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by Wendy MacLeod, directed by Benjamin Blais

The Dynasty Collective, Storefront Theatre, Toronto

September 24-October 11, 2015

Jackie-O: “I suppose you think I'm going insane just to be fashionable”

The Storefront Theatre Arts Initiative continues its first season with the 1990 American comedy The House of Yes by Wendy MacLeod.  If the title seems familiar it is probably because the play was made into a film in 1997 starring Parker Posey, Freddie Prinze Jr. and Geneviève Bujold.  The plot concerns a bride or fiancée’s difficulties with her actual or potential in-laws – an ancient theme in literature treated in a much more intellectual manner in Harold Pinter’s classic play The Homecoming (1965).  In MacLeod’s The House of Yes, the author begins with an interesting premise but never suggests that her story’s quirkiness has any wider implications.

MacLeod subtitles her play “A Suburban Jacobean Play”.  It is suburban because it is set in McLean, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., in a house “around the corner from the Kennedys”.  It is “Jacobean” in that the plot about an impending marriage threatening an incestuous brother-sister relationship and leading to murder is similar to that in John Ford’s famous Jacobean tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (c.1629).  With this MacLeod combines elements of an ongoing storm and the incestuous couple being twins borrowed from Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839).

Adding to the “Jacobean” or, more rightly, American Gothic atmosphere is the fact that Jackie-O has recently been released from a mental institution after having shot Marty.  It seems that shortly after the Kennedy assassination when the siblings’ father also disappeared, or was killed, Marty and Jackie-O began their relationship in which playing the roles of JFK and Jackie served as a stimulus to sex.  Jackie-O gained her nickname (we never learn her real name) when she attended a party dressed as Jackie in her famous pink pillbox hat and skirt suit splashed with blood and macaroni to simulate brains. 

In 1990 an American audience must have found MacLeod’s transgressive use of Kennedy references extraordinarily outrageous.  Now, after 52 years it just seems eccentric.  If MacLeod’s play has any greater meaning is would appear to be only the dusty cliché that the American golden age of “Camelot” ended on the day Kennedy was shot – hence the depiction of the depraved nuclear family that grew up thereafter.  Otherwise, The House of Yes is merely a sex farce that happens to include incest, madness and murder without any comment about them.          

In her preface to the play, MacLeod states: “It’s a great mistake to imagine the play is ‘camp’ because the characters pretend to be Jack and Jackie Kennedy.  To do the play that way is to undermine its emotional truth, and the love, however twisted, between the characters”.  MacLeod assumes that she has accomplished rather more than she has since “emotional truth” is about the last thing evident in her depiction of the situations or the characters. 

Director Benjamin Blais does, however, try to pull the play away from camp and more into the realm of black comedy but is not always successful.  Joy Tanner plays the materfamilias Mrs. Pascal as camp from beginning to end making her into an eye-rolling cross between Morticia Addams and Joan Crawford. 

As Jackie-O, Joanne Kelly is initially in danger of self-conscious histrionics, but soon pulls away from that to create an intriguing character who is both manipulative and mentally fragile.  Kelly is a master of the ambiguous expression so that we often can’t tell exactly whether what she is saying and does derives from conscious intention or not.

One might think that MacLeod would pay more attention to Marty, but she has left the character terribly underwritten.  We would like to know more of his thoughts about his relationship with Jackie-O and about the liaison between Anthony and Lesly, but MacLeod leaves us in the dark.  Carter Hayden does what he can with the material, but MacLeod gives him too little to work with.

Benjamin Blais keeps the pacing brisk and tight.  MacLeod specifies that “The characters shouldn’t enter and exit, they should appear and disappear”.  With the aid of Melissa Joakim’s precise lighting, Blais manages to fulfil this seemingly impossible demand.  He is also helped by designer Claire Hill, who has solved the problem inherent in the script involving frequent shifts between the living room and bedroom by building the first revolve I’ve ever seen used in a storefront theatre.  It works so well I hope the Storefront Theatre finds uses for it in other productions. 

In the end it is really only the Kennedy references that distinguish The House of Yes from many other plays of the same kind, plus the ending is predictable.  Nevertheless, The House of Yes is an enjoyable enough way to spend 80 minutes as long as you’re not looking for an edgy satire with something to chew on, so to speak, like Storefront’s previous play Big Plans.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Carter Hayden, Jakob Ehman and Joanne Kelly; Joy Tanner as Mrs. Pascal; Jakob Ehman and Karen Knox. ©2015 John Gundy.