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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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,...
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