If you spend any time on social media, you may have seen a meme involving a photo or video of a dog (usually a large breed, like a pit bull or Rottweiler) and a caption saying something like, “My dog bit my boyfriend and I had to put him down. I’ll really miss him”—followed by a video of the person hauling out a people-size body bag.
A Dog’s House
Through 6/14: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, egodeaththeatrecollective.org or greenhousetheater.org, $27
The choice between our dogs and our romances is the plot device animating Micah Schraft’s 2015 play, A Dog’s House, now in a local premiere with Ego Death Theatre Collective under Carol Kelleher’s direction. But as T.S. Eliot observed, “Plot is the bone you throw the dog while you go in and rob the house.” The problems facing the two couples at the center of Schraft’s play may be ignited by a dog fight. But as this taut (if occasionally manipulative) 90-minute show makes clear, both couples left their psychic houses wide open for plunder through emotional neglect, failure to communicate, and plain old loss of passion.
As the play begins, Michael (Jack Hradecky) is standing in the living room of the home he shares with Eden (Kaitlyn Gorman). Michael’s T-shirt and hands are covered with blood, and he’s holding a small dog harness. Turns out that their Rottweiler, Jock, has just mauled the neighbors’ toy poodle to death. In a panic, Jack brought the mangled body of Phoenix home to hide it until they can figure out how to break the news to owners Nicole (Hattie Hodes) and Bill (James Lewis). From there, a series of lies and revelations build to a perhaps predictable but still grim conclusion.
Michael and Eden go along with the fiction that Phoenix has just run away, even taking flyers from Nicole to hang up around town. (The fact that Michael and Eden are new to the neighborhood adds to the tension.) But Eden also invites the couple over for a dinner party where it quickly becomes clear that she and Michael aren’t the only ones having a hard time in their relationship. Bill and Nicole are struggling to conceive a child, and Bill’s harsh (if honest) assessments of their marriage seem rooted at least in part in his disappointments about that situation. His need for control—he works at an immigration detention facility—spills over into a friendly offer to help train Jock, which also doesn’t go well.
If Bill is the alpha dog in his house, Eden seems to run command central in her relationship with Michael. Schraft’s script, in my view, runs a little close to stereotypes of ball-busting professional women in his imagining of Eden, but Gorman’s performance also shows the despair many women can feel at always being the permanent mom in their men’s lives. Hradecky as Michael also threads the needle between his desire to be seen as a good person and his habits of passive-aggressive avoidance that spark Eden’s frustration. (Nathan Stark’s clever set design incorporates wire walls surrounding Eden and Michael’s living room, suggesting that they’re in a cage every bit as much as Jock.)
The comic star here is Lewis, whose rough edges and painfully on-point observations wring a lot of mordant laughs out of the material. (At one point, he invokes the story of Helen Keller as an analogy for dog training, complete with an over-the-top impersonation of Patty Duke’s Keller from The Miracle Worker.)
It’s a discomfiting play, but under Kelleher’s hand, it’s mostly an absorbing experience, even if you can see what the inevitable outcome will be. And though I doubt this disclaimer is necessary: No actual dogs are harmed in this production, as no real pooches appear in this show. The real dog fight involves the humans.
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