Our House

Patty and I just moved to Park Slope last weekend. We’re still getting used to the amount of time it takes to get from place to place. We misjudged last night and missed the first ten minutes of “Our House” at Playwright’s Horizon.

When we arrived at the theater, the usher put us in a small holding pen at the top of the theater until the next cue when she could show us to seats in the theater. The “holding pen” had plexiglass and it created the strange distancing effect of television as we started watching Merv, played by the daffily self-absorbed Jeremy Strong, and Alice, played by the self-righteously infuriated Katie Kreisler, argue about who was going to clean the kitchen. Ugh, I thought, why do we want to watch a scripted Big Brother. It’s bad enough idiots like this fill the air waves. It turns out, as a few more minutes of watching unfolded, that was the whole point of the play (you know, I really need to start reading synopses before I go to these things)

“Our House” is preciously meta. A tv exec of the fictional SBS (an acryonym for Such BullShit, perhaps?) network decides that because the network’s ratings are too low; he’s going to shake things up by making Jennifer, pitch perfect Morena Baccarin, his star morning news anchor the host of the Big-Brother-style reality tv show “Our House.” Merv, who is obsessed with tv, watches it openmouthed as his own interpersonal relationships explode around him.

The script written by Theresa Rebeck was strong, with biting dialogue and trenchant observations on the dumbing down of network television, the role of news in America (the tv exec wants to do away with it totally and is shocked that the FCC requires he broadcast news to get the airwaves for free), and the refracted reality of reality television. Strong theater takes situations far beyond reality, or rather, to a reality rarely achieved in life. In this case, Merv takes his roommates hostage after a particularly fraught house meeting. Rebeck made me squirm as she sent her vauntingly ambitious tv anchor into the fray and overlooked common human decency to get the story.

It’s a smart play and the acting is excellent—and no surprise, over half the cast was educated at Julliard. And yet, I really disliked the play and the actors in it. Part of this might be director Michael Mayer’s fault, the acting too often devolved to outright shouting. Shouting certainly raises the stakes, but too much shouting loses impact and quickly becomes stagey. In real life, people can rarely afford to lose their tempers so often. In this case, the shouting was simply sloppily characterization too—used to communicate diva fits, put-upon martyrdom, and boorish self-centeredness. Towards the end I wanted to shout, “Just move out and spare us all!”

Image courtesy of broadwayworld.com