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Carol Rosegg ©2025  Jason Butler Harner and Sarah Paulson

Carol Rosegg ©2025  Sarah Paulson and Jason Butler Harner

What would you sell in order to be living the lifestyle you’d like to become accustomed to“ Your sex? Your marriage? Your soul? Your…children? This is the (somewhat) satirical premise of “The Gingerbread House” by Mark Schultz, ably directed by Evan Cabnet, and presented by the stageFARM as a visiting production to the Rattlestick Theater.

A couple sits on a couch, watching a sitcom. Brian (Jason Butler Harner, by turns effortlessly spineless, creepily manipulative and resembling a young Christopher Walken) turns to his wife, Stacey (the estimable Sarah Paulson) and says casually, “I think we should sell the kids.” His reasons? One is a failure; one is slow. Stacy was prettier before she had the children. Their sex life resembles “two corpses fucking.” Brian hates the children for creating the distance between what their lives should have been, and the reality they are living in. Their lives would simply be so much better without them. Brian delivers all this in a funny, light-hearted way, underscoring the seriousness of what he suggests. Initially repelled, and then admitting she sometimes resents the children while qualifying her feelings by saying “That is not hate,” Stacey warms to the idea. When Marco, a colleague of Brian’s, shows up for the soft-sell (Bobby Cannavale, at his charming, snake-like best) he convinces Stacey (not Brian, whose absent conscience needs no convincing) that the children will be given, for whatever sum of money she decides on, to a rich couple in Albania, where for them life will be a permanent holiday. “Like Camp,” Marco says, and he has the color brochure to prove it. Stacey signs. All’s well that ends well. Except…

In the travel agency where Stacey works, she tells a prospective client, Fran (Jackie Hoffman, hilarious) that she has sold her children, and is met with little response. This theme, of monstrous self-absorption, is echoed throughout the play: Fran wants her vacation, her colleague Colin (the adorable Ben Rappaport) wants to screw her, her husband wants to better his golf game. By default, Stacey becomes the moral center of the play.
What Marco wants is more from Brian, mainly, his sex. In exchange for this, Brian and Stacey move to a deluxe apartment, “Almost the penthouse,” Brian says, as he gets the promotion, the Sub-Zero fridge and joins an exclusive club. But Stacey has been having nightmares about what is happening to her children, and, eventually, as her conscience re-appears, wants them back.

Carol Rosegg ©2025  Jason Butler Harner, Sarah Paulson and Bobby Cannavale

It is here that Schultz’s play goes awry, or rather, bisects itself into two different styles: satire vs. realism. Images of Stacey’s children are projected onto scrims, and the voiceovers are initially soothing: the children are having fun, and are happy, it seems. But the images become violent, and both children describe in graphic detail what has been happening to them: freezing conditions, isolation, neglect, repeated rapes. The framework set up by Schultz can’t handle such a jarring shift, and the allusion to “Hansel and Gretel” on the television is not enough to tie the beginning of the play to the end. Perhaps it is too difficult to sustain satire with such subject matter as middle-class parents willingly selling their children; perhaps there is a drama in there somewhere about suffering, abandoned children; I don’t know. But right now, the two halves of “The Gingerbread House” do not make a whole.