BWW Review: HOUSE Walks Through the Pain of One Man's Experience

Now playing at Hyde Park Theatre, HOUSE written by modern playwright Daniel Macivor, stars Austin's own artistic titan Ken Webster as the volatile and witty main man, Victor. HOUSE is a one-man show, running 65 minutes and is a pressure cooker for any performer. However, this production of HOUSE is a 1998 revival of Hyde Park Theatre's original production, also starring Ken Webster in what must have been a humbling experience, due to the roller coaster of emotions the protagonist of this story endures each night. From the top, he is grappling with apparent signs of paranoid schizophrenia as he delivers a long soliloquy about his past, present and future. Consistently returning to a therapy group with fellow struggling individuals, his stories of life jump from timeline to timeline, sketching more of the overall picture that has Victor so angrily and mentally destroyed. Between tales of his kinky wife and manic episodes - including one lively event at a grocery store, Victor represents the average person's fits of rage, passion and sporadic cheer. Dragging the audience through his fantasies of envy, antagonism and sometimes hope, Victor is a character in life people would most likely avoid but can't help but find fascinating. A car crash you won't look away from as you feel lucky that you were not collateral damage in the head-on collision.