Bless this mess

In the current production at The New Repertory Theatre, it's easy to see why Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House, a Pulitzer Prize finalist that saw two local productions last year, is oh-so-buzzworthy. Inventive, funny, warm, and not very challenging, this off-kilter domestic drama is very entertaining. And though Ruhl's formal brilliance is sleight-of-hand to cover a mess of cheap sentiment, why complain when the results are this fun?

The play opens with Matilde, a Brazilian maid who works for a pair of uptight doctors in Connecticut, telling the audience a dirty joke. At least, we infer it's a dirty joke from the exuberant hip movements that punctuate the recitation; the joke is in Portuguese, a sort of meta-joke on the audience. The whole play is like that, in a way: a gently clever game of reinterpreting jokes and tweaking our expectations. Matilde is mourning the death of her parents, who were the two funniest people in Brazil. In their honor she's trying to think up the world's funniest joke, a project that doesn't leave her much time to tend the gleaming home of Virginia, a fragile WASP who delivers tart comments like, "I didn't go to medical school to clean my own house." When Virginia's melancholy sister Lane discovers that Matilde hates cleaning as much as Lane loves it, they enter into a secret arrangement. Of course Virginia is horrified when she discovers that her sister has been scrubbing her toilets; but what she's really angry about is the news that her husband, Charles, is leaving her for one of her patients. If you think this sounds improbable, it's just the warm up for the second act, in which Charles insists that everyone become friends and Matilde perfects a joke that's so funny it's lethal.

As Matilde observes: "This is like a telenovela!" It's also like an absurdist comedy, a magical realist novel, a farce, a sophisticated foreign film, a stand up act and so on. Ruhl switches gears so smoothly, and with so much theatrical flair - like her humorous use of supertitles, or the ways scenes in disparate locations start to bleed into each other - that her wit and skill are downright dazzling. But though she's masterful at balancing genres, she's not interested in interrogating them or transcending them. Ruhl may remind us of Durang and Churchill, for instance, but she doesn't have anything to say about class or race or gender beyond vague, comforting notions about the power of love, forgiveness and housework. And thus The Clean House is also like one of those unashamed Hollywood movies about ethnic stereotypes who transmit valuable life lessons to repressed white people.

But it's hard to argue with truisms like, "Only connect," especially when they're dressed in this much loveable silliness. Under Rick Lombardo's crisp direction, the ensemble shines brighter than freshly waxed terrazzo. Will Lyman is endearingly earnest as Charles; manly and ardent and slightly clueless, it's like Charlton Heston wandered into the wrong movie. As Matilde, Cristi Miles doesn't seem to have entirely figured out how to balance the drama and whimsy, but her comic talent and natural charm serve well enough. Bobbie Steinbach performs some kind of alchemy as Ana, Charles's mistress; the character makes no sense on paper, yet Steinbach radiates so much warmth and conviction that it works anyway. Paula Plum has her own magic when it comes to playing high maintenance types like Virginia, always hitting the right blend of sympathetic and exasperating. And Nancy E. Carroll nearly steals the show as sad sack Lane. Carroll is so subtly funny, and inhabits Lane so fully, that I found it hard to take my eyes off her. In every moment of her performance, from her deadpan delivery of funny lines, to the sad way she gazes at a glass set down without a coaster and then forces herself to look away, her minimalism is magnetic.

Terrence McNally shakes the dust off gay history in Some Men, which sees a polished New England premiere this month from Speakeasy Stage. But this schematic play, which is as generic as its title suggests, lacks the loveable messiness of The Clean House. Speakeasy, with its talent for spinning straw into gold - a talent the company has been relying on a bit too much for my taste in its sixteenth season - has cranked out a slick and fairly entertaining production, but there's no disguising that this is minor McNally.

The action begins in the present, at a gay wedding at the Waldorf Hotel in New York City. But this isn't an Issue Play, and McNally isn't particularly concerned with equal marriage rights (which he has often said he sees as an inevitability.) Instead the play soon moves beyond midtown Manhattan to explore the histories of nine of the wedding guests. Jumping back and forth in time, and touching down in The Hamptons, Harlem, and, er, midtown, Some Men shows the connections of friendship, family and happenstance that unite the wedding guests. Of course in telling these stories - from the banker's son who had a secret affair with his chauffeur in the Roaring Twenties to the dudes who hook up online in the new millennium, from the Bernie who loses his family when he comes out to his son who's happily partnered and about to adopt a baby - what we're really hearing is the story of the gay community in the 20th century. (Well, the history of gay men. Well, white gay men. Well, white gay men who can afford to live in New York City.)

But nostalgia isn't what it used to be, at least not when you're in a hurry to check off every box on the list of gay theater clich?s. (Drag queen singing Judy Garland? Check. A trick who turns out to be Mr. Right? Check. Awkwardly staged nude scenes? Check.) Despite its overlong running time, Some Men just doesn't have enough room to explore its 14 vignettes with depth or authenticity, and McNally's flair for comedy here is more glib than warm.

Even the scenes that feel real - like a sweet, long term couple reminiscing about the good old days, or the story of Bernie, the play's central character - tend to depend on inorganic outbursts to get from point A to point B. The most interesting things in Some Men seem to be happening on the periphery. That's quite literally true in the piano bar where the clientele are complaining about the offstage noise from the Stonewall riots. There's an interesting point here about the inexorability of history, but McNally doesn't quite solve the fundamental dramatic problem: what's going on outside is a lot more interesting than what he shows us. In fact the drag queen who breezes through for a drink before joining the demonstration is one of several refugees from more interesting plays, along with the gay Iraq vet and the urbane representative of the Harlem Renaissance.

More of the memorable moments come from Paul Daigneault's clever direction, and the efforts of his tireless ensemble. The most striking moment in the whole piece is, I believe, entirely Daigneault's own invention: he lingers over the ending of the scene in which Bernie visits an AIDS-stricken friend in the hospital, adding a moment of silence that's punctured by a doctor being paged over the intercom. Startled and frightened, Bernie's head jerks up and out to the audience, and the tears start to flow. There's more truth in this simple moment than in all of the rest of the play, and Diego Arciniegas plays it so honestly and simply that it's breathtaking. No other member of the ensemble gets something quite this good to work with, but Christopher Michael Brophy, Maurice E. Parent and Christopher Loftus show impressive versatility in their various roles, and Robert Saoud and Will McGarrahan attack their own parts with charm and zest.