HOUSE CALLS.

Of the many insights that the late Jane Bowles contributed to American letters, perhaps the most lasting are her observations of female domestic life as it is lived in far-off corners of the world. In short stories such as "A Guatemalan Idyll" and "Everything Is Nice," set in Morocco, Bowles--a wildly imaginative woman from New York--captured the ways in which the everyday and the domestic dictate the actions and shape the morality of a culture. By concentrating on elements of society that her fellow world travellers ignored--the travel writing of Waugh, Orwell, and Naipaul was usually restricted to politics, which is to say, to the recording of male voices--Bowles established a niche that remains under-explored. Most American writers who do venture overseas, rather than opening themselves to the unknown with curiosity and respect, drag otherness home, using it to incite dramatic heat--or farce. Unfortunately, that is just what the MacArthur-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl has done in her dramatic comedy "The Clean House" (at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse under the direction of Bill Rauch). Although the play's central character, a maid named Matilde (Vanessa Aspillaga), is from Brazil, there is little here to differentiate her from, say, the Mexican maid in Paul Mazursky's film "Down and Out in Beverly Hills" or the Mexican maid in James L. Brooks's "Spanglish," both of whom, with their comically broken English and foreign ways, wreak havoc in the households of the privileged.

Matilde's nationality certainly matters little to her overachieving employer, Lane (Blair Brown). A busy, childless doctor, married to a surgeon, Charles (John Dossett), Lane has a slim frame and neatly trimmed red hair that bristles with discontent. "It has been such a hard month," she confesses to the audience near the start of the play. "My cleaning lady--from Brazil--decided that she was depressed one day and stopped cleaning my house. I was like, clean my house! . . . We took her to the hospital and I had her medicated and she still wouldn't clean." Beat. "I'm sorry, but I did not go to medical school to clean my own house."

That house, where much of the play takes place, is as white, closed off, and antiseptic as Lane's sister, Virginia (Jill Clayburgh, who seems uneasy in her underwritten role). Virginia is a compulsive cleaner. "If you do not clean, how do you know if you've made any progress in life?" she asks. Her cleaning, Ruhl makes clear, is an act of sublimation. "If there were nothing to tidy up," Virginia adds, "then there would be so much leisure time and so much thinking time and I would have to do something besides thinking and that thing might be to slit my wrists. Ha ha ha ha ha ha, just kidding." Virginia's sense of humor is as lame as her attempts to mask her sibling envy. She not only resents Lane's success; she is mystified by her sister's sense of entitlement. How did Lane come to believe that she deserved it all? Ruhl suggests that Lane's ambition is also a form of sublimation: she maintains order in her professional life because she can't do so at home.

One afternoon, in Lane's living room, Virginia meets Matilde, who has aspirations to become a comedian; she wants to tell the perfect joke, which she defines, cutely, as being "somewhere between an angel and a fart." (Like Virginia's and Lane's, Matilde's most revelatory lines are addressed directly to the audience.) One thing leads to another, and Virginia, naturally, volunteers to clean the house for the less domestically inclined Matilde, who has better things to think about. Matilde is the stereotypical image of the dreamy Latina: lusty, heavy-bosomed, with more than a hint of pluck. In one scene, Virginia compliments her on her ...