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Sibling ribaldry
Coyote peeps into The House of Yes
BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

The House of Yes
By Wendy MacLeod. Directed by Courtney O’Connor. Set by Mila Pavelka. Costumes by Suzanne Chesney. Lighting by Brad Lowery. Sound by Jeremy Goldstein. With Helen McElwain, Shawn Sturnick, Kippy Goldfarb, Ron Rittinger, and Tanya Anderson. Presented by Coyote Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts through June 22.


It’s practically an American custom for families to stash skeletons in household closets. Public families may find it tough to keep them tucked away for very long. It’s a little easier for ordinary civilian clans to let their seamy secrets collect dust while they themselves carry on beneath a veneer of normality. In The House of Yes, which is receiving a fine-tuned staging by Coyote Theatre, playwright Wendy MacLeod (whose Sin Coyote produced in 2001) brings us into the living room and boudoirs of a suburban DC household, where she strips away the family’s superficial appearances to reveal harsh, hushed-up truths — which happen to be rooted in a grisly obsession with one of America’s most iconic public families: the Kennedys.

The play is set on Thanksgiving 1983. A hurricane is gathering force outside, but a tempest is also stirring within the Pascal household. The matriarch is dithering about, making sure the final preparatory touches are in place, as she and two of her grown children await the arrival of the third, daughter Jackie-O’s twin brother, Marty, who recently moved to New York. Yet Mother’s bourgeois chirpiness and her painstaking attention to presentation cannot conceal the palpable undercurrent of uneasiness. Jackie-O is back home after a breakdown landed her in a " hospital. " Now, the slightest unexpected irritation can trigger a bloodcurdling fit of hysteria, as occurred the prior week when she found the seltzer water flat. So when she learns at the last minute that Marty is bringing a friend home with him, her exuberant expectancy becomes jumpy disgruntlement.

Jackie-O, you see, has a bond with her brother that brings an entirely new meaning to the term " sibling rivalry. " She’ll take on anything or anyone who threatens to divert her brother’s attention from herself. Everyone is the family is painfully of this situation; thus, when Marty arrives and the friend turns out to be a fiancée, the holiday reunion becomes a frantic attempt to break them up. Marty’s mother " needs to have a word " with him before dashing off to hide the kitchen knives. His going away, after all, was what triggered his sister’s mental meltdown. Marty’s position is that the move and the engagement are all part of his effort " to be normal. " With salty snap, his mother informs him, " It’s a little late for that, young man. "

Brother Anthony makes his own contribution to the campaign by hitting on Lesly. As for Jackie-O, her sole hope of avoiding a relapse is to slip into her replica of Jackie Kennedy’s legendary pink Chanel suit and pillbox hat and bully Marty into joining her in a nostalgic round of their twisted childhood game in which they act out the Kennedy assassination. It’s said that tragedy brings people closer together, but brothers and sisters aren’t meant to get as close as Marty and Jackie-O do in what customarily follows their role playing.

Coyote fully incorporates the satirical zing of MacLeod’s script, which rings with the sardonic darkness of Christopher Durang and the shrewd cultural examinations of Wendy Wasserstein. (You may recognize it from Mark Waters’s 1997 film, which featured Parker Posey as Jackie-O.) And under the crisp direction of Courtney O’Connor, the actors transcend type, displaying an effective balance of concern and irritation.

Helen McElwain, with her shrill outbursts, makes Jackie-O’s hysteria hilarious. Then, in the visual equivalent of stifling a scream to a yelp, she can suppress her jittery physicality into a wide-eyed expression and play it off with a faux and fleeting cool. Kippy Goldfarb’s image-centric Mrs. Pascal is a portrait of a suburban social climber colored with heated ambition and chill deadpan. Ron Rittinger fuels Anthony with a youthful air of manipulation. Shawn Sturnick’s Marty is appropriately bland as he tries to fill the part of the lone straight man amid the bedlam. And as the flirtatious doughnut-shop waitress suddenly entangled in this house of thorns, Tanya Anderson tempers Lesly’s mounting confusion with an eager curiosity. Throughout this intermissionless play, the ensemble functions efficiently in conveying the characters’ deep-seated dysfunction.

Issue Date: June 6-13, 2002
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