Gabriel Rysdahl (left) plays as Danny, and Rica de Ocampo is the teacher’s aide Hannah, in the Chain Theatre’s production of This G*d Damn House.
In spite of its off-putting title, Matthew McLachlan’s This G*d Damn House delivers two hours of satisfying theater that touches on loneliness, mental illness, homelessness, and more. Directed by Ella Jane New, this show is for gutsy theatergoers who like their drama to smack of real-life situations and push the theatrical envelope.
Sachi Parker is Angie, and Kirk Gostkowski is her son Jacob, in the Chain Theatre’s production of This G*d Damn House, directed by Ella Jane New. Photographs by David Zayas, Jr.
The play focuses on divorcée Angie (Sachi Parker), a Central Florida middle-school art teacher in her late 50s. Angie gets a 24-hour eviction notice from the bank, supposedly without warning. Her 12-year marriage fell apart many years earlier, after her husband came out as gay, and now she is alone. Angie’s two sons dutifully arrive at their childhood home to help her pack up. There’s the well-put-together Danny (Gabriel Rysdahl), a New York playwright in his late 20s, who arrives jet-lagged, and the likable Jacob (Kirk Gostkowski) and his wife, Ally, both in their early 30s. Jacob is a former actor who gave up his acting career when he married Ally (Christina Perry), a former dancer. He now works as a wedding photographer with Ally, as they prepare for their firstborn.
The action takes place on David Henderson’s purposefully cluttered set, a massive conglomeration of furniture and household items gone to seed. Add Michael Abrams’s flat lighting, and one arguably gets a glimpse of the Fourth Circle of Hell (it’s reserved for hoarders!) from Dante’s Inferno.
“Once the action grows darker and angrier, Angie turns from a mild-mannered matron to a woman on the attack.”
When Danny and Jacob first enter their mother’s home, they are aghast not only by the heaps of putrefying trash in the rooms but by the smell of cat pee. Jacob attempts to remedy the foul odor by masking it with some of the aerosol sprays that he found in a nearby cabinet. It’s a toss-up between Hawaiian Breeze and Warm Apple Crumble. They agree on the latter, even though Danny regretfully sighs: “It’s gonna ruin apple pie for me, but better than nothing, right?”
McLachlan plumbs the depths of this dysfunctional family, exploring past ordeals, aspirations, the siblings’ relationship with each other, and with their mother. Over the course of the show the playwright invites the audience to open themselves up to what is unbearable in human existence and what, at the same time, is sublime.
Things ratchet up dramatically whenever Angie (Sachi Parker) is on stage. When she first sees her sons in her living room, she warmly embraces both of them. But in the very next beat, she is caught in her self-defeating pattern of shirking responsibility: the eviction is the bank’s fault, not hers. Or, as she lamely puts it: “This all happened out of nowhere. I don’t want you both to blame me for this happening when I didn’t do anything wrong!”
Rysdahl, as the New York playwright Danny, is summoned to Florida when his mother learns she has 24 hours to vacate her home.
Once the action grows darker and angrier, Angie turns from a mild-mannered matron to a woman on the attack. In fact, in the play’s most dramatic scene, she vents her long-buried ill feelings toward Ally, blaming her for her son’s giving up acting: “You bullied him out of acting and he was too chickenshit to tell you otherwise. Oh, I’m sure he convinced you he wanted to give up his dream to become a wedding photographer, but that just shows you how talented he really is.”
When it comes to the performers, there are no weak links. Gostkowski portrays the older brother Jacob with the good-naturedness of a spaniel. Rysdahl gives Danny noticeably less patience than his brother Jacob: Danny doesn’t try to make excuses for his mother. As Angie, Sachi Parker is part termagant, part Machiavel, and altogether a flawed mother. As Danny points out to Hannah, Angie is forever “rewriting family history to cast herself in a more favorable light.”
Christina Perry has the unenviable role of playing Jacob’s pregnant wife and Angie’s daughter-in-law, Ally. Although she only appears in Act II, her verbal showdown with Angie is one of the play’s peak moments.
Rica de Ocampo’s as Angie’s teaching assistant Hannah is significantly the only “outsider” in this dysfunctional family drama. Beyond her outsider status, however, Hannah is the only person in the play who speaks of Angie’s better angel. She confides to Danny that “your mom always gave me a safe place to go and was always really kind to me. I really don’t know where I’d be without her.”
Whereas McLachlan’s drama might not scorch the stage with the same blazing intensity as a sibling drama like Suzan Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog, he still heats up the boards plenty and creates a tragic and sincere portrait of an American family in crisis.
The Chain Theatre production of This G*d Damn House runs at The Chain Theatre (312 W. 36th St.) through April 8. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit chaintheatre.org.
