In defense of Michael Lasser (theater review, October 28): "The Clean House" was the worst play I've seen at Geva in over 20 years. I went with friends to the opening, and this "hilarious" play got few laughs. Reviews of the 2006 performances in New York were "mixed," with the majority sharing our disdain. I liked the meliorating comment from Jeremy McCarter, in New York Magazine, that perhaps "it wasn't entirely" author Sarah Ruhl's fault, and I do suspect that there could be a performance of the play that would make it mildly amusing for adults rather than the piece of juvenilia that I think we found it to be.

The play starts badly with the long monologue in Portuguese. Not only was it not particularly amusing, whatever the sexual imagery, it is audience alienating. How better to turn off an audience than to begin the play with a five-ten minute rant in a language that most of the audience probably doesn't understand, and which also says, "Hey look, I'm smarter than all of you out there because I can write this not just in the language we share, but in a language we don't."

And if I may run ahead, the end of the play has exactly the same effect. Some plays are redeemed by a dramatic last-minute development; "Witness for the Prosecution" is one. What had seemed largely boring is transformed by the last scene revelations.

In "The Clean House," we might have forgiven all that had gone before if the Perfect Joke had turned out to be that, but it is told secretly, presumably in Portuguese, and we are once again excluded. Or worse still, the fact that we cannot understand, that the joke is kept from us, IS the Perfect Joke. So we are made fools of, from beginning to end, and made fools of not by something that is profound and energizing, but something that is adolescent and alienating.

PETER DUNDAS, PITTSFORD