Copyright Marc J. Franklin.
“During the pandemic, when the lockdown hit, I had just separated from my girlfriend, and was living on my own in Brooklyn, New York.”
While the specifics change from episode to episode, that’s how each of the three stories in Three Houses, Dave Malloy’s newest musical, begins. The show takes place during an open mic night at a mysterious bar. The bar is obviously not real. As the bartender, Scott Stangland (the only Broadway Pierre I didn’t get a chance to see) emits a sinister ambiance that permeates the theater. Each of the protagonists is compelled to present in turn, and “compelled” is just the word. There’s no indication that this is a choice. “Don’t be scared to dig deep,” Stangland says to each of them before they start, more mocking than encouraging. He knows they will.
The form is similar to Malloy’s previous production at the Signature, Octet, another show in which each character takes a turn to tell their story. Octet takes place at an internet addiction support group, an AA meeting for people hooked on notifications and Instagram feeds. The participants in that group would often share numbers, intertwining their stories when common threads were presented. The separation between sections in Three Houses is much stronger. But for the unifying elements and ensemble support between the three leads, Three Houses is divided into three fully individual extended sequences. When Susan (Margo Seibert) started singing, I had no idea she’d still be singing half an hour later.
I have to confess, when she began her monologue by mentioning the pandemic, I let out a (quiet) sigh. I didn’t know Three Houses was going to be a Pandemic Show. I have an instinctive distrust of anything that tackles COVID-19 explicitly. It feels too recent, and most of the things written about it too flat. “Oh, you were miserable? Cool.” “Oh, you found meaning in enduring those difficult times? Neat.” Fair or not, I couldn’t tell you. My distaste operates at a level below metacognition, in the realm of reflexive hostility. My general position is that most great art about COVID-19 will never call COVID by its name. It will be inferred, subtextual, a vibe.
Three Houses gets away with it because the show isn’t about the pandemic. The pandemic is very important to what’s happening on stage, and certainly important to my thoughts on the show, but it recedes to an ambience most of the time. COVID-19 is why these people are holed up. COVID-19 is why we watch them lose themselves in their obsessions.
If there’s one thing Malloy loves, it’s an obsession. He is compelled by and, it seems pretty clear, terrified of them. Octet is entirely about the compulsions of technology. Moby Dick is, well, we all know what Moby Dick is about. Even Great Comet can be looked at as an interlocking series of obsessions, a group of people consumed by their passions and their ideas. The obsessive moments of Three Houses fit comfortably within Malloy’s corpus, rendered, as ever, with humor and horrible understanding.
Susan is holed up in her late grandmama’s Latvian house. She smokes pot, drinks mulberry wine, and reorganizes her grandmother’s library. Her preoccupations are harmless enough, all things considered, though her recitation of her grandmother’s extensive collection has the edge of compulsion.
Sadie (Mia Pak) loses herself in a Sims-like video game, playing 14 hours a day. During what is probably the show’s highpoint, she recounts a childhood episode at the carnival, when she fed quarter after quarter into an arcade machine. “Quarter in. Roll. Click. Push, push, push, push, push, push,” Sadie repeats over and over, faster and faster, until the quarters have run out. “What happened? Where did I go?” That is a quintessential Malloy lyric. His work suggests that obsessions and compulsions are to be feared because of how they supersede our selves.
Beckett (J.D. Mollison) has the roughest go of it. His segment is when COVID-19 is most present, most suffocating. He completely cuts himself off from the outside world, choosing instead to box himself in. Literally. He orders compulsively from the internet. He names the spider that lives in the corner of the living room. He loses his grandparents to COVID, misses his sister’s “small outdoor” wedding, and loses his job due to poor performance.
If that setup works for all three protagonists, it can work for me, right? During the pandemic, when the lockdown hit, I had just separated from my girlfriend, and was living on my own in Brooklyn, New York. Like Susan, Sadie, and Beckett, I had just gotten out of a relationship when the pandemic hit. I too spent the early pandemic alone, my roommates cast to the far corners of Brooklyn while I stayed in the center. I bought and played and thought about board games. It got to the point where they were all I could think about, even though I myself was sick of them. It’s a strange thing, to have obsessive thoughts that you yourself are aware of as obsessive. It was a mania, and the only way through that I could find.
That behavior receded with time, thank god. Other things have hung around, though. After months of solitude, thinking about a Finnish man she met during her travels, Susan says, “I think he was the last person I touched.” I was alone for 76 days, and I have no idea who the last person I touched was. It feels like such an important thing. It might have been my roommate Sam, the last person to leave. It might have been the woman I went out on a date with the Monday before I decided I wasn’t leaving the apartment again. I don’t know. What I do know, as I contemplate that question, is that I cannot be alone anymore.
Three Houses is about isolation, obsession, and fear. Like all of Dave Malloy’s creations, it is funny, breathless, and discursive in extremis. The show is unified by the idea of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf, which feels neither wholly successful nor wholly necessary. I can’t tell what he is. Is he the things we avoid confronting in our lives? Is he death? Is he both? What does it mean to dance with him, as all three protagonists ultimately do? I don’t know, and I’m not sure the show knows either. That’s alright. There are worse things than having too many ideas.