“We’re big on new beginnings here,” a smiling young man tells a woman in her fifties, early in Selina Fillinger’s wrenching new play, Something Clean. Joey, a 24-year-old survivor of sustained childhood rape, is trying to reassure Charlotte, a suburban matron, as she signs up for volunteer work at the inner-city Center for Sexual Assault Prevention and Intervention, but her skittishness is rooted in trauma that not even he could imagine.
Fillinger, the latest gifted young playwright to have her New York City debut produced by Roundabout Underground, gives us a hint in the play’s wordless prologue, in which Charlotte and her husband, Doug, enter their home grimly, carrying a young man’s suit and shoes. The items belong to their 20-year-old son, a freshly convicted sexual assailant, sentenced to six months in jail.
Something Clean traces that period in one 80-minute act, primarily from Charlotte’s perspective, as she grapples with a range of emotions and vexing questions: Is she accountable for her son’s actions? Is Doug? If so, can they ever make amends? The play’s title, and the cleaning gloves Charlotte carries in her neat handbag and whips out for use in several scenes—with disciplined purposefulness at first, but later with a growing sense of despair—reinforce her determination and her struggle.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★ review here.]
And since Charlotte is played by Kathryn Erbe, we feel the full force of both. At times, this actress’s wholesome prettiness and unmannered authenticity have made it difficult to fully appreciate the soulful ferocity of her work, but not here; working in the tiny confines of the Black Box Theatre, under Margot Bordelon’s vigorous direction, Erbe shows us the weight of her character’s guilt and frustration, her anger and self-doubt. There’s a devastating moment towards the end, where Doug demands to know the state of their relationship in the plainest terms, and Erbe stands there for what feels like an eternity, eyes burning and throat twitching, before responding.
Daniel Jenkins and Christopher Livingston lend potent support as the very different men with whom the isolated Charlotte alternately shares her time, in short scenes punctuated by Palmer Hefferan’s eerie, industrial-tinged original music and sound design. Livingston’s playful but earnest Joey emphasizes the generational differences between his character and Erbe’s—Joey, who is gay, has to explain to Charlotte what “cis” means, and how race figures into crime and punishment—while establishing a relaxed, convincing rapport that gives the production both additional substance and welcome levity.
Jenkins has a trickier task as Doug, a businessman who has provided a comfortable life for his wife and son and who seems, at least on the surface, less inclined than Charlotte to dig for answers. Throughout the play, I’ll admit, I found myself wishing for a bit more context concerning the son’s act; we learn that he was an athlete, like his dad, and that he was drunk at the time of the incident—details consistent with stereotypes dangled by young writers in various bro-bashing works of late. (More intriguingly, Charlotte reveals that the victim wasn’t white, but this bit of information is blurted out and then more or less dropped.)
Fillinger’s writing is more supple and nuanced than that of many of her peers, though, and in dealing with Charlotte and Doug, she reveals a precocious grasp of conflicts and bonds within mature, longterm relationships. Scenic designer Reid Thompson has made the part of the set representing their home a model of strained, rather generic domesticity, with framed portraits of flowers hanging over a bed and sink. But the exchanges taking place between these walls can be anything but gentle, as when Charlotte, after one of her intense conversations with Joey, questions her husband’s certainty that she enjoys his expressions of affection and arousal.
There’s also a sense of hope in Something Clean, however frail or distant it may seem. The play ends with a surge of light, a simulated sunrise, which builds until it becomes blinding, then lapses suddenly into darkness. If we can’t choose what life presents us, it’s suggested, we can at least seize on learning moments while they’re before us, however painful. In doing so, as best she can, Fillinger’s protagonist earns not only our sympathy but admiration—and, in Erbe’s probing, glowing performance, our rapt attention throughout.
