Long Wharf Theatre
The three women in the room — two sisters and a TV host — are wearing safety glasses. It’s time to start demolishing the house the sisters grew up in. The TV host, all smiles, hands one of the sisters a sledgehammer, so she can do the honors of striking the first blow. Time stops, and there’s a fight. Time starts again, and the sister swings the hammer and puts a huge gash in the wall. That’s when something starts oozing out, like thick blood from a wound. Is that supposed to happen? No one knows.
In Dream Hou$e, sisters Patricia (Renata Eastlick) and Julia (Darilyn Castillo) are looking to sell their family’s home in the fictional Los Angeles neighborhood of Hilovilla, recently rechristened Highville, perhaps based on the real Highland Park, a rapidly gentrifying Latino neighborhood close to Pasadena. The house has been in the family for generations, but the sisters’ mother, who lived there, has recently passed away, and the heat of the real estate market suggests the sisters may be able to sell the house for a lot of money. To increase their chances of making a profit, they agree to sell the house through Flip It and List It, an HGTV-style real estate show, in which the house undergoes significant renovation before being put on the market. This puts the sisters in the hands of Tessa (Marianna McClellan), the TV show’s host, who appears to have genuinely taken an interest in the sisters’ story, but is also intent on making another episode of her show that revels in the sometimes history-erasing joys of home improvement and making a quick, large buck.
Things get complicated. As the show gets under way, the sisters’ history turns out to be neither as straightforward nor as heartwarming as it seems. Tensions arise first between the siblings. Patricia, who bore the physical and emotional weight of taking care of their mother in the final year of her life, just wants out of the house, and wants to make as much money as possible. Julia, who is expecting a child, begins to have misgivings about selling the house, and doing renovations that will render invisible the family’s past. These tensions are aggravated by the game-show-like challenges Tessa mounts for the sisters as contestants on her show. Through these challenges, Julia’s deep-felt connection to her past is questioned by the fact that she doesn’t know as much about it as she thinks she might, and Patricia is tested regarding just how much she’s willing to sell out. Meanwhile, the renovations prove more difficult than imagined; it turns out, there are secrets in the walls that make them bleed.
As the title of the play suggests, Dream Hou$e is best understood as a satirical fantasia, and the farther away from realism it gets, the better it works. The flashy trappings of the show projected on the house’s walls, and the house’s gradual transformation into a phantasmagoric version of itself, are ably abetted by some extremely effective work from scenic designer Stephanie Osin Cohen, lighting designer Jason Lynch, projection designer Mark Holthusen, and composer/sound designer Paul James Prendergast. Costume designer Haydee Zelideth likewise makes savvy choices in illustrating the characters’ own transformations, especially as they venture into more surreal territory.
Likewise, under the direction of Laurie Woolery, the actors adeptly handle the journeys their characters go on, especially as the weaknesses behind their initial facades are exposed. As Patricia, Renata Eastlick excels at projecting a brittle optimism that cracks into anger, and Darilyn Castillo maps her own character’s painful arc as we come to understand that her desire for liberation doesn’t have as solid a foundation as she wants it to have. Marianna McClellan’s Tessa is a fascinating mixture of relentless cheer and dark menace. An ensemble cast of Andrew Martinez, Moira O’Sullivan, Ezra Tozian, and Kevin Sisounthone, playing the production crew of Flip It and List It, have no lines, but function as a kind of Greek chorus through gesture alone.
In its invocations of gentrification, history, class, the shallowness of entertainment and profit making, and the ways that cultural identity and its signifiers can be a source of strength, a weapon, a crutch, and an illusion all at once, Dream Hou$e wrestles with several heady subjects all at once. It’s a lot to take on. On one hand, this means that, midway through the play, playwright Eliana Pipes is able to conjure up some gloriously surreal scenes in which everything seems to hang in the outcome of the conflict at hand, and we wonder at the same time whether any of it is actually happening. On the other hand, it makes the conclusion feel rushed. In the context of its own logic, Dream Hou$e unravels, seemingly wanting every possible ending and landing in a place that feels less ambiguous and more simply vague and unsure of itself. But then again, who has any answers, in the real world, in the forest of questions that grow around gentrification? Has any place gotten it right? And gotten it right for whom?
Dream Hou$e runs at Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Dr., through April 3. Visit the theater’s website for tickets and more information.