The Clean House and Other Plays Book

Sarah Ruhl is beloved by many of my theater artist friends and one can't deny her decorated credentials (e.g. Genius Grant, multiple Pulitzer Finalist, most produced playwright in America 2012) but, this collection infuriated me. I found every play to be "twee". The Urban Dictionary defines "Twee" as, "The opposite of simple, authentic and true: desperately exquisite, contrived to the point of ridiculousness, trying to so hard to be ornately exceptional that you (inadvertently) end up looking like a clown." I don't understand how she is considered an exceptional writer based on this work. It is rife with cardboard characterizations that operate as bloodless puppets twitching to Ruhl's idiosyncrisies. That these fantasies are elliptical collections of ad hoc oddities, which seem to delight in their internal discontinuities while also failing to convey understandable analogy, is infuriating. She fails to communicate anything other than her fragile sense of self and because of that I don't see the imagery she weaves as more than an eccentric solipsistic exercise. Very disappointing.