A dysfunctional family exhumes the Kennedys

PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH Lents and Brind exchange crazy Kennedy malarkey!

If you're a member of the privileged classes, posits Wendy Macleod's The House of Yes, the only challenge remaining for you is how well you can one-up your neighbors. The Pascal family, unfortunately, lives adjacent to those pesky Kennedys, who have set virtually unanswerable records in the fields of tragic death, illicit sex, and zany booze-fueled antics.

When we join the Pascals in this production, it's Thanksgiving 1983, simultaneously the 20th anniversary of JFK's assassination and of Mr. Pascal's mysterious disappearance, yet another instance in which the Kennedys completely eclipsed the Pascals, tragedywise. Feeling dwarfed by the achievements of their more illustrious neighbors, the Pascals have compensated by adopting Kennedy-esque family dynamics and then by debasing themselves in ways that even Teddy couldn't think of during his worst bender. It's a family with the cover of George and the contents of Swank.

Marty (David Brind, JE '00), the only member of the Pascals to have moved out of the old homestead, arrives for a holiday visit. Unexpectedly, he's brought his fiancée, a sweet, ordinary Donut King employee named Lesly (Leslie Klug, DC '00). Her presence threatens to disrupt the Pascals' two decades of proud fucked-up-ness, and the three house-bound Pascals immediately go into Full Alert Mode. Marty's monomaniacal twin sister, Jackie O. (Stacie Lents, SY '00), has a suspiciously possessive attitude toward Marty and wheedles Lesly for information about his relationship with her. Mrs. Pascal (Lauren Popper, ES '01) welcomes Lesly with off-putting family stories like, "Jackie was holding Marty's penis when they came out of the womb." Anthony (Nate Schenkkan, BR '02), the youngest and most passive Pascal, suddenly activates and turns his boyish good looks and dopey yearning toward Lesly in the hope of someday superimposing a blue video blotch over her face. Portentously, all this takes place during a hurricane.

House of Yes is a spawn of the old theme of the Escape From the Dysfunctional Family, and much of the play's comic energy comes from how it confounds the standard thrust of such plays. The typical protagonist might long to distinguish himself from his bummer of a clan, but Marty longs only to slip into anonymity with Lesly. There's a great moment when Marty, overwhelmed by shame, begs Lesly to "talk him down," and Brind and Klug clutch one another and recite the boring details of a domestic morning with the desperate passion of doomed opera singers.

Director Tamara Fisch has done a good job of divvying up the carcass of the Kennedy mystique between the three other Pascals. Each actor is given ample space to bounce their character's fixations off of the others'. Lents, as the heavily medicated Jackie O., ricochets between bratty aloofness and pathetic dependence, and plays Jackie's need to regulate the family well. Popper's jaded matriarch conveys an aura of resigned self-pity and contempt. Schenkkan finely shades his performance to reveal that the apparently pure Anthony knows a lot more about manipulating people than he lets on; after he gloms onto Lesly's desire for a happy, drab existence, he tempts her with the ultimate image of such a life: "We could move to Pennsylvania and become Amish." Klug has the unenviable job of functioning as a foil for these characters, but she holds her own throughout and is especially good with Schenkkan.

Most of the images of escape in The House of Yes are accompanied by an equivalent image of descent in social status. This and the play's use of the Kennedys, America's equivalent of a royal family, lead the performers into traps in places by seeming to point to a depth that isn't really there. American aristocracy in this play functions like the Catholic Church often does in plays by Christopher Durang--it's a MacGuffin, the impetus for a bunch of characters to run absurdist rackets on one another. The difficulty is that the characters sometimes seem to be thinking too much. The pacing is slow, and they deliver their lines with a deliberation that seems unwarranted. An unavoidable land mine is the Whitney Humanities Center Gym, which adds a sepulchral tone to any sound within it.

The Pascals are a gothic cartoon of the Kennedys' fall, and their performances need the kind of stimulus-response pacing that suggests that their obsessions are hijacking their minds. At its best stretches, such as Schenkkan's seduction routines, The House Of Yes approaches this level and is a morbidly funny ride. Unfortunately, its fits of seriousness make it like a game of ski football that keeps getting interrupted by trees.

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