The chaos lurking beneath the “perfect” family holiday
[Left to right: Dina Thomas, Naomi Jacobson, Will Conard, Dani Stoller, John Lescault, Jonathan Feuer in Rules for Living at Round House Theatre. Credit: Margot Schulman.]
A review of Rules for Living at Bethesda’s Round House Theatre
By Norah Vawter
Just in time for the holidays, Round House Theatre presents the U.S. premiere of Sam Holcroft’s Rules for Living, which runs through January 4 and features a dysfunctional family coming together and trying (far too hard) to have the perfect Christmas dinner. The tone ranges wildly. It’s often hilarious—and I’m talking laugh-out-loud, double-over in your seat funny. But this play is far from a straight comedy. There’s a murky undertone throughout, with tension and secrets and resentments lurking beneath the surface. I suppose we could call it a dark comedy or a tragicomedy, but Rules for Living doesn’t fit neatly into one genre or another. It shifts from broad, zany farce, to small, intimate moments of human connection, to flashes of crisis and heartbreak.
Holcroft is a British playwright, and the show originally ran at the National Theatre in London in 2015. However, this new production, directed by Round House’s artistic director Ryan Rilette, sets the action in an American suburb as a wealthy family gathers for the holidays. On stage we see the kitchen and living area of an upper-crust, waspy, suburban house. This is a home designed to impress guests. Not to make anyone who lives there feel comfortable or at home. Everything is meticulously clean to the point of being sterile. There is a spreadsheet for preparing Christmas dinner.
Matthew (Will Conard) has brought his actress girlfriend Carrie (Dani Stoller) home for the first time, but he worries that her natural flamboyance will be too much for his family and asks her to tone her behavior down. This backfires. Meanwhile his brother Adam (Jonathan Feuer) and his wife Nicole (Dina Thomas) are caught up in their own drama. Their daughter is upstairs “resting” for mysterious reasons. Is she sick? Or just avoiding her extended family? It certainly seems to be a family worth avoiding. We hear a lot about Matthew and Adam’s controlling, impossible-to-please, spreadsheet-wielding mother, Deborah (Naomi Jacobson) and domineering father (Francis) before either arrives on stage, and once present they bring more palpable tension. This gathering feels like a powder keg that could explode at any moment.
[Naomi Jacobson, Will Conard, and Dani Stoller in Rules for Living at Round House Theatre. Credit: Margot Schulman.]
Holcroft was inspired to find a new approach to the classic dinner party story by her experiences with cognitive behavioral therapy and wanted to find a new way to write a dinner party story. She’s said, “I wondered whether or not there could be a marriage between the sort of well-told stories of the families in a party farce that we're all quite familiar with, and whether or not I could deconstruct that in any way ... or explain that in any way through cognitive behavioral techniques... As an ambition for a play, could I bring together a family and assign each one of them a personality trait or rule, and an underlying core belief that they might be struggling with? And if they lived by that rule throughout the course of the drama very strictly, would they rub up against each other? Would they set each other off?”
The result is a strange play, but I don’t mean that as a criticism. I mean that the experience is genuinely surprising: from moment to moment, or scene to scene, you don’t know what to expect. It’s a complex, intriguing, sometimes frustrating, sometimes uneven but generally brilliant piece of theater. Because Rules for Living is a story about the mess lurking beneath the façade of perfection, perhaps it’s fitting that the play itself is messy.
[Left to right: Will Conard, Jonathan Feuer, Dani Stoller, John Lescault in Rules for Living at Round House Theatre. Credit: Margot Schulman.]
What keeps us grounded is the stellar cast and the excellent production quality all around. The costuming by Ivania Stack, props by AnnaMae Durham, and especially the scenic design by Jimmy Stubbs are impressive in their meticulous attention to detail. I felt like I was looking into a real house. This effect is amplified by the fact that Round House has a partially thrust, rounded stage, so the seats at the front of the theater wrap around the stage, giving audience members a different view depending on where they are sitting. The physical layout, along with the verisimilitude, lends a sense of voyeurism that adds to the tension as we watch the family interact.
The ensemble works well together—the script demands quite physical performances, and there is a fluidity among these actors, as if they are all part of an intricate dance. In certain moments, the dance gets wild, and much credit is due to choreography by Casey Kaleba, who manages to create a sense of chaos on stage that is of course tightly controlled.
It’s a talented cast all around with impressive range to be able to tackle the comedy, the physicality, and the drama. For me Jonathan Feuer and Dina Thomas were the standouts, moving between humor, grief, tenderness, and anger as Adam and Nicole, who are the truth-tellers of the family and at the center of the drama. Their lives are combusting—the mysterious reason for their daughter’s absence is revealed to be an anxiety disorder so overwhelming that she’s exhausted and unable to come downstairs. The child is putting pressure on herself to be a high achiever, to be perfect, telling herself that if she makes even one mistake, she's terrible. That’s no way to be a child. And we can imagine that this is the way Adam and Matthew may have felt growing up in this house.
[Dina Thomas and Jonathan Feuer in Rules for Living at Round House Theatre. Credit: Margot Schulman.]
Rules for Living is a careful balancing act. Holcroft uses comedy to ramp up the action and bring us to intense moments of violence, as well as epiphany and emotional breakthrough. If the play weren’t so funny so much of the time, those emotional breakthroughs would be melodramatic. But if the play stayed funny throughout—if the characters’ problems simmered under the surface without disrupting the rat-a-tat and status quo of Christmas dinner—we would miss out on the pathos, the empathy, and the chance to see radical change (for good or bad) on stage.
This is a play that can be harsh, caustic, and at times painful to watch. It’s also exciting, breathtaking, cathartic, and fascinatingly messy. Rules for Living might not be for everyone, particularly if you’re going through your own family drama right now. But there was a palpable feeling of electricity during the show. I left feeling energized, intellectually engaged, and newly alive.
Rules for Living runs through January 4, 2026 at The Round House Theatre, located at 4545 East-West Highway, Bethesda, MD 20814. Runtime is 2 hours 20 minutes, including one intermission.Tickets can be purchased by calling the box office at (240) 644-1100 or online.
Learn more about Round House Theatre’s upcoming productions and their wide range of educational programming on their website: https://roundhousetheatre.org.
DC Theater Arts interviewed
If you’d like to know more about the play, check out DC Theater Arts’ recent interview with director Ryan Rilette. You can also listen to a fascinating audio conversation with Sam Holcroft and the director of the original National Theatre production of Rules for Living, Marianne Elliot, recorded back in 2015.
