House of Tomorrow

A new play by Cat Crowley

Or: Conspicuous Consumption

It’s a nightmare in Teal. Cool, and slopping and impersonal, the asymmetrical excitement in chrome of the Jetson Family manse, if said dance had been set underground, vacuumed from any trace of life, and been equipped with a computer butler rather than a robot maid. This is the house of tomorrow (gorgeously crafted by set designer Will Ledbetter) the eponymous setting of Cat Crowley’s thrillingly dark futuristic retake of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, now complete with all the newest dystopian conveniences.

Meet Jane Jupiter (Ravin Patterson) the owner of this wonder home. utterly content to work in tandem with her HANC (Matthew Cameron Clark), whisk up full dinners in the Thermofridge (trademark), get chummy with the neighborhood salesman (Dakotah Brown) of the all-encompassing DomestiTech company, and buy, buy, buy all their lavish goods. Her husband John (Nicholas Paul Garcia) and daughter Little Jenny (Arianne Sermonia), might dream of a little more than passing along messages from computer to computer or watching reruns of Rex Rocket (Brown again), but they don’t dream that deeply and anyway, there’s a pill for that. Things change however when Jane’s old school friend Patty Studebaker (Sara Bruner) arrives out of the slightly toxic blue with her own once in a lifetime author.

Crowley hit a nice two-tone of comedy and menace. The killer-diller Fifties’ lingo sparkles in the air (especially in Mr. Salesman’s shiny chrome pitches, which Brown excels at giving their enticing warmth and murky underside). The plot is like expertly thrown matches each one catching the next on fire. Unfortunately, the Jupiter’s are a little inhibited as characters, by virtue of their characters being inhibited. Each actor uses this complex tool to their own benefit: Patterson hanging on tooth and nail to her happy outlook until she is sucked up into the vacuum of emotion, Garcia pinning himself tighter and tighter in Johns fussiness, and Sermonia palpably stumbling into a terrifying vacancy in herself, a blue screen of death, when her life takes a drastic turn.

But by far the most marvelous thing in this house is the stranger. Bruner is electric, sending Patty crackling with the magnetic energy of a con artist or a saboteur, or someone who is up to no good. She is a creature undefined by space, clinging high upon the wall and slipping down into the dining nook, inhabiting spaces no one else dares to. Her roguish play with HANC induces giddiness, and wry comments about the weirdness of the Jupiter’s lives bring us squarely onto her team. But it is in Patty’s attempt at reconnection that have the most meat on them; idle remembrances, harmless hypotheticals, harmlessly floated like balloons across the room, and yet we can all see Patty tensing, hoping with all her heart that Jane will pick them up.

Bright and shiny as Hannah Read Newbill’s costumes, the charm of House of Tomorrow, and its endearing impracticalities (best sold in the Domestitech commercials designed by Cody Gittings), slide toward a dark and squirmy ending. While it may not pull as free from the chrome world it inhabits as Crowley might want it to, it fetches a steady supply of laughs until the welcome credit switch to shudders comes due.

Warning: Contains onanism and moderate to severe existential crisis’.