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The House of Yes
Reviewed by Bill Raden
Zephyr Theatre
Through June 14
A lot of cultural water has passed under the bridge since The House Yes, Wendy MacLeod’s pitch-black comedy of the grotesque, debuted in 1990. Most significant has been the retreat of the Kennedy family from the national consciousness. For a play whose irreverent voltage depends on the tragic associations of the clan, the deaths of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and John F. Kennedy Jr. in the ‘90s, and Senator Ted Kennedy in 2009, somehow deprive the story of whatever claim it might have once had to scandalize our collective imagination.
The story opens on Thanksgiving in the McLean, Virginia home of the Pascal family “some 20 years after JFK’s assassination.” A hurricane is brewing, and MacLeod wastes no time in signaling that this storm will be of the dysfunctional family kind.
Mrs. Pascal (Eileen T’Kaye) and the emotionally arrested youngest son Anthony (Nicholas McDonald) tape up the windows and otherwise prepare for the return of college student Marty (Colin McGurk), the fraternal twin of the sister that calls herself Jackie-O (Kate Maher), who herself has just been released from a mental hospital.
To the consternation of all, Marty turns up with a fiancée, Lesly (Jeanne Syquia), a working class fish-out-of-water and a waitress at Donut King. Soon, the entire family is working overtime to separate the betrothed couple even as the somewhat innocent Lesly begins to suspect the unsavory truth about Marty and Jackie-O’s incestuous past.
But in a play that opens on the image of a character named Jackie-O ritually placing an oversized hatbox beneath an altar-like sideboard (on Adam Haas Hunter’s generic living room and bedroom set), it hardly comes as a surprise when Maher finally gets around to removing the iconic Oleg Cassini pink assassination suit (capably reproduced by costumer Wendell C. Carmichael). What is unexpected is just how unsurprising it is when the twins finally get around to putting the suit to use in a sex game that climaxes in a reenactment of Dealey Plaza.
Lee Sankowich directs with a firm hand, and both Syquia and T’Kaye deliver on their respective portraits of sweetly tempered ingenuousness and icy mendaciousness. It is Maher and McGurk who fail to generate the requisite chemistry for an audience to register any recognizable sexual heat in their degenerate incest. Without that sympathetic connection, MacLeod’s laughs never materialize.
Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Ave., Fairfax; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through June 14. (323) 960-5563, https://plays411.com/houseofyes
