Our House

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Barry Boehm’s Our House has its heart in the right place with a story of intolerance and its aftermath in a small Iowa town. However, Mark Finley’s production does a good deal to sabotage what is probably a much better play than now being see on stage at The Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at A.R.T./New York Theatres. Over the top acting does not help an overheated plot.

Billed as a “comedy in two acts” on its title page, it is not funny nor does it deal with comic material, though the direction tries to emphasize its bitchier moments. Its plot involves homophobia, gay bashing and racism which goes a long way to explain why The Other Side of Silence (TOSOS), the oldest and longest producing LGBTQ+ theater company, would be interested in staging it. However, half of the actors emote shamefully and the other three give too restrained performances to make much impression, both of which damage the credibility of the play.

Set in Iowa in 2014, Iowa was at the time one of onlysix states where same-sex marriage was legal. Andy, a professor at the State University of Iowa, and his husband Stanley, a nurse practitioner, are hosting the wedding of their nephew Brendan and his fiancé Eugene, a Black lawyer from Georgetown, at their home where Brendan grew up. Andy was formerly an AIDS activist for ACT UP in New York but when he met Stanley he was afraid of losing him and he moved back to his home town, eventually buying out his sister Paula from the family home which they had inherited and which needed a great deal of work since the days when his great-grandfather had built it.

Before Brendan and Eugene arrive, Andy is trying to explain to a police officer (who has taken 48 hours to respond to calls) about the homophobic incidents that he and Stanley have endured with teenagers on skateboards coming past the house and throwing locally grown black walnuts all over their back patio and into their hot tub. However, the officer is either dense or uneducated as he doesn’t seem to see a problem since no damage has been done or understand what their rainbow flag (which had to be taken down) represents.

When Stanley delivers the guests from the airport and Brendan’s mother Paula arrives from her community theater rehearsal, they all begin to party with drinks and pot. Then the vodka runs out and Brendan and Eugene offer to go to the local ABC store through the woods behind the house to buy some and they insist on walking rather than taking the car.  They are back too soon having been attacked by five young men who yelled racist insults, but while Brandon’s coat was torn, Eugene was able to get the broom they were using as a weapon away from them. And then the same dense policeman arrives to say that two young men have made charges that they were attacked by a young Black man with a weapon which Eugene is still holding and the police officer points his gun at him. This leads to Eugene being taken down to the station to give a statement with Stanley and Brendan following and Andy and Paula waiting up to see how this all plays out.

The play does little with the issues of racism or homophobia for that matter, though a generational gap is made quite clear between Andy born in 1964 and Brendan born in 1986. (Brendan has never heard of ACT UP or presumably the fight for gay rights.) The play doesn’t make much of the issue of same-sex marriage in 2012, a year before the Supreme Court decision making it the law of the land. And as New York, the District of Columbia and Iowa (where the characters have lived) had made it legal prior to this date, it seems a fallacious issue in the context of the plot. Neither does it make much of the fact that Eugene’s parents are not coming to the wedding – an example of reverse racism?  However, the most powerful scene in the play occurs in Act Two when Andy tells Paula what it was like growing up gay in Iowa and she tells him what it was like to bring up two children as a single mom.

As Andy, Christopher Borg is so over-the-top that he is not credible as a college professor. He rants, he weeps, he curses the policeman, he claws the earth like Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind,  all of which only make things worse. As written by Boehm, rather than pointing out the racism of the policeman pointing his gun at the only Black person on their patio, Andy cries out about this behavior “in our house” which sounds more like Lady Macbeth than an enraged householder. Nancy Slusser as his sister Paula and Brendan’s mother, the reigning queen of the local community theater scene, also emotes rather than acts but this can partially be explained as she is rehearsing Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virigina Woolf? and has always been a drama queen herself. As Brendan, CJ DiOrio is too swishy to have attracted Eugene, a sensible down-to-earth person. This is 2012 after all and not just the new freedoms brought about by Stonewall.

On the other hand, Tim Burke’s Stanley is so laid back that he seems to have no personality at all, just as Jalen Ford’s Eugene gives a flat performance as Brendan’s fiancé. He redeems his character in the next to last scene explaining to Brendan and family about the racism from policemen he has always had to deal with that they are completely unaware of because of their white privilege. (One does not think it needed to be stated out loud a decade ago but this is supposed to be a small town in Iowa, circa 2012, not a sophisticated metropolis.)  Jon Spano as the police officer who makes both visits to Andy and Stanley’s house is so wooden and stilted that he is more of a caricature than a believable authority figure.

The design elements are much more successful. Evan Frank has created a very attractive renovated back patio complete with furniture, drinks cabinet, vegetation and Christmas lights. The costumes by Ben Philipp beautifully define the characters from Eugene’s preppy look to Paula’s oversized flowery muumuu top.  David Castaneda’s lighting captures the look of dinner time to 5 AM in the morning, the time period of the play’s two acts. Morry Campbell’s sound design is most in evidence when cars arrive at Andy and Stanley’s house and firecrackers are set off by the local teens.

Barry Boehm’s Our House has a lot to say about racism and homophobia and tells it in an interesting story. Unfortunately, the inadequate production that surrounds it undermines both its message and its colorful characters. It is the sort of old-fashioned Ibsenite-Arthur Miller-type play that one hardly sees anymore and can be dynamite in the right hands. This production isn’t it.  From the ranting to the crying to the emoting, this play needs a stronger hand on the emotions.

Our House (through March 21, 2026)

The Other Side of Silence (TOSOS)

The Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at A.R.T./New York Theatres, 502 W. 53rd Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.tososnyc.org

Running time: two hours and 20 minutes including one intermission