On Thanksgiving in the early 1980s, Marty Pascal returns to his family's home in McLean, Virginia, to visit his mother, younger brother Anthony, and twin sister Jackie-O, who adopted her name as a result of her obsession with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Marty has brought with him his new fiancé Lesly, shocking the family with the revelation that he is engaged. The news destabilizes Jackie-O, who has recently been released from a psychiatric hospital. As the play progresses, it transpires that Marty and Jackie-O are involved in an incestuous relationship; their father left the family the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination, and as teenagers Jackie-O and Marty would re-enact the assassination as a form of ritualistic foreplay. The play concludes with Marty and Jackie-O again re-enacting the assassination, though Jackie-O intentionally uses a gun loaded with real bullets instead of the previously used blank cartridges, killing Marty.
Development
MacLeod has stated that The House of Yes is about "people that have never been said no to," and that she wished to depict the "insularity I see in the upper classes, people who have cut themselves off from the rest of the world and are living by the rules they've invented." The play was inspired by a house MacLeod saw in a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C., while its title came from a piece of bathroom graffiti seen by MacLeod that read "we are living in a house of yes." The subtitle of "A Suburban Jacobean Play" was inspired by the Jacobean drama'Tis Pity She's a Whore, which similarly focuses on an incestuous relationship between a brother and sister.
The House of Yes received mixed to positive reviews from critics. Reviewing the 1990 Los Angeles production for The Los Angeles Times, critic Sylvie Drake called the play "funny, grotesque, impudent, a little chilling and streaked with satire," and favorably compared it to Death of a Buick and The House Across the Street. Drake qualified that the play was "tamer than expected, more struck with lunacy than danger," and that it was a "very San Francisco play, characterized by a healthy noncommerciality that may have a hard time surviving in the hothouse Hollywood jungle." In his review of the 1995 off-Broadway production of The House of Yes for The New York Times, Ben Brantley called the play "pretty familiar stuff, although deftly executed," noting that the plot is "so predetermined that it lacks urgency and menace."
