Season:
27 November 2014 – 13 December 2014
Theatre Works, St Kilda
Director: Stephen Nicolazzo
Set Designer: Eugyeene Teh
Costume Designers: Tessa Leigh Wolffenbuttel Pitt and Eugyeene Teh
Lighting Designer: Katie Sfetkidis
Sound Designers: Russell Goldsmith and Daniel Nixon
Production Manager: Rebecca Poulter
Stage Manager: Harriet Gregory
With:
Genevieve Giuffre, Josh Price, Anna McCarthy, Paul Blenheim and Benjamin Rigby.
Produced by Theatre Works and Little Ones Theatre.
Jackie-O’ Pascal is obsessed with the 1963 Kennedy assassination, frequently re-enacting the moment of his death for her own deluded amusement.
She is also madly in love with her twin brother.
An acidic satire about class, incest, innocence, and mental illness The House of Yes is a disturbingly camp, theatrical experience centred on a deranged family of JFK enthusiasts.
In Wendy MacLeod’s obsidian-black comedy, The Pascals, for whom the clock stopped with the Kennedy assassination, are shut in as a hurricane swirls outside. Arriving ahead of the storm’s eye are Jackie-O’s twin brother Marty, and his fiancée Lesly.
Keen to renew her long-running, incestuous affair with Marty, the hurricane builds inside too as the battle for her brother’s affection rages. Will Jackie-O and her beloved be reunited? Or will it all end in the same bloody mess created by one gunman on a grassy knoll?
This piece marked darker territory for Little Ones Theatre and highlighted a turning point in their aesthetic, moving into even more detailed visual terrain. The work was praised for its biting social satire and design aesthetic.
★★★★ “Thrilling to watch…The performances are all excellent… a grotty little piece, the camp turned inward and cancerous, even the silliness tinged with madness and grief.”
Time Out
★★★★ “This show is another triumphant feather in the Little Ones Theatre’s ever-expanding cap. Its Rocky Horror meets Douglas Sirk in deliciously cinemascope time-warped glory.”
Theatre People
“Scintillating…a beautiful and detailed production. A triumph of the camp. It’s a definition of camp. Not camp as excess or trivia, but camp in the Sontag sense, as role-playing and artifice. Passionate camp, in which life is amped up to the state of theatre… The House of Yes is oddly substantial. It explodes out of the queer ghetto by elevating kitsch into something exalted and collectible. By turning trash into theatrical treasure.”
The Australian
“Bright and beautiful. Dark and tragic. The production leaves you in that state of ecstasy pinched between joy and desperation.”
Arts Hub