The Clean House and other plays (Paperback)

"Passionate. Show-stopping. Daringly over-the-top and impressively consistent in its delirious excess. "The Clean House" shines."--"New Haven Advocate"

""The Clean House" is not, by any means, a traditional boy-meets-girl story. In fact disease, death, and dirt are among the subjects it addresses. This comedy is romantic, deeply so, but in the more arcane sense of the word: visionary, tinged with fantasy, extravagant in feeling, maybe a little nuts."--"The New York Times"

"Touching, inventive, invigoratingly compact, and luminously liquid, "Eurydice" reframes the ancient myth of ill-fated love to focus not on the bereaved musician but on his dead bride--and on her struggle with love beyond the grave."--"San Francisco Chronicle"

This volume is the first publication of Sarah Ruhl, "a playwright with a unique comic voice, perspective, and sense of theater" ("Variety"), who is fast leaving her mark on the American stage. In the award-winning "Clean House"--a play of uncommon romance and uncommon comedy--a maid who hates cleaning dreams about creating the perfect joke, while a doctor who treats cancer leaves his heart inside one of his patients. This volume also includes "Eurydice," Ruhl's reinvention of the tragic Greek tale of love and loss, together with a third play still to be named.

Sarah Ruhl received the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2004 for her play "The Clean House," which has been produced at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia, South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, DC. Her play "Eurydice" has been produced at Madison Repertory Theatre and Berkeley Repertory Theatre.