The House of Yes
by Wendy MacLeod
Directed by Josie Collier
3 – 20 November 2005
Thursdays – Saturdays 8:00 p.m.
Sunday Matinee 4:00 p.m.
play! Theatre [1204 Cedar Avenue]
Produced under the name "Coda Theater Project".
Starring: Kate Meehan, Cris Skelton, Pidge Smith, Lisa Scheps, Christopher Loveless, and Hallie Martin.
Every family has its problems: a somewhat less than cold mother, an emotionally unbalanced twin sister, and a younger brother who has recently dropped out of Princeton. These are but a few of the things wrong with Marty's. Nonetheless, he decides to bring his new fiancée home to meet his family for Thanksgiving. Although his mother hides the kitchen knives, none of them are able to prevent the impending disaster.
It is the afternoon of Friday, the 22nd of November 1963. Two children of 12 or so—fraternal twins—sit in the cold glow of a black and white tv set, watching coverage of the assassination of the President of the United States. Not the first such assassination, but the first in living memory, the day a generation of Americans lost their innocence. More important than the shadowy images which pass across this set, images of a woman losing her husband, a man who did something for other people, a dying man, a murdered man, are the images reflected in the TV screen. For these twins, far more than political innocence is lost that day.
It has become a commonplace to assert that everyone remembers where they were when first they hear of the events unfolding in Dallas, Texas. For one of these twins, that sense of time, of memory, is shattered both here and in the more personal events of the following March. Events which engendered there the broken home, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead. / Being so caught up, / So mastered by the brute blood of the air, / Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? One could speak of myths, of gods, of archetypes, even of the pharaoh and his sister-wife, but these event are far too human for such mythographic, such poetic, license.
The present production approaches this matter from a new perspective. To date virtually all production of The House of Yes have had a surreal edge. We have chosen to put a more realistic face on these events, and to approach the language of the play not as simple, rhythmic exercise but as the deep, fertile ground we believe it to be.