The Actors' Group has moved to a new theater space in Chinatown that doubles its stage and audience areas. Given that the tiny old digs in Kaka'ako kept the actors and the front row audience jockeying for leg room, the new location in the Mendonca building on Smith Street still only seats about 70, but feels comparatively luxurious.

The air conditioning works and is quiet enough to be left on during the performance. The second- floor lanai overlooks a hidden tropical courtyard and offers enough space for a wine bar — a light year's improvement over the body-and-fender-shop ambience that characterized the old location.

While the new site is comparatively posh, it's still gritty enough to sustain TAG's image as a way-off Broadway engine willing to take risks beyond its resources and often succeed.

Still, every risk is not a success and the season-opener, Sarah Ruhl's "The Clean House," plays like its spark plugs could use a good cleaning.

Ruhl is a young and promising professional playwright with a growing resume that includes award recognition, but in this production, "The Clean House" reads like a first draft released before the playwright took time to think it through. The sputtering tone isn't helped by Jacin Harter's hesitant and jerky direction.

The action begins with Brazilian housemaid Matilde (Jessica Kauhane) telling a long and presumably hilarious joke in Portuguese. It seems her parents were fabulous jokesters and — after her mother died laughing — Matilde emigrated to the States to make a career in stand-up comedy. But since her material doesn't translate well, she has taken a temporary job as a housemaid and works on her material in her native tongue.

Her employer is Lane (Victoria Gail-White) a demanding professional physician who "didn't go to college to clean my own house." Matilde hates cleaning and is about to lose her job when she strikes a deal with Lane's sister Virginia (Catherine Fong) who loves housework and is eager to take over the task because she badly "needs a task."

Keeping the deal a secret sustains Act One, with pantomimed appearances by Matilde's deceased parents (John Wythe White and Frankie Enos), and hints that Lane's surgeon husband may not be spending all his time in the operating room, since strange female underwear begins to show up in his laundry.

All this changes in the second act when husband Charles (Wythe White) reveals that he has found his soul mate in Ana (Enos), an older woman afflicted with cancer, but still wants everybody to be friends. The action simultaneously turns serious and absurd with the new lovers tossing props from Ana's balcony to land in Lane's living room and Lane caring for Ana while Charles slogs through Alaskan tundra to chop down a yew tree with medicinal properties.

Matilde pronounces the situation to be a perfect joke, something she has both sought and feared.

Wythe White and Gail-White play the disintegrating married couple as a variation of similar roles they earlier shared in TAG's production of Edward Albee's "The Goat." Wythe White has the knack for transforming absurdities into plausibly compassionate dialogue, while Gail-White holds them safely at arm's length with astonished incredulity.

Fong is disarmingly uncomplicated as the sister with a cleaning fetish, Kauhane shows a great deal of promise as Matilde, and Enos finds the right amount of pathos in Ana's illness.

The set design is starkly black and white, but we spend too much time watching the crew handle the minimal props, waiting for the actors to pick up their cues, and wishing that the pace would shift out of first gear.

Joseph T. Rozmiarek has been reviewing theater performances in Hawai'i since 1973.