The House of Yes

Wendy MacLeod’s seriously screwed-up The House of Yes is risky business for even the most seasoned of artists. It tells of incestuous twins Marty and Jackie-O (Alex Goodrich and Stacey Jowett, respectively), siblings who don’t just knock boots, but also get off by re-creating the Kennedy assassination as a sex game. When Marty brings his fiancée home from New York, he disrupts his sister’s dreamy Camelot fetish and sends her on a rampage. Meanwhile the fiancée busies herself by deflowering Marty’s younger brother.

A chemical balance of voyeurism, nihilism and macabre humor is vital to making House work, and frankly the play might not even be worth it. Easy Street, a one year-old storefront troupe, is in way over its head, old enough to be attracted by the play’s kinkiness but not mature enough to handle it. While Goodrich has a natural presence, the rest of the production can’t cut it, from limp direction broken up with a series of bludgeoning blackouts to a set that looks like someone’s community-service-hours project. Also, why can’t the repressed glamour of pre-Vietnam America be anything but ironic?—Christopher Piatt