Margo Seibert, J. D. Mollison, and Mia Pak in Three Houses. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

“My heart broke and then the world broke and then my brain broke too, and I don’t know which one to blame,” sings Sadie (Mia Pak), alone in an unfamiliar house in New Mexico that she’s borrowed from her aunt at the height of the pandemic lockdown. With endless hours of solitude weighing down on her, she’s filling the terrifying time in an online sword and sorcery village that might or not be Minecraft (her avatar is a small animated pig, and her favorite companion a digital badger named Zippy), reconstructing her grandparents’ Ohio split level house block by virtual block. And as this activity starts to slip from distraction to compulsion, Sadie traces threads from her past that seem to explain the place in which she finds herself now.

We as a society are only just starting to grapple with the pandemic in art. (My day job is in book publishing, and there’s an awful lot of novels right now set in a perpetual but not acknowledged 2019.) And while there are certainly works that acknowledge the pandemic in the setting and the plot details–for example, in theater, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Plays from the Plague Year, which ticks day by day through the moments and absurdities and tragedies of that timespan as an act of collective remembrance–Dave Malloy’s chamber musical Three Houses is, I think, the first piece of art I’ve seen that takes the mental experience of peak pandemic as its theme: the isolation and separation and fear. Malloy–who wrote book, music, and lyrics, as well as the orchestrations–looks straight at the ways that we were separated from one another and went a little bit mad, at the fractures in ourselves that were pried open by the stress and terror of that moment: the way the world broke and then our brains broke. That looks, to use Malloy’s metaphor, at the wolves prowling around the edges of all of our psyches. “This is the story,” three different people say, “of how I went a little bit crazy living alone during the pandemic.”

As the title implies, Three Houses tells three stories of people who each found themselves alone in a new home at the height of lockdown. Each has just broken up with a long-term partner, each is either unemployed or does the kind of work that was being done from home in those months, and therefore each is surrounded by solitude in a way completely new to them. In addition to Sadie (Mia Pak), who’s just split from her longtime girlfriend, Jasmine, there’s Susan (Margo Seibert), recently separated from her husband, who winds up at her deceased grandmother’s empty farmhouse in Latvia, and Beckett (J. D. Mollison), newly divorced, who let his ex-wife have all the furniture and is in a nearly bare basement apartment in Brooklyn. Where Sadie has as her only companion Zippy the badger (represented by a puppet operated and voiced by Mollison), Susan has Pookie, a dragon figurine collected by her grandmother (puppet voiced by Pak), and Beckett has Shelob, a marionette spider taking over his apartment (voiced by Seibert). They all battle substance abuse, or at least the temptation to overindulge because substances are more available than companionship. And they all notice their worst latent mental tendencies—obsessiveness, depression and rage, agoraphobia—spiraling. 

The pandemic is the precipitating incident for these stories, and it might explain why these three people hit these three crises at exactly the same time, but there’s something more unsettlingly universal underneath it all too. Three Houses is specifically about that precise period of time, but it’s also about ghosts, and grief, and loss, and solitude; it’s about family patterns and addiction and coming to terms with the worst fissures in our own minds. It’s about how we make sense of past trauma and–to quote Joan Didion–tell ourselves stories in order to live. 

Because Three Houses itself isn’t set during the pandemic–the three people telling us how they went a little bit crazy have all emerged back into the world; they’re all at a bar telling these stories at an open mic night. As the three storytellers gather in this bar lifted out of time (designed by dots as part hipster-retro cocktail lounge, part Italian restaurant from the 1970s, with a kitschy painting on the barback that changes with the story being told), staffed by two formally attired waiters (Henry Stram and Ching Valdes-Aran) who may or may not be ghosts, the slightly sinister bartender/emcee (Scott Stangland) keeps urging them to “go deep.” They’ve gotten through, but they haven’t yet quite admitted the cost.

The stories follow the same template—they even start with the same musical intro. Each features an inward/downward spiral, and a journey into the teller’s past to look at the legacy of their grandparents: For Susan, a hermit grandmother and a grandfather who left his wife and baby daughter at the height of World II. For Sadie, gentle people whom she was afraid to disappoint. For Beckett, a stonemason grandfather and crystal-collecting grandmother, both with a mystical streak. And yet the individuality of the performances and the details in Malloy’s music (orchestrated with the utmost simplicity for piano, cello, violin, and French horn) gives each a unique texture. 

Seibert’s Susan is world-weary and a little arch, gently mocking herself and consciously trying to find the joy in her situation–possibly a little too much glee at the potential of the world ending. Part of her hungers for chaos, for becoming a superhuman survivor at the end of it all. (It’s telling that her “imaginary friend”/puppet companion addresses her as “Miss Susan”; there’s not a lot of intimacy there. Though Pookie is also the least developed of the puppet characters–their function builds throughout the piece–and Pak’s voice for Pookie can be hard to understand.) Pak’s Sadie is diligently trying to soldier through, to build a structure that will insulate her from digitally stalking her ex and to find a shape to contain her racing mind. But she feels judged even by Zippy. Where Susan and Sadie are genuinely isolated, Beckett is pushing away everyone who tries to hold on to him: his sister, his job, even his ex, seek contact, and he literally builds himself more walls, emotional and physical. Egged on by Shelob (Seibert gives her a jokey tone that only makes her creepier), Mollison shrinks physically and vocally, collapsing in on himself.  The songs are melancholy and introspective; they’re songs that feel like they’re being thought as much as sung.

With its tight ensemble of six actors and four musicians, on Signature Theatre’s smallest stage, Three Houses is unusually intimate. The actors frequently use the lip of the seating area as playing space, and the musicians, seated in the corners of the stage, are practically in the audience. (I’m not sure there’s a better setup, but if you’re sitting near one of the musicians, they will be the dominant note in the arrangements for you.) Director (and choreographer, though dance doesn’t play a huge role here) Annie Tippe makes sure that we the audience are caught directly in the gaze and the address of each of these storytellers. It touches nerves that are still a little bit too live, for me anyway; it’s not a comfortable show to watch, nor a comforting one, but it’s enormously compassionate and through that compassion, it builds a ritual in which we can all find a measure of grace. 

There are times when Three Houses forces its template or pattern onto these three stories in a way that feels a little forced: an underlying motif of “The Three Little Pigs” to me doesn’t add much, though it’s built through clever detail: Susan’s grandmother escapes the war on a hay cart; Sadie’s grandfather built wooden instruments and she’s a carpenter in her game-world; Beckett’s grandfather built stone clochans in Ireland and he’s living in a brick basement now. The wolf at the door works as a metaphor without the pigs, though (the show draws on another fairy-tale wolf as well, the one that eats Red Riding Hood’s grandmother), and to me that less narratively embedded metaphor feels even more powerful, especially given the complicated architecture of images Malloy builds in the show’s climactic moment. The piece’s genuine catharsis and power lie in its heartbreaking rawness, and its rougher edges intrigue me more than the braiding with another story. 

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that this is the first Dave Malloy musical I’ve seen. I’ve resisted out of a fear that they’d be gimmicky, a triumph of concept over content. And you could make that argument here; it is a little overdetermined, a little too set on its parallel structure, a little too self conscious in its metaphors. But it also taps into something deep and strange, a way of memorializing a place we were all forced to go, together and alone–and, possibly, the way we come back together to exorcize that experience. Its coda asks us both to feel tenderness for our demons, and to look forward, to whoever we will become next. It’s a lovely note of hope I want to believe, but it’s the darker, crazier moments of Three Houses that will stick with me.