by Chris Ziegler

OC Weekly

It’s easy to laugh at drunks. It’s only a littletougher to laugh at death. Insanity? Infidelity?Incest? All have been comedy stalwarts since thedays of Middle English and beyond, and all are fodder for the funny bits in Rude Guerrilla’s production of The House of Yes, a sick, sarcastic and uncomfortably (but seductively) intimate romp through the repressed-for-good-reason wilds of the psyche. Sure, it’s an agonizingly bleak and uncompromising portrait of the infinite huma capacity for self-destruction and self-delusion, but it’ll still make you laugh until you cry—or maybe cry until you laugh.

If there’s one lesson to learn from the House of Yes, it’s that the family that decays together stays together. Mrs. Pascal (Susan Shearer/Stewart) presides boozily over a brood rotten with corruption and detached intellectual decadence; even though they live in Washington, D.C., it’s really more of a New York kinda household. Anthony (Keith Bennett) is a dropout and Jackie (a white-hot Rachel Davenport) is, well, a bit of a lone nut—she has a thing for Jackie Onassis, but she’s a Lee Harvey Oswald gal all the way. Only Marty (Daniel J. O’Brien) has escaped to a semblance of a real life in the big city, and now he’s bringing someone from the outside world home for Thanksgiving: his fiancée (Elisabeth Ginnett). Naturally, the family reacts to this home invasion with measured Oswaldian aplomb. Bring earplugs because shots will be fired.

Unsubtle gunfire aside, of course, House of Yes is a delicate production. It’d be easy to get sloppy and let the vitriol dissolve everything else in the play, and it’d also be easy to get swamped in the precise and bristly dialogue, as happened in the film version a few years back. Instead, the Rude Guerrilla ensemble and director Jeff Marx manage to preserve the few shreds of vulnerability in their characters, vitally counterpointing the play’s jagged edges. Davenport deserves special note: her every calculated move adds an uncomfortably palpable intensity to the production, and her ability to transmit flashes of the humanity submerged in Jackie’s insanity sets a standard for the cast. When a livid Marty breaks down and tells her he’s tired of being above everything, that he wants to be human, she glibly responds, "Okay, fine, so let’s be human." Too bad it’s never quite that easy—but at least we can still laugh.

By Eric Marchese

The Register

As a defining moment in our nation's history, the assassination of John F. Kennedy has since been the basis for many a book, film and play. But rarely, as in Wendy MacLeod's "The House of Yes," has it been the basis for laughter.

Dark laughter, yes. And indeed, we're not exactly laughing at the horrific moment itself. It's how MacLeod's characters react to it that cause us chuckle. It's laughter of discomfort, laughter of disbelief. Incongruity is a major source of comedy, and MacLeod has found something ideally incongruous between a horrible deed and a character's comically distorted response to it. Another character in "House of Yes" even expresses outrage over the concept of taking the events of Nov. 22, 1963, and turning them into a game. We share her outrage -- but at the Empire Theater, in the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company's expert staging of MacLeod's very black comedy, there's still room for the grim chuckle.

It's Thanksgiving weekend, and the members of the Pascal family, a wealthy clan in suburban Washington, D.C., awaits the arrival of eldest son Marty. They are Mrs. Pascal (Susan Shearer/Stewart), the matriarch; youngest son Anthony (Keith Bennett); and oldest daughter Jacqueline (Rachel Davenport). A hurricane is raging outside, but all are excited -- none more than Jacqueline, who looks dressed to kill. Everyone calls her Jackie-O -- a fact we learn when she later explains that she once attended an Ides of March party dressed in a pink Chanel suit identical to that of Jacqueline Onassis on that fateful November day in Dallas. Jackie-O had even splattered the dress with blood, along with boiled macaroni painted gray to simulate brain matter. Once Marty (Daniel J. O'Brien) arrives, the extent of Jackie-O's obsession becomes all the more clear. They're identical twins, and Jackie-O harbors a sexual fascination with her twin. Even now, in their late '20s, the twins have a private ritual in which they re-enact the assassination,then have torrid sex.

For Jackie-O, the ritual is the only thing that can get her truly aroused -- her attempts at having other boyfriends have failed. Marty, meanwhile, has been struggling to break free; his arrival in the downpour with his girlfriend Lesly (Elizabeth Ginnett) triggers waves of jealousy in Jackie-O, and sets off shock waves within the already-warped Pascal family that are so bizarre, the only natural human response is to laugh. Shudders, though, are not too far behind. As Jackie-O mixes Marty a drink, he tells her that Mom wants he and Lesly to leave. "She's afraid I'll push you over the edge." "I've been over the edge," says the softly seductive Jackie. "Now I'm back." And so the games begin. Nerdy, awkward younger brother Arthur is immediately drawn to the simple and almost equally awkward Lesly, demonstrating a touching if hilariously blunt romantic manner. Lesly rejects involvement with him as near-incest, which only mirrors what's going on under the same roof between her fiancee and his intense twin. Eventually, of course, Jackie-O gets Marty alone and puts on "the suit." "I even have the gun," she purrs, loading it with blanks. "You be him and I'll be her," she says, as if it were an innocent game played by children. We eventually learn, in the play's explosive climax, that this game is indeed tied in with the twins' early childhood, and that it's fatefully linked to the events of November 1963 that changed our nation forever. At the Empire, all the elements are in place, starting with director Jeff Marx and Don Hess' chic, black-and-white scheme set design, Marx and David Gallo's sound design and the show's well-coordinated costumes (uncredited).

Marx's staging is direct and precise, and his actors are pleasingly loose and relaxed. They're never too loose, however, walking the same fine line between comedy and tragedy that MacLeod does with her taut script -- a text that offers realistic dialogue of a memorable nature. (The dialogue between Mom, Jackie-O and Marty sounds like Edward Albee on a bender.) The chess moves of her characters -- particularly of the Pascal family -- are complex, yet the play is never hard to follow. Davenport's dark, sexy Jackie-O is the natural focus of Marx's staging -- a sophisticated, blue-blooded femme fatale with jet-black hair, dress and shoes and stark white pearls. Davenport is perhaps more sensuous and kittenish than the character is scripted, but she can also be Sharon Stone-like, crossing and uncrossing her legs to send unmistakeable signals. Davenport's voice is another key to her characterization; Jackie-O uses it like an instrument: It's breathy, high and fast one moment, low and slow the next. She's a merciless mimic, teasing Mom and, more viciously, Lesly, whom she holds in great contempt.

Ginnett's performance is the perfect complement to Davenport's. Lesly's a Donut King waitress from a small Pennsylvania town, and Ginnett is sweet, goodhearted and hopelessly awkward and naive when it comes to the kind of fashionable life Marty has always led. She has no response to Jackie-O's cattiness, and the litany she uses to try to help Marty envision their married life together weaves a poignant aura around the scene. As Marty, O'Brien does a good job of fulfilling the role's mostly plot-driven function -- Marty is whatever each scene with Jackie-O, Lesly or his mom or brother needs him to be. O'Brien takes care not to over dramatize Marty's struggle between his love for Lesly and his fatal attraction to his deadly twin. Bennett also does well as the puppyish, always out of place Arthur, although his vocal delivery is often too rapid and too poorly articulated to be heard. And in a few deft strokes, Shearer/Stewart paints Mrs. Pascal as a promiscuous virago as loony as her daughter -- and serenely accepting of Jackie-O's lurking insanity and the other events that occur under the roof of "The House of Yes."