THEATER - FRINGE 2006 Encore: "Open House"

Open House is an over-the-top comedy that's a little too open. The gags are obvious, the scenes are ridiculous, and the characters go way beyond stereotype. What few laughs there are, are forced, and the meanness of characters (or the shallowness of others) keeps the play too dark to be charming. As a shell, it's decent, but until the house fills with substance--comedic or otherwise--you wouldn't want to live there, much less visit.

The problem starts with the characters: characters incapable of selling this show. Alistair is a passive "dude" who feels as if he's "stuck in the last ten pages of a fairy tale." When he was interesting, he was a Prince Charming; now, especially as Bill Dawes plays him, there's too little passion and too much pathos. This is what the other characters glom onto: his wife, Beverly, begs for him to get jealous as she grinds against his neighbor, Lewis; his daughter, Sylvia, aches for his attention and devotion; when Melanie, Lewis's wife, tries to seduce him, she has every right to be enraged with his apathy. Would that Alistair had an epiphany, or changed, or in some way justified the sluggish pace of Open House. Instead, Ross Maxwell gives Alistair a less-than-thrilling climax and then tacks on a lengthy coda that ruins even that. And this play has the nerve to talk about tacky displays of art?

Beyond characters, Maxwell's script also suffers from attention-deficit disorder, a problem that I suspect springs from a general disdain for characters. The play springs from low self-esteem to patriotism, from homophobia to terrorism, from imaginary friends to sex games. None of this is interesting: Maxwell hops from absurdity to absurdity, shuffling furniture around (as if to boost the play's feng shui), when what he needs is to invest in something. Of the characters, Bess Rous's portrayal of the socially stunted daughter is the most appealing. I don't want to take anything away from her dedicated performance, but in a boring play, isn't the weird character always the most interesting, simply by default?

Open House lives up to its title: it's a house in search of an owner. Unfortunately, all that's wrong with the structure and the casting far outweigh the cute little tchotchkes left behind, and even the best director (and hey, Josh Hecht isn't bad) should bulldoze rather than renovate.