Four women shine in serio-comedy "The Clean House"

Is it messiness that is next to godliness?

Yes indeed, in the whimsical world of Sarah Ruhl's 2004 play "The Clean House." And to those of us who equate vacuuming with water torture, that makes good cosmic sense.

No wonder Ruhl's award-winning serio-comedy, now at ACT Theatre, is so ubiquitous on the regional theater circuit.

Yet from its opening moments, when a saucy young maid from Brazil who hates cleaning tells a joke — a very long joke, a joke in untranslated Portuguese — "The Clean House" flirts with preciousness.

Fortunately at ACT, the play gets a splendid in-the-round staging from Allison Narver and a crew of agile actors who fully, pungently embrace its eccentric characters, aphoristic wit and whimsical affirmations.

Now playing

"The Clean House," by Sarah Ruhl. Tuesdays-Sundays through April 29, ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., Seattle; $10-$54 (206-292-7676 or www.acttheatre.org).

That embrace minimizes some obvious clichés. Mainly: the division of four female characters into two mess-making, hot-blooded sensualists who want to live, live, live, and two uptight control-freaks who use spick-and-span order to ward off the untidiness of life, love and death.

Wouldn't you know, the sexy, spontaneous women are both Latin: Matilde (Christine Calfas), the sparky maid, and Ana (Priscilla Hake Lauris), a captivating older Argentine woman who is dying of cancer.

And, no surprise, the repressed clean-freaks are WASPy Americans: the grimly chic physician Lane (Suzanne Bouchard) and her near-hysteric sister, Virginia (Anne Allgood).

All four get jumbled up when Ana falls in mad, instant love with her surgeon, Lane's sweet-natured husband, Charles (Allen Fitzpatrick). Charles loves Ana madly right back.

Suddenly, Bouchard's astringent Lane has more to worry about than whether Matilde will ever stop devising "the perfect joke" and start making beds. And Virginia has more to do at Lane's pristine white-on-white house than some clandestine toilet-scrubbing.

Ruhl is a genuinely poetic writer, who can really turn a phrase. (A favorite: "The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love.") And she wants you to truly feel for these people as they cope with grief and passion, hurt and dirt.

Narver and company work hard and smart to make it happen, and the in-the-round intimacy of ACT's Allen Theatre helps.

For Matilde's rhapsodic memories of her fun-loving late parents (Fitzpatrick and Lauris, playing dual roles) and several scenes set on Ana's seaside balcony, scenic designer Matthew Smucker has provided a graceful overhead bridge.

Ana and Matilde have a hilarious time tossing half-eaten apples off that balcony, an invigorating scene staged with great physicality by Narver (who is maturing into one of Seattle's best stage directors).

And funny, and lusty, are the spectacle of Ana and Charles igniting their torrid love affair (to the strains of Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde") and the impulsive trashing of Lane's snow-white living room by an unlikely trasher.

The pinpoint comic (and tragic) timing of the actors, especially Bouchard and Allgood, also keeps the laughter popping (and the heart caring).

In other hands, Lane's emotional thaw might just be formulaic. But Bouchard makes it so wincingly gradual, it's like watching someone crawl out of a tight carapace inch by painful inch. The changes in the relationship between Lane and Allgood's blossoming Virginia also occur by poignant degrees.

Calfas has fewer places to go with her relentlessly perky character who utters such axioms as: "If more women told more jokes there would be more justice in the world." If only ... .

But she is adorable, and sounds (to someone who really doesn't know) like she's speaking real Portuguese. And when composer-sound designer Eric Chappelle's Latin-inflected music wafts, she can samba.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com