Waitress Victimized in ‘House of Yes’

Things are not well in “The House of Yes.”

The setting is a wealthy suburb of Washington--around the corner from a Kennedy home--at Thanksgiving. Outside a hurricane blows. Inside, Leslie, a young Donut King waitress from the wrong side of the tracks, has been brought home to meet her fiance’s family. “It’s about how she’s victimized by this family,” said playwright Wendy MacLeod of the dark comedy (opening Tuesday at Las Palmas Theatre). “She starts out feeling beneath them and ends up discovering they lack a moral center.”

The characters include fraternal twins Jackie O. and Marty (Leslie’s fiance), their “aging cocktail hostess” mother and younger brother Anthony. “There’s no dad,” explains MacLeod, 31, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama. “He either disappeared or was killed the day Kennedy was shot. So the twins became confused in their minds: the loss of Kennedy/the loss of their father. They re-enact the assassination ritual as a form of foreplay--they’ve been sleeping with each other for years.”

No wonder MacLeod’s subtitle is “A Suburban Jacobean Tragedy.”

“It’s got madness, incest, gore, revenge, all the good stuff,” she said lightly. “Basically it’s about this strange, brilliant, insular, dangerous family, a class turned in on itself--literally intermingling. Leslie represents a breath of fresh air.” MacLeod hints at shades of real-life in her premise: “Sometimes when you’re growing up, you meet a family and want to know them better. But the farther you get inside, the more you go screaming back to your own.”

The New York writer also makes no bones about her long-term interest in Kennedy’s assassination.

“We had this Time-Life book, ‘Four Days in Dallas,’ and I sort of pored over it. After awhile, I started to confuse the book with what really happened. I also think we have this fascination with public violence, and a sexual attraction (to) Jackie and Jack. What happened in the country after the assassination--that loss of innocence--is like what happened to these characters. They were a normal upper-class family till the day the father left. Then everything went terribly wrong.”

In her case, everything about “The House of Yes’ (which arrives here via San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, where it played five months) has gone right .

Buoyed by the show’s success, MacLeod--who’s spending the year as a visiting professor at Kenyon College in Ohio--recently attended a reading of her “Things Being What They Are” at South Coast Rep and is prepping for the premiere of her other “house” play, “The My House Play” at New York’s WPA Theatre in January.

The title of this house play, she says, came from graffiti she saw in a New Haven bathroom. “It seemed the perfect title for a house of immorality. No one has ever said ‘No’ to these people.”