The House of Yes (Fall Guy Theatre)

[November 21st, 2007]

[KENNEDY KINK] My colleagues tell me Mark Waters (Mean Girls ) adapted Wendy MacLeod’s perverse familial comedy into a film starring Parker Posey and Freddie Prinze Jr. They say it’s got quite the cult following. I wouldn’t know; I’ve never seen it.

That might make me an ideal audience member for director (and Earl Blumenauer aide) Willie Smith, who asked his cast to avoid Waters’ film, which—I hear—rearranges some major scenes to make the whole thing more believable. My impressions of the play come free of Hollywood’s contaminating influences, and they are the following: first, creepy; second, hilarious; third, kinda hot.

The House of Yes , for my fellows in ignorance, is the story of a fella (Joe Bolenbaugh) who brings his fiancée (Julie Jeske) home to meet the family, including his twin sister (and estranged former lover)(Cecily Overman), who is an unstable young lady who goes by “Jackie-O” and gets off on reenacting a certain infamous presidential assassination. Think Buried Child meets Private Lives , and you’ll get the general idea.

It’s hard to know how to feel about this script, which intersperses class warfare, incest and murder with Woody Allen-style repartee: “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go baste the turkey and hide the kitchen knives.” Is it some kind of complex cultural allegory, or just a black comedy about a family caught in a cycle of self-destruction?

Either way, Smith’s production is enjoyable, if unpolished. Set in a living room so soulless that even the picture frames are empty, and punctuated at every scene change with a thundering minor chord, it’s a fun 90 minutes of flying barbs and periodic nudity. It’s even occasionally sexy, though in such disturbing ways that you’ll spend the next few days trying to forget what you’ve seen.

Acting here is no more uneven than in your average Portland production—Suzanne Owens-Duval is in top form as the bitter, alcoholic mother, while Bolenbaugh seems unfortunately detached and preoccupied—but it stands out more thanks to Overman, who is so totally invested in her pink-suited, gun-wielding psychopath that the rest of the cast grows transparent in comparison. I never miss an opportunity to see this extraordinary professional in action, and you shouldn’t either. She kills .