SomethingToDo2

There’s a lot to be said for a bit of romantic whimsy on the stage. Two shows from one of America’s most celebrated playwrights are enchanting audiences in Brisbane and Melbourne this month.

The significant buzz around Sarah Ruhl has been telegraphed across the Pacific. The Queensland Theatre Company is currently performing her 2004 rom-com The Clean House, while down south theatre-goers get the semi-surrealist melodrama that is Dead Man’s Cell Phone courtesy of the Melbourne Theatre Company. (Her latest work, the Tony and Pulitzer Prize-nominated In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), is presumably a little too provocative for our mainstream theatre producers.)

The program for Dead Man’s Cell Phone, currently playing the Sumner Theatre, cities the Columbian novelist Gabriel García Márquez-inspired literary mode of ‘magic realism’, a story “without wonder, without speculating on its meaning, in a tone so even that it makes one read it again to see if one understood it correctly”. Ruhl strives for a cerebral examination of issues, suspended somewhere between fantasy and reality. A 2008 New Yorker profile of the 30-something Manhattanite wrote:

Her nonlinear form of realism — full of astonishments, surprises, and mysteries — is low on exposition and psychology. “I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life,” she has said. “Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. They’re pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.”

The Brisbane production of The Clean House, starring soapie actress Brooke Satchwell as the Brazilian maid who brings laughter to an upper-class housewife, was described by one reviewer as “theatre at its finest”; “rarely does a play move you to the extremes of belly-laughter in one act and tears in the next”.

I was less enthusiastic about Dead Man’s Cell Phone, the story of a woman who answers the call from the departed to get mixed up in his family and shadowy life. Its flights of fancy are often weighed down by plodding dialogue, and the cast, led by another TV starlet in Lisa McCune, struggles to convey the ethereal feeling intended. (Visit Crikey‘s theatre blog Curtain Call for a full review.)

But there was much to like in the sweet-natured romance. And Ruhl’s is a rare talent in bringing magic to the stage.

The details: The Clean House plays the Cremorne Theatre in Brisbane until July 31 (tickets at QTIX); Dead Man’s Cell Phone plays the Sumner Theatre in Melbourne until August 7 (tickets on the MTC website).