OnStage: 'House' proud

Playwright Sarah Ruhl is a genius, and she has the piece of paper to prove it. Ruhl, 33, was awarded a five-year, $500,000 genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation last year. Now, she says, she doesn't have to feel guilty "when I get baby-sitting help to find time to write."

If current trends continue, Ruhl won't ever have to feel guilty about pursuing her craft. She's one of the hottest playwrights going. "Eurydice" was an off-Broadway smash this summer, and Ten Thousand Things will produce it in the Twin Cities next February. "Clean House," which opens tonight at Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, was a Pulitzer finalist. And 3 Sticks Theatre Company will produce "Melancholy Play" at the Bryant-Lake Bowl, Nov. 8-18.

"Clean House" is a sly work about a housecleaner who doesn't like to clean house, a surgeon who falls in love with his patient, and two sisters caught in the middle. It is a puzzle to many audiences, which doesn't bother Ruhl. She agreed to characterize it partly as an example of "Laughter is the best medicine."

Quiet and thoughtful, the native of suburban Chicago talked from her New York home about success, philosophy and her ideas on how the Midwest might receive these plays.

Q Do you still have a Midwestern sensibility?

A I think so. Some people say that Midwesterners have no sense of irony. I disagree. They have a good sense of irony but they also tolerate sincerity, which sometimes the East Coast doesn't. And I think there can be an innocence in my plays sometimes.

Q You've said a play can be affected by the theater, the audience, the director, even the city. What does Minneapolis say to you?

A I had a production of "Eurydice," a very tiny one in the Jimmy Jingle building long ago, with apprentices from the Children's Theatre Company, and I got a taste of Minneapolis then. I loved Minneapolis as a theater town because there are so many ensembles and actors. But it's not an industry town. There's a real integrity to the work that I've seen there. What I say about the Midwest aesthetic is that when there's innovation, there is a certain amount of pragmatism. The avant garde is about playfulness and innovation in the Midwest and less weird.

Q Your dialogue seems intended to provoke an emotional response.

A My husband came with me to this production of "Passion Play" in Chicago and he cried at the end and he said, "I'm so moved and I don't know why." And I said, "Oh, excellent! That's exactly what I would hope for." I feel that theater has become so intent on finding a distilled, graspable meaning from a play. I'm agitating for a return to experience, where you might have no idea why something hit you the way it did.

Q Archetypal?

A Yes, exactly. I definitely feel that I'm more of a Jungian than a Freudian. I don't love everything Jung said but in terms of universality as opposed to individual neurosis, in explaining things, I'm more interested in that onstage. Our theater has been in the post-Freudian world for so long, with our theater being about explaining why individuals are wounded and bizarre because of secrets they carry with them. I'm more interested in the Jungian sense of commonality.

Q Your dad died when you were 20. Have you put that behind you?

A Finally. In the plays in Minneapolis, they have to do with losing my dad and other people in my family to cancer. "Clean House" deals with illness. There are questions about illness and afterlife. In this new one, I think I've finally written a play that lives in the real world without an afterlife and I feel very proud and happy. I've moved on.

Q Who are these characters in "Clean House?"

A I heard a story about a surgeon who left his wife for a woman he performed a mastectomy on. I was fascinated by the woundedness, the doctor's part in saving the patient. This notion of performing a physical act that may be approached as a metaphysical act, falling in love.

Q How did Paula Vogel shape your work?

A Most people teach structure and say every structure looks like this. Paula teaches her students about circular structure, backward structure, repetitive structure, Shakespearean structure. She gives you a permission about form. You can see it in all her students' work. Nilo Cruz. Lynn Nottage, all have the same attention to form and playfulness.

Q You like to mix things up in your work. There's realism and fantasy in the real world, yeah?

A I think so. That's why sometimes people try to categorize my work as magical realism and I say, 'OK' because I love those artists. Falling in love at first sight in "Clean House" seems fantastical. But my father claimed to have fallen in love with my mother at first sight, so who knows?

Graydon Royce • 612-673-7299

Graydon Royce • groyce@startribune.com