“Three Houses” Is Pandemic Art You’ll Want to See
Dave Malloy's new musical paints hauntingly beautiful windows into three lives in lockdown.
It’s understandable why art about the pandemic might be an immediate turn-off. We’re worried it’ll be too cliché, raw, re-traumatizing, or didactic. Dave Malloy’s new musical, “Three Houses,” however, overcomes the seemingly impossible odds. This show captures the pandemic with authenticity and beauty in a clever, just-sad-enough story.
Malloy’s approach to writing about the pandemic works because it doesn’t make big, sweeping statements about the worst of COVID-19, but rather gets hyper-specific. The show takes place after people started to re-enter the world, maskless, in an intimate bar that looks like it’s mixed with a grandmother’s house (scenic design by dots). There’s a bartender named Wolf (Scott Stangland) and two quiet, ghost-like older waiters (Henry Stram and Ching Valdes-Aran). There are three patrons, each sitting alone, who will share their pandemic stories.
The bartender invites them up one at a time to an open mic, with a special twist for each. He offers Susan (Margo Seibert) a straw for her drink, Sadie (Mia Pak) a swizzle stick to stir hers, and throws a brick in front of Beckett (J.D. Mollison). If those details sound familiar, that’s because “Three Houses” isn’t just a pandemic musical; it’s a Three Little Pigs allegory, a subtle framing device that might just sneak up on you if you aren’t looking out for it.
“Don’t be afraid to get deep,” Wolf encourages each of his guests, and while they may be afraid, they definitely do. Each of them approaches the mic with the same opening, singing: “So this is the story / of how I went a little bit crazy / living alone / in the pandemic.”
The outlines of the three character’s pandemic experiences are similar: they all had just separated from a partner, fled to a new location, and went through lockdown alone. This structure is what grounds us and keeps connection between the three, yet the details are far from similar.
Susan hid away in her grandmother’s home in Latvia, drinking and cataloging old books. Sadie lived in her aunt’s house in New Mexico, spending hours in a Sims/Animal Crossing-like game, attempting to recreate her grandparents’ home online. Beckett confined himself in a basement Brooklyn apartment and became obsessed with his family’s Irish superstitions, eventually building a makeshift clochán out of Amazon boxes.
Malloy’s lyricism is the material on which these three homes are built, filled with dense phrases that float like poetry. Along with these detailed descriptions, the production design transforms the bar into three distinct worlds. Multicolored lights (designed by Christopher Bowser) scatter the top of the stage, illuminating different corners. Sassy and talkative puppets (designed by James Ortiz) highlight one non-human companion from each tale. Susan talks with a dragon figurine; Sadie fights with a video game badger; Beckett converses with a larger-than-life spider.
These puppets, along with clever lines in the musical’s book, help walk the thin line between darkness and humor. In a pandemic musical, we know to expect some sadness, which Malloy writes hauntingly. I can’t get the song “Haze” out of my head, with its simple yet chilling refrain: “My heart broke / and then the world broke / and then my brain broke too.” (Signature Theatre has kindly released a 30-second clip which has been on loop in my head for days. Watch at your own risk.)
Yet within this sadness, there are hilariously human moments. Sadie asks her video game badger puppet, Zippy, if he wants to play, and he snidely shuts her down — which got a laugh from the whole audience. Her video game world is lively, fun, and witty. Then we learn she’s been playing the game for over 13 hours a day.
Malloy also writes madness through music, using the form to emphasize each of the character’s obsessive tendencies. Sadie sings through a story from her childhood, about playing a game where she couldn’t stop putting quarters into a machine, desperately hoping to watch them fall. She would put one quarter in, push, and wait for the quarter to fall. When it didn’t, she’d put another quarter in, push, and wait for that one to fall. Susan, Sadie, and Beckett sing the song in rounds, using the same choreography (by director Annie Tippe) to create a hypnotic spiral into emptiness, where there are no quarters left to spare.
Once each has told their story, Wolf reappears, and we return to the underlying allegory. The three little pigs must take down the wolf. In this case, Susan, Sadie, and Beckett are confronting both Wolf, the bartender, and their own enemy: themselves.
Yet this ending isn’t where the Three Little Pigs allegory was strongest for me; instead, I found the framing of each of the vulnerable houses, with a wolf at the door, the most compelling. How do our walls protect us, or fail to? Each of these characters had shelter in a dangerous time, yet the walls they built weren’t always safe. When they had to seclude themselves, walls weren’t protection but division. Their houses alienated them from their loved ones, their communities, and their sense of selves. Houses were a false sense of security that could easily be blown down.
The homes we step into during “Three Houses” are both a window into other worlds and a reflection of our own. By portraying personal experiences in a period when so many of us felt alone, “Three Houses” satisfies a curiosity and hunger to learn about what everyone else was going through during the pandemic, even if our experience on paper was quite different. I wasn’t in the woods of Latvia, playing hours of video games, or hoarding Amazon boxes in Brooklyn, but I could relate to the pain of feeling completely remote, getting lost in screens, and trying to find security in household items. It’s writing 101: in specificity, there comes relatability.
In giving voice to three unique stories, “Three Houses” somehow let us all get our pandemic stories heard.
Thank you for reading Not to Be Dramatic! “Three Houses” runs through this Sunday at Signature Theatre.
My how I found out, why I went, and how I got tickets all have a wonderful connecting theme: my friend Emily! Emily works at Signature and was raving about “Three Houses” early on. It’s been so exciting to be able to see what she and the team have been working on. Thank you to Emily for sponsoring this newsletter, both in ticket form and dutiful fact-checking.
If you’re interested in seeing the show before Sunday, tickets are still available online — and there are $30 rush tickets at the box office.
three little pigs tie in is brilliant and so weird