Matilde finally comes back to tell the audience, this time in English, about how her parents, both wonderful comedians, recently died.
Matilde and Virginia discover panties in Lane's laundry that look too sexy for her and begin suspecting her husband Charles, also a doctor, is cheating on her.
Their suspicions are confirmed when Lane tells them that Charles has left her for an older woman named Ana, a patient of his who had breast cancer and is now recovering from a mastectomy.
Charles performs surgery on Ana and then they act out the scene where they meet for the first time and fall in love in a matter of moments.
She tells them that Charles, frantic for his lover's health, has gone to Alaska to cut down a Yew tree, which supposedly has healing powers.
Ana's condition, however, quickly worsens, and unwilling to have cancer beat her, she asks Matilde to kill her with a joke.
The Clean House had its world premiere at the Yale Repertory Theatre, Connecticut, from September 17 to October 9, 2004, directed by Bill Rauch.
The play premiered Off-Broadway at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on October 29, 2006 in a limited run to January 28, 2007.
[7] Directed by Bill Rauch, the cast featured Blair Brown (Lane), Jill Clayburgh (Virginia), John Dossett (Charles/Mathilde's father), Concetta Tomei (Ana/Mathilde's mother), and Vanessa Aspillaga (Mathilde).
The director, Joanne Gordon, noted that Ruhl "...presents a female perspective with wit, with humor, with subtlety, and the element which I enjoy so much about her work... it possess that kind of Latin magic - realism.
[10] The Clean House has received positive reviews from some critics: David Rooney, the Variety reviewer wrote: "This funny, tender play has screwy poetry and penetrating wisdom, oddball humor, deadpan soap, operatic arias, fantasy, spirituality and a soaring sense of romance.
Most of all, it has tremendous compassion [...] It’s her skill at weaving together the jagged edges of conflicting lives— finding common ground between neurotic sisters, rivals for the same man or just people with discordant attitudes to life— that makes Ruhl’s play as rewarding humanistically as it is theatrically.
"[11] Charles Isherwood of The New York Times wrote that the play is "[...] a gorgeous production that fully taps its tart humor, theatrical audacity and emotional richness [...] Sociology is just one small thread in the multihued tapestry of “The Clean House,” a play that keeps revealing surprising insights, whimsical images and layers of rich feeling as it goes along.
"[12] Peter Marks, reviewing the 2005 Woolly Mammoth Theatre (Washington, DC) production, wrote: "As with most original voices, it takes a while to tune into Ruhl's wavelength.
"[14] At the end of 2006, Entertainment Weekly magazine named the New York production one of the top ten theatrical attractions of the year.
[15][16] The Clean House won the 2004 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize,[1] awarded annually to the best English-language play written by a woman.