Always…Patsy Cline, Nunsense Jamboree, Molly Sweeny, The Herbal Bed and What the Butler Saw. She also toured to the Fortune in the 1997 Court Theatre (Christchurch) production of Antony and Cleopatra, playing Cleopatra. Other Court Theatre productions in which she has appeared include the world premiere of Kiwifruits, Hay Fever, Macbeth (as Lady Macbeth) and the solo show Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. A B.A. graduate from the University of the Pacific, Jen has appeared in a number of regional and off-Broadway theatres, on ABC television (One Life to Live), CBS television (As the World Turns) and in the recent feature film The Bridge to Terabithia.

Jude Gibson has acted professionally for more than three decades, appearing notably with Auckland's Theatre Corporate and Tantrum companies and at Wellington's Downstage and Circa theatres. She created the role of Moira in the original production of Greg McGee's Foreskin's Lament. Her television performances have been in such series as Shortland Street, The Strip, Shark in the Park, Hanlon and Country G. P. and she has been seen on the cinema screen in Trial Run, User Friendly and When Love Comes. In 2005 she directed Geraldine Brophy in Confessions of a Chocoholic and she later created the role of Lottie in another new play by Geraldine, Real Estate. The Paradise Package, yet another new play by Geraldine Brophy, last year marked a memorable Fortune debut for her as an actor and she returned to the company at the end of the season to play the Fairy Godmother in Roger Hall's hit pantomime, Cinderella. In The Clean House she will appear as Lane.

Phil Darkins, well-known Wellington based musician and broadcaster will make his debut on the Dunedin stage in The Clean House taking the role of Charles. He appeared in the Circa Theatre (Wellington) production of the adaptation of The Jungle Book by former Fortune Artistic Director, Martin Howells. His television work includes McPhail and Gadsby, The Strip, Street Legal and Good Morning and he also appeared in The Lord of the Rings.

Hilary Norris will be well known to Fortune audiences where she has acted in more than 60 productions, most recently Take a Chance on Me, the 2003 revival of Equus and in the title role of A Passionate Woman. She has also directed a number of Fortune shows, recent productions including A Perfect Wedding, Things We Do for Love, Alarms and Excursions and last year's Dunedin Arts Festival drama, My Heart is Bathed in Blood. Her role in The Clean House is that of Virginia.

The set for The Clean House will be designed by the Fortune's Resident Designer, Peter King, the costumes by Wardrobe Mistress, Maryanne Wright-Smyth. Lighting and sound will be designed by the company's Technical Director, Ulli Briese from Germany. Alan Surgener is the Fortune’s new Scottish Stage Manager and South African Brendan van den Berg makes his Dunedin theatrical debut as Assistant Stage Manager. The Fortune’s new Assistant Director Michel Beuch is on secondment from Germany.

Bookings are now open at the box-office (phone (03) 477 8323) or via the website (www.fortunetheatre.co.nz) for the strictly limited three week season which runs from March 30 to April 21.

ENDS

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