Rehearsals begin today for House of Gold, a macabre comic fantasy inspired by the bizarre life and mysterious death of the famous child beauty queen and tabloid phenomenon, JonBenét Ramsey. Yikes! This is incendiary subject matter, to be sure—a play that gets my blood flowing with both wild expectation and pure terror.
Wild expectation for many reasons: playwright Gregory S. Moss is a precociously talented newcomer with bold ideas, an idiosyncratic sense of language, and an intuitive sense for both drama and comedy. He will be paired at Woolly with one of the most brilliant directors to emerge in recent seasons, Sarah Benson, Artistic Director of New York’s downtown hotbed of theatrical invention, Soho Rep. (Sunday night I saw another new Greg Moss play directed by Sarah Benson—Orange, Hat & Grace-—and found it absolutely riveting. For the full immersion in this powerhouse collaboration, you can catch it until October 15 at Soho Rep.) We have an amazing cast for House of Gold, including Mitchell Hebért, Michael Russotto, and Emily Townley. And the subject matter is fascinating, inspired by one of the most notorious unsolved murders of our time.
Pure terror? Well, once in a while a new play comes along that I feel Woolly absolutely must produce because it carves out a genuinely original path we haven’t imagined before. Stunning by David Adjmi was one of those plays—about a Syrian Jewish girl who falls in love with her African American housekeeper. Maria/Stuart by Jason Grote was one of those plays—about a German-spewing ghost who inhabits the bodies of her children and grandchildren to get them to see the truth about their lives. House of Gold is such a play. Like the others, it pushes against boundaries of both subject matter and aesthetics, revolving around protagonists we haven’t seen on the stage before, immersing them in dangerous situations that are sometimes squirm-inducing to watch, and exploring new language and structures to tell their stories. The pure terror comes from a couple of questions that such plays always pose for me: Will it work? And what will it unleash in our audience?
House of Gold unfolds like a strange nightmare with a logic of its own, though the basic outline is fairly simple. The ghost of six-year old JonBenét Ramsey returns to her earthly home and re-lives scenes remembered or refracted from her doomed life. She is not investigating her murder, so any expectations of a whodunit should be set aside. Instead she is puzzling over the larger question of how adults and children saw her, what expectations they placed on her as a beautiful young girl, and whether her brief life was ultimately worth living. At the center of the story lies an unlikely romance between JonBenét and a fat boy from her neighborhood who seems to be her opposite in every way. Their childhood attraction is the bright spot in a suburban landscape that presents itself as a minefield of inappropriate psychological projection. Underneath it all lies a desperate longing for love and safety.
Sounds like America, right? I can’t wait to see how all the elements of House of Gold come together, but I can promise you there will be much to talk about. And if the past is any guide, Woolly’s audience will rise to the challenge. (I’ve often said I’d love to shock our audience but it seems to be impossible!) Playwright Greg Moss never tells us exactly what to think. He juxtaposes achingly poetic language, vaudevillian comedy, and disturbing behavior to examine the underpinnings of suburban America’s culture and values. Often taking the form of a funhouse ghost ride, the House of Gold begins previews the day after Halloween—so you can think of it as Woolly’s contribution to the season of ghouls and goblins, with a little extra prick to your subconscious.
~Howard Shalwitz, Artistic Director
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I saw the play this past Saturday and I still cannot get it out of my mind. I think it speaks volumes about childhood innocence and how it becomes tainted with prurient and selfish longings of every adult a child encounters. It is no wonder why we are all screwed-up in some way. I think it speaks on the void of competent parenting and the responsibility we all have as a society.
What I found utterly remarkable however, is how the play accidentally tripped over prejudice in the most benign way in which we think. The Black actress was “out of place” in the way we think about things. I liked that because it was incongruent and it allowed us to confront our subconscious mind on how things are suppose to be neat, orderly, and similar. If anybody was “troubled” by this, then this was a revelation to how our minds work.
A great shake-up!