Dave Malloy may be best known for adapting a sprawling 19th-century novel — a portion of War and Peace became Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 — but lately he’s the leading composer on the subject of hypermodern loneliness, especially the kind experienced online. In Octet , Malloy imagined a support group for people addicted to “the monster” that is the internet. There is a song about being canceled, an acid-tipped upbeat number about Candy Crush , and dark journeys of the soul into online dating and porn.
Malloy’s latest work, Three Houses , is more directly about the pandemic, but each of his three primary characters is grappling with a similar beast, those same feelings of intense ever-connectedness and emotional isolation — in this case compounded by the physical isolation of lockdown. Each character introduces their third of the musical with the same refrain, like cantors repeating a bit of liturgy: “During the pandemic, when the lockdown hit.” The second member of Malloy’s trio, the chipper Sadie (Mia Pak), responds to the pandemic in the way that a character from Octet might: by constructing an elaborate recreation of her grandmother’s house inside a video game.
(The obvious inspiration is the early-2020 obsession with Animal Crossing , though there are also elements of Stardew Valley and The Sims. ) The game provides a level of comfort and systemization the outside world simply does not allow, even as it also further alienates Sadie f.
