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It’s solely becoming {that a} bar, replete with liquor and raised like an altar, presides over Dave Malloy’s “Three Houses,” which opened on Monday on the Signature Theater. Malloy’s music is, in any case, intoxicating. Alcohol is the accelerant for the present’s linked monodramas. And hung over is the way it leaves its pandemic-sozzled characters on the finish of a darkish karaoke night time of the soul.
You could really feel that approach too: misplaced in a morning-after fog like Malloy’s three protagonists, every having radically relocated throughout lockdown. Susan (Margo Seibert) discovered herself in her dead grandmother’s ranch dwelling in Latvia, pointlessly alphabetizing the library. Sadie (Mia Pak) moved into her auntie’s New Mexico adobe, the place a life-simulation sport akin to Animal Crossing was her solely companion. Having holed up in a “pink brick basement in Brooklyn,” Beckett (J.D. Mollison) quickly changed into an Amazon shopaholic.
As every now takes the open mic on the metaphysical bar to sing about going “a little bit bit loopy dwelling alone within the pandemic,” it turns into clear, although, that extra was at play. Encouraged by a bartender not by the way known as Wolf (Scott Stangland) — “don’t be afraid to go deep,” he says — they disclose to us, and maybe to themselves, that Covid wasn’t the one risk to their well-being. Love, too, was a lockdown.
A current seismic breakup is a part of all their tales. Susan’s ex, Julian, moved to a different state for work. Sadie’s Jasmine stored “messing up” family routines along with her spontaneity. Beckett didn’t really feel protected letting his spouse, Jackie, see absolutely “the darkness inside” him. That these accusations are so transparently skinny doesn’t weaken their effectiveness as defenses — or, as a result of we acknowledge the conduct, as storytelling.
But Malloy’s try to cross-reference the stand-alone 30-minute tales with psychological and literal echoes palls. It’s straightforward sufficient to jot down off the twee alliteration of the three J-named exes as a form of gentle rhyme or fairy-tale resonance. Same with the eight jugs of pink currant wine in Susan’s story that change into eight instances of mezcal in Sadie’s and eight bottles of plum brandy in Beckett’s. Why eight? Why not? The level is that folks drink closely in isolation.
The which means of the extra ornate linkages is much less clear. Each phase contains an compulsory puppet — a Latvian home dragon, a online game badger, a creepy spider, all designed by James Ortiz — that feels extra like a stab at theatrical selection than an expression of a related human want. (Even so, Annie Tippe’s staging grows monotonous.) The bar’s orange-vested waiters (Ching Valdes-Aran and Henry Stram) reappear as varied loving grandparents, indistinguishable regardless of their accents. But all of the characters appear to have been reverse engineered from templates, suggesting structural desperation.
Such issues needn’t be inevitable in a triptych sure by theme (loneliness) and temper (melancholy) as a substitute of plot or character. Malloy’s beautiful “Octet,” from 2019, directed by Tippe in the identical house on the Pershing Square Signature Center, averted the sensation of false connection, even with 5 extra protagonists within the combine. But since “Octet” was particularly about false connection as skilled on-line, the shape match the operate. Here it doesn’t, regardless of strenuous if cryptic efforts.
For many, it is going to be sufficient compensation that Malloy’s music stays as hypnotic and embracing as ever, carried out faultlessly by the solid (particularly Seibert) and a busy quartet (violin, cello, French horn, keyboards) underneath Or Matias’s musical path. An in depth-harmony coda, accompanied solely by a hurdy-gurdy drone, particularly recollects the a cappella wonders of “Octet” and the hushed great thing about the title tune of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.”
And if the lyrics are typically too thick with metaphors, they’re additionally typically attractive and trenchant. I sighed at pretty phrases like “The air is latticed with birds,” maybe particularly as a result of I’d been primed for poetry by Christopher Bowser’s dreamlike, rich-hued lighting. Glowing, flickering or out of the blue illuminating a bizarre nook of the set (by the design collective dots), it appears to be wired on to the music.
But intermittent gorgeousness just isn’t, for me, a ample substitute for substance. What is “Three Houses” attempting to say, or have us expertise, about dwelling by way of the pandemic — past the usefulness of eight portions of liquor?
I may think about Susan, Sadie and Beckett, within the disintegration of their social selves, as warnings to ascertain stable connections, or to restore frayed ones, earlier than destiny makes each unattainable. But I may additionally think about the alternative: that their disintegration — Beckett stops bathing and builds a clochán fortress from his Amazon packing containers — is how they uncover a necessity for connection within the first place: a connection that outweighs the discomforts of relationship.
Either approach, it involves the identical bleak factor. As hinted by the title — and by naming the bartender Wolf — “Three Houses” is about being insufficiently ready for the day when catastrophe involves blow our home down. No construction, dramatic or in any other case, will save us by itself.
Three Houses
Through June 9 on the Signature Theater, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
