Seana McKenna and Fiona Reid play sisters, Lane and Virginia, who both have something to sweep under the rug in the Toronto première of The Clean House.

Whether they want it or not, life, and all its emotional messiness, is about to come crashing through Lane’s always pristine walls. The Clean House directed by Alisa Palmer (Shaw Festival, Toronto's Soulpepper) and written by award winning American playwright Sarah Ruhl (Eurydice). Ruhl's latest play Dead Man’s Cell Phone, is now in New York previews starring Mary Louise Parker of Weeds fame.

This is one wild piece of theatre from a new younger American playwright. Tell me about your character Lane...

“Lane is a successful doctor whose life has been pretty blessed and in her sister’s eyes, seems to have it all. She’s got the specialist surgeon husband; she’s got the clean house. Well, she had a clean house until her maid decided she was depressed and stopped cleaning. Lane is, at the core, I think feeling something is not quite right.

She finds out that her husband Charles (Joseph Ziegler) is leaving her for a much older woman Ana (Mary Ann McDonald), and this is after 30 years of marriage. So Lane is grappling with that and actually overcoming that kind of jealously, rage, and hatred and being compassionate toward both her husband and her husband’s lover."

I am sure that Lane and Charles go on with their lives – day in day out at the hospital with nothing really changing.

“Like many lives. Their work is their focus. Lane and Charles met in medical school when they were 22. They were very young, and both had similar goals, similar aspirations, similar values, and life has gone on. I think part of it is that Lane can keep chaos out of her life. I also think Lane has been unfair to herself. She thinks people’s real problems are only in hospitals because she does see so much and she does see so many ill people and people who are dying. So I think she thinks anything that is related to "whining" or "cringing" about lesser things is irrelevant. Her sister Virginia says anything you saw, you thought anyone with a problem has “a defect of the will.” I think Lane is harder on herself than anyone really."

Then there’s Virginia (Seana laughs)…. Why on earth would she want to come and clean her sister’s house?

“Ah well, you said that the sisters are escaping something, probably their unhappiness. But Virginia was a very well educated woman. She went to Bryn Mar (premier liberal arts college for women) but she didn’t go on to a profession, didn’t become a poet, a historian, an archaeologist, she didn’t become a scholar and she’s married. She calls him well… she thinks a husband should be like a piece of furniture “well placed and occupying the right amount of space.”

So Virginia’s marriage is not exhilarating. She cleans her house methodically. It’s done at by 3:12 everyday. It’s her focus, her domain. When you are taking care of a home and the family, that is your domain, that is your work, but Virginia gets no real thanks for it.

It’s valuable work. I know when my husband Miles (Prominent Canadian Director Miles Potter) goes off to work and I am home with our son and the house, I know he’s got the easy job and we both know this. So as she says, Virginia “wants a task.” So she volunteers the help clean the house for the Brazilian maid Matilde. Matilde (Nicola Correia-Damude) does not like to clean but my sister does not tell me about it because I would not like it."

She‘s a comedian… I guess you say both Virginia and Matilde are.

“Virginia’s kind of quirky and her comedy lies in pathos through her whole world picture.Matilde or Matilda, as I call her in my Anglo way, is an aspiring comedian. Her parents were the funniest people in Brazil and then they died making her the third funniest and that was too difficult so she left.

It’s a whacky play – very funny and we were so thrilled when we got our first audience because we thought, ‘Ah yes. It is very funny.’

When you rehearse comedy you don’t rehearse it for the laughs, you rehearse to find the truth of the moment and you find out that the audience thinks it’s very funny which is gratifying.

In Part Two in this continuing series Seana McKenna talks about play structure, working with the cast, the quirky text of playwright Sarah Ruhl and director Alisa Palmer. The Clean House continues at Canstage to March 8.