The Open House
Opening Night: February 11, 2014
Closing: March 30, 2014
Theater: Signature Theatre
People have been born into families since people started getting born at all. Playwrights have been trying to write Family Plays for a long time, too. And typically these plays try to answer endlessly complicated questions of blood and duty and inheritance and responsibility. They try to answer the question, "Can things really change?" People have been trying nobly for years and years to have plays solve in two hours what hasn’t been solved in many lifetimes. This has to stop.
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March 3, 2014
A Will Eno play always seems to leave the audience walking out asking the same question: Was that the greatest thing I’ve ever seen or the most awful? It’s a fittingly existential question for a playwright widely considered to be this century’s answer to Samuel Beckett, one whose works explore lofty subjects including life, death, and our place on this planet. When the lights come up on Eno’s latest, The Open House at Signature Theatre, all you know is that, in 80 minutes, he has picked apart an entire genre, thrown the pieces into the air, and refused to put them back together. That in and of itself is mind-blowing to watch.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 3, 2014
As lights come up in The Open House, a bike bell rings, birds chirp and a dog barks. Those familiar sounds place us squarely in a homey setting — and where there’s family, there are, of course, unhealthy behaviors and attitudes. Domestic dysfunction has been mined to the max onstage. So it’s very impressive that playwright Will Eno extracts so much pungent humor and so many poignant observations in a fleet 80 minutes.
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March 3, 2014
Ever since hitting the scene in 2005, Will Eno has been asking one question with his plays: Does anyone belong anywhere? All of his characters have struggled with this, trying to find amid the emotional wreckage of their lives some beacon of stability that will guide them to whatever their ultimate destination is — not that discovering that is easy, given how likely they are to be tripped up by their own inertia. Eno continues his exploration of this matter, and of the limits of audience patience, in his new play, The Open House, which just opened at the Pershing Square Signature Center.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 4, 2014
It’s not easy to explain The Open House, which opened Monday night at the Signature Theatre Company, in a few words. Actually, it’s not easy to explain the impact of Will Eno’s play in a lot of words, either. A family of five – no names are given – are at home on the wedding anniversary of Mom (Carolyn McCormick) and Dad (Peter Friedman). The couple’s two grown children (Hannah Bos and Danny McCarthy) have come to visit, and, as a kind of fifth wheel, there’s Dad’s brother (Michael Countryman), who’s lived in the home since being released from a rehab clinic.
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March 3, 2014
Families have been falling apart on American stages ever since the country’s theater came to maturity back in the early decades of the last century. Fathers alienate sons. Wives excoriate husbands. Generation gaps yawn; alcohol plays the dual role of salve and fuel; lives are irrevocably destroyed. Right, you know the drill. But you’ve probably never seen a fractious family stage the uncanny disappearing act that takes place in The Open House, Will Eno’s new play, which opened on Monday night at Signature Theater. By the conclusion of Mr. Eno’s mordantly funny but disappointingly hollow comedy, the nuclear family onstage has been nuked into nonexistence, to be replaced, after a fashion, by a new clan that happens to look suspiciously like the old.
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