Solange (Samie Spring Detzer, left) tries in vain to contact her sister Tessa (Allison Standley, right). Standing next to a haunted bed and breakfast really messes up your signal.
Solange (Samie Spring Detzer, left) tries in vain to contact her sister Tessa (Allison Standley, right). Standing next to a haunted bed and breakfast really messes up your signal. Chris Bennion

In my preview of Washington Ensemble Theatre's production of Susan Soon He Stanton's The Things Are Against Us at 12th Ave. Arts through May 16, I encouraged theatergoers to approach the show with an open mind. Things contains lots of surreal elements. In order to enjoy it, you have to try to catch the associative logic that transports you from scene to scene and from emotion to emotion, and maybe get spooked by some ghostly antics. Those coming for a linear narrative would leave disappointed.

But it turns out you'll probably leave a little disappointed no matter how well you prepare yourself.

Julia Welch's expressionist haunted house looms large over the show. Windows hang down from the lighting rig at odd angles, suggesting multiple points of entry into the world of the play. A line of old chairs replaces the standard black theater seats in the front row. With its nuanced touches and its appealingly creepy design, the set prepares the audience for a world of potential hijinks, horror, and poetry.

It's hard to keep track of all the moving pieces and relational shifts that occur throughout the play—characters turn into other characters without announcing it, characters seem related to each other in impossible ways, and then there's a haunted house but also a haunted bathtub inside the house?—but the core of the play involves the relationship between the two sisters.

In the first act, the sisters give each other relationship advice over the course of several communiques—Solange, the NYC hipster, uses her Blackberry to communicate; Tessa, the self-described spinster (despite the fact that she lives with and yet is also simultaneously trying to begin a relationship with a hunky lumberjack cliché named Caspar) writes letters. The fact that Solange's Blackberry texts show up as letters written on paper for Tessa is part of the play's quirky fun.

Shortly before intermission, the house asserts itself as being haunted and the play takes a left turn. *SPOILER ALERT* At the end, the house (or maybe a possessed bathtub that is inside the house?) turns one sister into a wet dress and the other into a pile of bones, both of whom complain about the air quality and talk about wanting to get laid.

Judging by the action and what happens to these women, you could read the play as a critique on gender expectations, maybe? The men in the show don't seem at all interested in the women, but the women throw themselves all over the men anyway. The haunted house punishes these women by scaring them and by talking to them in spooky ways, but it doesn't seem to be doing so because of their stated desires to find sex/love. It's just doing so because it's a creepy haunted house. The play doesn't seem to have much in the way of political ambition—it doesn't want to be an allegory or anything, I think it just wants to be weird and fun and surreal and scary.

But for surreal plays to work for me, there has to be a rule, no matter how loose, or a series of rules that I'm learning as I'm going along. In Things, the rules kept changing. Quick example: One of the characters in this play is the poet, Federico GarcĂ­a Lorca, who frames the world for the audience at the outset by introducing the characters. He then drops into the narrative and never returns to his initial task. His job in the play, aside from flirting with people and writing poems, seems only to be to remind you that the play engages with the surreal. I kept wanting something else to do with him, but I couldn't figure out what.

I felt similarly about Yusef, a Lebanese man who wears his dead grandfather's clothes but also maybe is that dead grandfather? No one else seems to have that relationship with clothing, so it's hard to say. At one point, Lorca alludes to the fact that Tessa is her own grandmother, Theresa, but this only happens briefly, and I think it only happens once?

The show seems glued together not by any kind of surrealist or associative logic, but by a string of abandoned narrative gestures, and the pleasures of Stanton's lyrical language and off-beat humor don't come often enough to dispel the confusion those gestures create.

Claus (the house) possesses Caspar (Robert Bergin, right) which makes him do creepy stuff to Solange (Samie Spring Detzer, center), who seems to have some kind of platonic affection for Bashir (Jeffrey Azevedo, left) who is sometimes called Yusef. That tub was the scene of an implied murder that involved Bashir/Yusef in a way thats never explained.
Claus (the house) possesses Caspar (Robert Bergin, right) which makes him do creepy stuff to Solange (Samie Spring Detzer, center), who seems to have some kind of platonic affection for Yusef (Jeffrey Azevedo, left) who is sometimes called Yusef. That tub was the scene of an implied murder that involved Bashir/Yusef in a way that's never explained. Chris Bennion

Stanton's wild imagination and her embrace of experimental forms make you want to read/see more of her work, but this play, which was initially written in 48 hours for a class assignment before WET workshopped it for a year, could have used some more time.