A Symposium on the Modern Family

“Why are we like this?” the daughter screams several minutes into Will Eno’s play The Open House. The question sits between a pair of tense silences, the sort that are standard in that dramatic subgenre best known for fetishizing dysfunction: the family play. A nervy mother and a dastardly patriarch enact the chewed-up end of a long-suffering marriage; their grown children lunge at genuine connection; a neglected, ghostly uncle hovers on the periphery. If this seems like something you’ve seen before, it probably is.

But The Open House renders these tropes only to dismantle them. For Eno, to consider the family play is to consider the family itself, and to consider the family is to consider the body, wellspring of kin—birth parents, blood siblings, shared DNA. Family is not “what you make of it,” but rather what has made us already; our bodies are the case in point. In this sense, a house is the body a family shares, and when the lights come up on this one, everybody in Eno’s house seems painfully misplaced. The adult son and daughter slump like grade-schoolers. Mom and Dad glare in deep expectancy of death. Everyone is motionless for a long, silent opening, as if they had just been lightly anesthetized or were terrified of coming into any sort of contact with their kin. The moment passes. The pain begins.

Pain—both physical and emotional—comes on suddenly and constantly in this single-act play. Unprovoked, the uncle yells, “Ouch. Splinter,” though he has hardly moved for several minutes. “But, you know, old house, splintery banisters,” he concedes, all too familiar with the routine. “No one to blame but myself.” Later there are sudden leg cramps, an aching wrist, maddeningly dry cuticles. The daughter confesses that a mysterious bump has recently been found either on or near her spine. Her family reacts in a diffused, baffled way—as if asking to be soothed had long ago been banned and no one wants to call out her transgression. “It doesn’t sound that serious,” the father says. “I’m holding you,” the mother offers, withholding concern. When the daughter asks what her mother even means by that, the father explains that it’s something people say “without actually having to hold the person.”

As dialogue moves on to more pressing concerns, like car batteries and a lawn mower repair...