I love jokes. I love to listen to them and tell them. I especially like the way that something so quick and short establishes a believably unreal world that pops with the punch line. It creates its own kind of sense; we call it non-sense. So I liked playwright Sarah Ruhl's use of jokes in "The Clean House," now at Geva Theatre Center, to suggest a place and some people that look familiar but work by their own existential lights. She alerts us by setting her dark comedy in what she calls "a metaphysical Connecticut." When you read that in the program, how can you know that it will turn out to be one of the play's more amusing lines?

That said, what are we to make of a play that begins with Matilde, the Brazilian maid, telling the audience a dirty joke - in Portugese - complete with several different ways of pumping her hips? Even though you don't understand it, it's more mysterious and evocative than what you do understand, a tiresome plot about a married couple - two successful physicians named Lane and Charles - whose life has settled into a dull pattern until Charles falls instantaneously and overwhelmingly in love with Ana, a patient, as they discuss her imminent mastectomy. Matilde doesn't like to clean house, but Lane's sister, Virginia, does, compulsively; they strike a deal. So a marriage goes bad, people fall in love at first sight, and a lover dies as Ruhl sets out to create comedy from reality's terrible unpredictability.

But having Virginia (played overheatedly by Lynne McCollough) elevate dusting to moral certitude before she takes vengeance on her aloof sister's perfect house, and having the buttoned-up Charles (Tuck Mulligan) bolt for blizzardy Alaska to bring back a cancer-curing tree, lack the inspired madness this kind of comedy requires. Ruhl needs to have turned the daemon loose. Only the jokes have promise: Matilde says that her mother laughed so hard at one of her husband's jokes that she gave birth, and her father laughed so hard at his wife's joke that he died. Virginia's high-decibel complaining and Charles' breakneck trek place a poor third behind them, leaving Lane and Matilde, played with strength and sympathy by Anne-Marie Cusson and Tania Santiago, to hold things together in what is largely a play about women.

On the other hand, the play has a couple of nice touches to suggest what might have been: Ana, played with vitality by Judith Delgado, has a sun-washed, flower-filled balcony. It is the play's one grand dash of color; in Lane and Charles' living room, everything is white or metallic. But when Ana and Matilde toss apples that aren't sweet enough into the sea, they land in Lane's austere living room. The understatedly antic scene anticipates a larger mess to come. Near the end of the play, waiting for Charles to return, Lane nurses Ana, the woman who betrayed her, as Virginia cleans and cooks, and Matilde tries to invent jokes to ease Ana's pain. In an inspired moment, Virginia announces that she has made chocolate ice cream. The disputes between the women disappear as they munch happily for a few moments. The scene feels as satisfying as a good joke well told.

Most of the time, though, the comic scenes aren't funny, the humor has little edge, and the ironies are obvious. It's hard to know if the problem is mainly the play's, director Emma Griffin's, or the cast's. Whichever it is, if this is what passes for sophistication nowadays, then a) sophistication is getting a bad rap and b) gimme a pie in the face any day.

"The Clean House"

Through November 8

Geva Theatre Center, 75 Woodbury Blvd.

$22-$54 | 232-GEVA, gevatheatre.org