Show Response: Single Family Home

by ad canter

Single Family Home by William Sydney

I think Single Family Home is about the incapacity to communicate, how hard it is to reach anyone. I think Single Family Home is about the imprudence of constructing meaning in a self-involved, benighted culture—so no one gives a damn, and even if they did what good would it do—and that the labor of it (trying anything) is just entirely exhausting, and can make a man mad. I think Single Family Home is a play about being a boy then being a young man and coming to terms with a debased inheritance, which sounds a lot like being an American, so I suppose I think the play is about becoming a man in America, and trying to look at that in the mirror, and not meeting its eye.

I do not equivocate as some sort of false modesty but because I attended the show a month ago and do not remember meaningful details with alacrity or precision, which is no credit to me. Good artworks stay with you but must be met halfway; that’s the way with everything these days, it seems. Just as the character William Sydney is somewhat of the playwright William Sydney who is too somewhat of the person William Sydney we are in a slanted relation to our own lives and experiences: Partial, perhaps impartial, embarrassed, endlessly adjusting, constantly catching up, designed and unwittingly constructed. One of the two great strengths of Single Family Home is how the play toyed with the upsetting contradiction of self through liveness—the diegetic and the non-diegetic clarified at one moment and then again obscured, which is the theater—and how that discontinuity spells out the formal mechanism of our relationship to ourselves.

The other great strength is another formal one. The play is perfectly Greek: Trump is Zeus the father; the play is performed in recitation; there’s a Chorus above (err, behind; wait now before) the action; everyone is wearing a mask. The Chorus is just excellent, and the high point of the evening is when their many voices become one wall of sound. Reimagined, the Chorus does not exactly comment on the dramatic action but rather further contextualize this central character/person, William Sydney (the name is probably stated over one hundred times), who is the synecdoche for our shared experience. He is stated over and over because he is singular and he is one of us; it’s an efficient and successful marshaling of a dramatic and narrative symbol, and is the key to the show. Through him we face the void alone, but given that we are working through him we are in fact not alone we face the void together. So I think the play proposes how to be a man in benighted, debased America: Go to theater, experience art with others, face the void together.

Single Family Home ran March 26-April 5 2026 and was presented at JACK.

Featuring John-Philip Faienza, Scott Gunner, Dan Hasse, Nathaniel Jameson, Paul Ketchum, Jack Langberg, Jake Lewtan, Robert Malbrough, Nathan Rtishchev, Mike Steele, Sven Stenroos, and Walsh.

Lighting design by Jacqueline Scaletta.

All photos: Jimi Sweet