Clean Start: A New Look at a Beverly Hills Maid

By John Farrell

Celebrating the beginning of its 15^th year, Casa 010 opened Clean Start, a new play by Casa founder Josefina Lopez and Kathy Fischer.

The play opened to an almost full house of celebrants who enjoyed the play’s comic look at the relations between a Mexican maid and her Beverly Hills employer. The celebrants also enjoyed the opportunity to celebrate theater in the reviving Boyle Heights district of East Los Angeles.

When Casa 0101 first opened its doors, more than a decade ago, it was just a small black-box theater in a run-down section of town. Now it is housed in a purpose-built house that also includes an art gallery and plenty of room for the after-opening festivities.

Clean Start is a funny play, opting for laughs over the serious side of how so many Mexican (and other ethnic and national origins) maids ride the bus to work every day and manage — some just barely — to keep their families and lives together. It’s not an impassioned discussion of the subject, but a TV-like comedy with improbable characters, lots of laughs and some real heart at the end of the evening.

Ingrid Oliu is one of those maids, Rosario Rodríguez, who has had a steady job working for a rich wife in Beverly Hills for the past 20 years. But then Parker Reed (played with flamboyance and plenty of comic sensibility by Kim Chase) becomes homeless herself. Her husband ran a Ponzi scheme in Beverly Hills, was arrested, and her home and possessions were lost in the shuffle. Parker has nowhere to go, so Rosario feels she has to take her in.

But her house is already crowded with her younger sister Blanca (Maria Russell) and her mother, Doña María Rodríguez. It’s a crowded situation and the hunky Russian living in the basement (Robert Jekabson as Vladimir) just adds to the confusion.

Sister Blanca doesn’t work: she is waiting for her coming-out party, her Quinceañera, which she missed 20 years ago. Momma María (she’s a Jewish mother even if she is Mexican) doesn’t approve of her Russian would-be boyfriendor of Rosario’s decision to take in Parker. But Rosario, the one rock in this play, does what she has to do to bring her family, including Parker, into the real world.

Oliu is funny as Rosario, but she is also steady, determined and almost never is a situation beyond her and her ideas of friendship and family. The others flow around her like water against a stone — funny and sometimes vainglorious, always respecting her ideas. Fischer, who wrote the play with Lopez, directs with a sure hand. The set, which was designed by Rees Pugh, is a house you just might like living in. Costumes, including Blanca’s outrageous celebratory dress, are by Dandi Dewey.

There is a lesson in this play, of tolerance and cooperation. But really, the work looks more to its comic sensibilities than to any message. You’ll get the message, but mostly you’ll just laugh.

Tickets are $20, $17 for students and seniors and $15 for Boyle Heights residents. Performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 5 p.m. through Feb.15.

Details: (323) 263-7684; www.casa0101.org
Venue: Casa 0101
Location: 2102 East First St., Boyle Heights