Little Theater Presents Unsettling Family Drama

by James Blachly
9/20/00
Be careful who you take home for Thanksgiving next month. It is, as we learn in senior director Kelly Smith’s production of Wendy MacLeod’s The House of Yes, a very important decision. 
The House of Yes, subtitled “A Suburban Jacobean Play,” bears a sense of premonition from its inception, with posted warnings about “adult scenes” and gunshots. The subject matter is heavy, dealing with incest, fidelity and death. But the play is leavened by the script’s sometimes extraordinary sense of contemporary and idiomatic syntax, allowing the audience to silmultaneously laugh and remain disturbingly conscious of the play’s powerful undercurrents. 
These subtle strata are masterfully manipulated by Smith. The company’s outstanding timing, delivery and preparation demonstrate a rare and tasty execution of the mutual vision of several talented artists. The play is both immediately accessible (one need not have seen the movie) and deeply moving, all in the course of one hour and 20 minutes. 
Smith’s production pays particular attention to the play’s title, which she says refers to “a house in which nothing has been denied,” and which pertains to later issues of morality and nurturing. Yet in this house of uncommon relationships, few people would consider asking a question that would allow for such a straightforward response. 
It is hard to imagine a family more cerebral than the Pascals. Every comment is charged with cynicism, sarcasm and aggressive humor. The scenes dominated by the mother, Mrs. Pascal, played by senior Shannon Forney, epitomize this at once brutally straightforward and simultaneously underhanded commentary, revolving around the incest of twins Marty (senior Patrick Mulryan) and Jackie-O (senior Jaime Currier ). 
Theirs is a world which exudes the role of fantasy at its core, with visceral descriptive stories composing the essence of the characters’ sense of identity. While the family is divided along several important lines, they all operate within the same syntax. Even Anthony, the younger half-brother of the twins (played by senior Gabriel Carleton-Barnes), a Princeton dropout, only partially distinguishes himself from the family’s complicated social interactions with his distinctly anti-Pascalian honesty. 
The focus of this conflicted household is conspicuously apparent from the first scene, but it is not so much the sibling incest that drives the energy of the play as the societal and familial tension the situation creates. 
The scenes between Jackie and Marty are disturbingly convincing, and their respective responses to the pressures of exonerating their forbidden love affair take the play to its most unusual component, the refreshing and brilliantly executed role of the fiancée, Lesly, played by junior Sammy Tunis. 
Serving as a foil to the family’s intellectual snobbery, sarcasm, insularity and denial, Lesly provides both the most inane and profound comments throughout the play, such as “I don’t think you’re insane. I think you’re spoiled,” and, “You smell like fresh laundry. He smells like champagne.” Tunis’s remarkable skill with this role makes her immediately irresistible to both the audience and the family. 
While the play is undeniably carried by its talented acting, it is made more distinctly powerful because of the artistry of the sets, sound, lighting and costumes, details provided with unusual consideration by Smith’s designing staff. 
Junior sound designer Mark S. Williams, junior set designer Ariel Emmerson, senior costume designer Sarah Wolfman-Robichaud and senior lighting designer Carolyn Wong play an important role in Smith’s production, and their manipulation of the mood of the audience begins as soon as we leave the chill of a fall evening in Oberlin. 
Passing through the black curtains of the Little Theatre, one is jarred into a space defined by oversized black and white tiles, an impeccably white bed, a black coffee table, an angular white rug and an orange leather couch. 

Wolfman-Robichaud’s costumes reflect this conscious but not overdone reflection of the play’s sense of morality, demonstrating a particularly astute awareness of the effectiveness of such details as a vest, sequins and shoes, particularly those of Lesly and Mrs. Pascal, subtleties which, in conjunction with the detailed and, for the most part, well-timed lighting of Wong, cast the characters in an enhancing aureole. Playing subtly but penetratingly through pre-play conversations, Williams layers Mozart’s Requiem Mass and a 1962 TV sitcom of the Kennedy house, setting up the eerie scene with an aural effect at once subtle and penetrating. In addition to Williams’ masterful orchestration of the simultaneous external storm conflicts, his conscious manipulation of sounds allows us to delve into the tormented consciousness of the characters through effects reminiscent of The Cell. 
His use of silence is particularly insightful, calling attention to the play’s emotional epicenter with a deafening silence representing the eye of the hurricane and calling attention, in one of the play’s most human scenes, to the achingly poignant clink of ice in a glass. And when the play is over, his astute choice of (think about it!) Marilyn Monroe’s “I Want to Be Loved by You” leaves the audience with the feeling of a complete experience, both emotionally and intellectually. Indeed, the Kennedy family plays a seminal role in the Pascal household, and their overly-conscious knowledge of their neighbors calls attention not only to the wealth but the social insularity of the upper-class. MacLeod’s script contrasts the bourgeois intellectualism of the Pascal family with the profoundly simple Lesly, a girl from, of all places, Home, Pa. “Pennsylvania,” Jackie-O says, “is just this state that gets in your way when you have to go someplace else.” These words strike a familiar toll for both Oberliln students and MacLeod, who now holds a residency at Kenyon College, but lives in New York. In fact, most all of MacLeod’s words, penned in 1990 in San Francisco, will ring particularly true to this audience of Oberlin students, as her work raises issues of normalcy, sexual identity, liberal-arts education and intellectual snobbery.