The stage is blushed pink and dimpled with teddy bears and scattered dollies - a classic suburban playroom, a little girl's dream. An ominous black and white screen hanging on the back wall of the stage bursts the bubblegum sweetness of the room. The jarring juxtaposition, contrasting saccharine-sweet facades with bitter innards, sets the tone for Greg Moss' GS "House of Gold."
Last Friday's premiere performance was part of the Brown Literary Arts New Plays Festival. With searing dialogue and audacious visuals, "House of Gold" is a testament to Moss's unabashed talent and bold originality.
"House of Gold" spins a wild and piercing tale resembling a fictional postscript of the JonBenet Ramsey scandal. Taking a salacious knife to the juicy tabloid tale, the play exposes the seedy underbelly of the household setting - rife with wanton sexuality and unrestrained and unsatisfied lust. All aspects of the play throb with suppressed sexual dreams and nightmares.
The characters vainly attempt to mask their illicit and poisonous desires but fail miserably in their attempts to squirrel away their poisonous fantasies.
The play takes on a sinister humor that evokes Vladimir Nabokov's disturbing but undeniably fascinating portrait of Humbert Humbert and Lolita. Driven by his sense of entitlement, the father of Moss' pseudo-JonBenet sees the cheeky and flirtatious daughter as a fleshy extension of himself. As the play spirals, wild snippets of their relationship play out. The two waltz eerily across the stage in matching pageant gowns to tinkering music.
The young girl's mother, a cold Nurse Ratchet-like figure, asserts a feigned self-confidence and matronly sex appeal while hiding her disappointment and self-hatred. This toxic mix fuels jealousy and resentment of her daughter.
She maintains a disturbed life as her husband's sexual partner and as an overwhelming mother. She literally wishes to subsume her daughter in a futile attempt to reclaim the youth the girl has stolen from her.
The characters in "House of Gold" find themselves unable to ward off the alluring power of the young girl's prepubescent purity. The pageant princess, however, does not wish to be a sultry siren.
Instead, she seeks only to abide by her parents' rules and live up to their expectations. Completely submissive to the wills and wishes of her parents, she becomes vulnerable to their manipulation. In doing so, however, she unknowingly falls into a licentious role as an ever-obedient sex symbol.
Moss' main character begins to second-guess her parents' ostensible truths when she meets Jasper. An aspiring boxer, this gangly, tube socks-clad adolescent models himself after Muhammad Ali. He intrigues the sheltered JonBenet figure with his awkward attempts at rhythmic vernacular and haughty handshakes. Despite his contempt for her family, Jasper, in the end, is no different from the rest. He is unable to resist the girl's pristine whiteness.
In one of the play's more cautious and subtle scenes, Jasper and the girl face an unsettling revelation. Despite their guises, the two characters must face reality.
Victims both of their own self-ignorance and of the expectations of others, Jasper and JonBenet continue to flounder around in futile attempts to find themselves and their sexuality.
As the play unravels, the plot's incestuous threads become entangled. Like the pulsating fantasies of JonBenet, the snarled scandal swells. Tensions run high and in the play's final scene, a Pandora's box of venomous terror explodes. In this horrifying and awesome montage of violence, abuse, sex and sodomy, bacchanalian dance and cultish chants fill the stage. Strikingly assertive and confident, JonBenet stands in the spotlight, testifying the crimes and wrongs against her, like a white dove of hope.
