Absurdity moves in at ‘The House of Yes’
It doesn’t take long before Wendy MacLeod’s 1995 play “The House of Yes,” now in a Custom Made Theatre production, gets absurd and deviant. A hurricane’s already brewing as the play opens, but just as tempestuous is the exchange inside the Pascal home, where Jackie-O — not the actual Jacqueline Onassis, but something stranger (played by Caitlin Evenson) — caterwauls over the location of her hairbrush and why her adult brother Marty (Casey Robbins) might dare to bring a friend over.
MacLeod calls her script “a suburban Jacobean play,” writing in an author’s note that it’s about “people that have never been said no to.” Director Stuart Bousel, a Custom Made regular, describes the play as “a comedy of manners meets gothic novel, about people too declasse for feelings and yet consumed by secret and corrosive passions that will ultimately undo them.”