Off-Broadway Review: “Three Houses” at Signature Theatre’s Linney Theatre (Through Sunday, June 9, 2024) (2024)

Off-Broadway Review: “Three Houses” at Signature Theatre’s Linney Theatre (Through Sunday, June 9, 2024)
Music, Lyrics, Book, and Orchestrations by Dave Malloy
Directed and Choreographed by Annie Tippe
Reviewed by David Roberts
Theatre Reviews Limited

Dave Malloy’s “Three Houses currently running at Signature Theatre’s Linney Theater is a retelling/interpretation of the classic fairy tales “The Three Little Pigs” and “Red Riding Hood” (among other cautionary folklore narratives) in which The Big Bad Wolf appears.

Stand-ins for Little Red Riding Hood and those Three Little Pigs are Susan (a manic and hedonistic Margo Seibert), Sadie (a bubbly and obsessive Mia Park), and the aptly named Beckett (an intense and shattered J.D. Mollison) who are isolated from civilization during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

Susan had just separated from her husband and has “fled to the Baltics alone in a new home: [her] grandmama’s giant ranch house in the middle of a white forest in Latvia.” Sadie “had just separated from [her] girlfriend and had fled to the desert. [She] was alone in a new home: a midcentury adobe house in a valley outside Taos, New Mexico.” Beckett had just split up with Jackie and had hopes for renewal in his “little Utah-shaped room in the basem*nt of a butcher shop/one little window/looking out on a graveyard.”

At the beginning of “Three Houses,” the GenY/GenZ trio find themselves somewhere in a dimly lit co*cktail bar decorated with items that will be part of their individual stories. The bartender (a wolfish Scott Stangland) serves drinks and emcees the storytelling fantasy. He might be a bit grandmotherly in mein and appears later as the infamous wolf at the door – big and bad.

The three post-COVID 19 lockdown stories are heartfelt and often sorrowful. They start with where Susan, Mia, and Beckett came from and how they arrived at their lockdown houses, and what they left behind. There are ancestors in each story, grandparents who nurtured, parents and grandparents who might have clues to their progeny’s present angst. Beckett thinks of “parents and grandparents, every branch along the tree. trying to trace the tumor that ended up in me.”

Overall, the three stories of the three houses are extended metaphors that are replete with allusions to the canon of surrealist and absurdist literature skillfully woven through each narrative. Susan’s narrative captures the angst shared with Mia and Beckett. In the “wolf dance,” the grandparents urge their grandchildren to dance with the wolf that is their collective demons.

The “moral of the story” (all fables have morals) is that everyone must at some point face their inner demons. The fear the three experienced during the lockdown is ultimately fear of their own past, present, and future. And unless those demons/wolves are reckoned with, they may “fester and fascinate, else he may snag you and eat you alive.” Both grandparents also admonish their younger selves to “dance with the wolf. scratch his chinny chin chin” because “because this is who you are.it will never go away.” Henry Stram and Ching Valdes-Aran shine as the three pairs of grandparents and assorted other characters.

Dave Malloy’s storytelling is rich with literary tropes and his characters are engaging and authentic. He uses the fable and canon of surrealist and absurdist literature carefully and respectfully. Not all playwrights can successfully navigate those genres and weave a narrative that is as important as “Three Houses.” Annie Tippe’s direction is serviceable and fluid.

The musicians who accompany the stories (Mona Seyed-Bolorforosh, Yuko Naito-Gotay, Blair Hamrick, and Maria Bella Jeffers) add appropriate mood and setting. It would be better if the two musicians seated downstage left and right could be repositioned more upstage. It is sometimes difficult for patrons in the first few rows to hear the dialog over the instruments. And that is a significant loss.

Scenic design by dots, costume design by Haydee Zelideth, lighting design by Christopher Bowser, and sound design by Nick Kourtides all add to the effectiveness of the setting for “Three Houses.” Ortiz’s puppet design (Pookie: a Latvian dragon puppet, voiced and operated by Sadie, Zippy: a video game badger puppet, voiced and operated by Beckett, and Shelob: a creepy spider puppet, voiced and operated by Susan) direction although offering some comic relief add little to the advancement of the plot.

“Three Houses” is an intriguing cautionary tale about the vicissitudes of the human condition and well worth seeing.

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