Arts Review

Housebreaking

Animated raccoons always look so cute. But if you bring a real one home and try to train it as a pet, you’ll quickly discover that raccoons are wild animals – cunning foragers and skilled predators. Such is the ill-conceived situation in which dispassionate thirtysomething Chad finds himself in Poison Apple Initiative’s world premiere production of Jakob Holder’s Housebreaking.

Staged in the Compound, a drafty, dingy, yet somewhat endearing house/recording studio a block from the Scoot Inn, Housebreaking is a slowly smoldering story that makes us wonder how we got to be who we are – and whether we can change that identity. Rather than bringing a furry animal home, Chad (Juston Street) drunkenly adopts a meek, scraggly homeless man named Carmine (Sam Mercer), bringing the hobo to stay with his fucked-up family: practically bipolar younger sister Magda (Elizabeth Bigger) and kindly old pop (Al Bianchi), who seems to have lost his mind grieving for his late wife. Condescending and impudent Chad gives everything he has to “old Uncle Carmine” – food, booze, and a shower, of course, but also his wallet, all his money, and eventually, as he dons Carmine’s smelly clothes and abandons Magda and Dad, Chad also gives away his home and family. Chad’s selfish experiment in homelessness, an attempt to “feel something,” turns into a two-year odyssey, and when he finally returns home, crawling in the window and scavenging for food like a “gang of raccoons,” he discovers that resourceful Carmine has taken his identity, too.

Holder’s brilliant, brutal script, which is more or less devoid of exposition, keeps us guessing as we discover the dark secrets behind the family’s fraught relationships. Under Bastion Carboni’s meticulous direction, the production isn’t stagy at all, though it could have been shorter. Housebreaking made me feel like a voyeur in someone else’s kitchen on a quiet night, enhanced by the real, slightly grungy working kitchen that serves as the performance space. The skilled ensemble has impeccable timing and realistic familial rapport, and all the actors gave knockout performances, but the most impressive were those of Street and Mercer. They showed remarkable range as they literally switched identities in the second act, with Street becoming a pathetic, sniveling beggar and Mercer a forceful, unforgiving head of the house who made his counterpart wish he’d never brought a wild animal home to stay. Housebreaking left me in stunned silence, simultaneously repulsed and fascinated as I questioned my own identity.

This article appears in December 16 • 2011.