The House of Yes
Written by Wendy MacLeod
Directed by Jacob Christopher Green
Greenhouse Theater, 2257 N. Lincoln (map)
thru April 28 | tickets: $25 | more info
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Hubris Productions presents
The House of Yes
Review by Lawrence Bommer
It’s a new and, I hope, endangered theatrical hybrid: The House of Yes by Wendy (Apocalyptic Butterflies) MacLeod is subtitled "a suburban Jacobean play." Well, it’s certainly as grotesquely cruel as The Duchess of Malfi – but it wants to be more than a campy update, which is just where it fails.
Set during a hurricane in Thanksgiving 1988, the black comedy depicts the Pascals, an amoral upper-class Virginia family who are so fixated on their neighbors, the Kennedy clan, that they ignore their own moral decay.
At the head of the twisted bunch is the matriarch, a deep-dyed snob who’s helpless in the worst passive-aggressive way. Comparatively uncorrupted, younger son Anthony is a college dropout who’s woefully unready for real life. The craziest Pascal is daughter Jackie-O. Glamorous, spoiled and insane when not medicated, she’s the evil twin sister of Marty, a brother whom Jackie-O loves with more than sisterly affection.
Marty returns for Thanksgiving with his new fiancé Leslie, a sweet-tempered waitress with the distinct advantage of not being a Pascal. When he blandly announces, "I love her and I’m trying to follow procedure," Jackie-O springs to defend her incestuous rights. The twisted sister entices him into a disturbed Kennedy impersonation where she dresses like her namessake in teased wig, pill-box hat, and blood-spattered dress; brother and sister wave from an imaginary motorcade, then Marty mimes being shot as Jackie-O screams hysterically. (It’s no funnier than it sounds.) After timid Anthony seduces Leslie (their decency draws them together), Leslie tells Marty to take her back to New York. Enraged, Jackie-O then replays the motorcade game with a vengeance.
The playwright got her title from a grafitto she found in a New Haven bathroom: "It seemed the perfect title for a house of immorality. No one has ever said `No’ to these people." As MacLeod imagines them, the Pascals are insulated by wealth and, despite their unearned privilege, unrepentantly arrogant and totally 1%.
Unfortunately, in this weakly wrought 85-minute offering MacLeod hasn’t imagined them enough. If the play means to update the Jacobeans’ condemnations of vicious 17th century Italian noblemen, it fails: It supplies too little social context for a class critique. Though Leslie’s lower-class origins are sufficiently documented, we never learn how rich the Pascals are or how they got that way. When Lesiey turns on Jackie-O and asks, "What have you done for anybody?," the indignation seems unearned: The issue of the Pascals’ parasitism was never broached. (Merely emulating the Kennedys is proof of stupidity, not venality.)
Rather than an anti-privilege diatribe (or an attack on Reagan and Thatcher as first conceived), Jacob Christopher Green‘s slow and creepy staging treats House of Yes like a creepy neo-Gothic potboiler. But the pot never boils because from the outcome is obvious from the start. There is one touching, well shaped scene– where Jason Dabrowski‘s sweetly inept Anthony stumbles into sex with Patricia Moy’s equally innocent Leslie–that’s one of the few moments where the characters relax into humans.
Though defeated by the staging’s tepid tempo, a strong cast do all they can to turn easy targets into cunning stereotypes. As the regal and sepulchrally sly mother, Patti Feinstein combines the vaporous delicacy of O’Neill’s Mary Tyrone with the hauteur that Nancy Marchand brought to “Lou Grant”. Playing bitch queen Jackie-O with demented vigor, Jessica Maynard conveys all the renegade narcissism that would entice her into incest with a twin. Charlie Rasmann plays him with weak-kneed imbecility.
Inevitably their hard work gets wrecked by a play that seems to live only for assorted shock effects and a bloody conclusion. I can’t give it away but it resolves nothing and only exposes the hollowness of what preceded it. Whatever its hoped-for indictment of the selfish rich, House of Yes is all symptoms and no diagnosis.
Rating: ★★
House of Yes continues through April 28th at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln (map), with performances Thursdays-Saturdays at 8pm, Sunday at 3pm. Tickets are $25, and are available by phone (773-404-7336) or online at Tix.com (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More information at HubrisProductions.com. (Running time: 85 minutes with no intermission)
