‘Three Houses’ Review: Dave Malloy’s Post-Pandemic Musical Is Lonely to a Fault

Are we ready for the pandemic musical? Musicals, unlike straight plays, almost always inherently demand that we sit inside the internal experience of a singing character, as song elongates and amplifies each emotion it depicts. Not everyone will be ready to stare into the maw of our memories from four years ago. And if individual mileage for audiences reliving shared horror may vary, the more pressing question may be whether the pandemic musical is ready for us. To judge from Dave Malloy’s Three Houses, by far the most unflinching depiction of life in lockdown on a New York stage yet, the answer is: not quite.

It’s not that Malloy, the multi-hyphenate creator of works like Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812 (for which he received Tony Award nominations for book, score, and orchestrations) and the a cappella choral-theatrical Octet, is afraid to plunge rawly into the depths of isolation. Rather, Three Houses, in wading through its excesses of ideas and often free-associative images, suggests misleadingly that it has a particular point to make, even a moral to unfurl (after all, the show is loosely based on the fable of “The Three Little Pigs”). But the disparate pieces never bundle into something fully legible, and Malloy’s sinewy music drifts away too wispily to cohere: As drama, this is, perhaps, closest to a house of straw.

The show’s setting is a “whole open mic confessional thing,” a sort of quarantine speakeasy for the subset of storytellers who found themselves struggling with mental illness in the wake of a recent breakup and alone in a new home in spring 2020. Susan (Margo Seibert), a novelist, flees to her late grandparents’ house in Latvia after her divorce. Sadie (Mia Pak), newly separated from her girlfriend, takes cover in Taos, where she worms her way deeper into a Sims-like virtual reality world, building a digital version of a family home. And Beckett (J.D. Mollison), newly single and trapped in a Brooklyn studio apartment, burrows obsessively into the fear and paranoia of isolation until he can’t get out. The Wolf (Scott Stangland) is the looming proprietor of the establishment, both inviting each guest to tell their own story and threatening (figuratively, though the metaphor isn’t all that clear) to blow their houses down.

“My heart broke, and then the world broke, and then my brain broke too,” Sadie sings at one point, and that’s really Three Houses’s central conceit in a nutshell: three figures facing the triple fracture of love, liberty, and lucidity. Part of the stasis of Three Houses as it moves through each of its narratives is the creeping sense that Malloy hasn’t really created a trio of separate characters so much as split one experience into three pieces. Susan’s Latvian’s grandmother’s escape from the Nazis in a hay truck is taken directly from Malloy’s own family’s story, and he’s spoken openly about his struggles with video game addiction in interviews surrounding the 2019 production of Octet, a work centered on obsessive online behaviors.

With a dramatic arc that’s striving, certainly in its final moments, to create community through shared experience, Three Houses gets swallowed up by its own insularity. As we move from character to character, perspective to perspective, we’re really just seeing the same story refracted from the same point of view—with the same musical vocabulary too—again and again.

The greatest pleasures of Three Houses come, then, from Annie Tippe’s refined, detailed staging, making nimble use of a small playing space, and from the cast’s astute navigation of Malloy’s unexpected melodic contours (several cast members appeared in the pre-pandemic Octet, also at Signature). They collectively ensure that Three Houses remains a classy, well-coiffed affair throughout. Tippe’s assembled a design team that lends the storytelling emotional precision: The superb design collective dots supplies a moody set for the bar, at once eerie and cozy, with its comfy armchairs in each corner for the band’s four musicians. (Malloy’s eclectic instrumentation, including a french horn, is vivifying throughout.) The stark shifts in Christopher Bowser’s lighting design also contribute to the show’s structural clarity.

All of the cast (rounded out by Henry Stram and Ching Valdes-Aran as grandparent figures in each story) sing the craggy score with splendid care, but Seibert, a veteran at interpreting Malloy’s musical language, especially endows his melodies with a rich variety that’s lacking from the often-repetitive harmonic gestures. Veering boldly from lush soprano to a harsh, jazzy belt, she guides the audiences through Susan’s careening mental states. Seibert also relishes a turn in Beckett’s story as a spider that he names Shelob, in tribute to J.R.R. Tolkien. (Each segment features a different fantasy puppet, amusingly built by James Ortiz.)

In perhaps Three Houses’s darkest, most honest admission, Susan, deep in the tendrils of self-destructive impulses and tracking the rising death toll, sings, “I wanted the numbers to get higher…I fantasized about emerging from my house in the forest/Into an apocalyptic landscape/Fantasized about going crazy at the end of the world.” Moments later, however, she’s “filled with abounding joy, reveling in the absurdity of my situation/Alone in a birch tree forest in Latvia/while the world slowly crumbled apart.” Those are weird and wild and complicated musings, and some audience members are sure to relate with each character’s over-abundant, careening thoughts as the storytellers spend far too much time in their own heads.

But in aiming for gripping, moving theater, Three Houses ultimately overlooks its own message: that a little isolation goes a long way. Even for just the brief moments when the three storytellers join in taut three-part harmony for fleeting lines in the midst of one of their monologues, there’s a surge of energy, a musical reminder of the necessity of sharing our stories together.

Those moments sung starkly against the drone of a hurdy-gurdy, also highlight that Malloy’s music is most mesmeric in his choral vocal writing rather than in his solo melodies, which, especially when setting largely unrhymed, bulky soliloquies to music as he does here, tend to meander. In one effectively strange moment during Sadie’s story, Susan and Beckett take turns singing each syllable of the phrase, “Sometimes it feels like half of me is missing,” a potent use of the human voice, reminiscent of his choral inventiveness in Octet, to portray jagged loneliness.

Three Houses honors the tragedy of being alone on the edge of apocalypse. But Malloy clings closely to that solitude, forsaking the chance to respond to that most painful isolation with the salvific harmony promised by those too few moments of shared song.

Three Houses is now running at the Signature Theatre.