Yael Rasooly: The House by the Lake

Three Little Sisters: Observations on The House by the Lake

An Essay by Scott T. Cummings

“Where is Mother?” The question becomes more insistent each time it is asked in Yael Rasooly’s The House by the Lake. Written and directed by Rasooly and Yaara Goldring, the piece tells a story we know all too well: Three little girls have been taken by their mother to the family’s house by the lake “in a faraway land in Central Europe” and told to never ever open the door until she returns for them. But when the threatening knock at the door eventually comes, it has the weight of the Holocaust behind it. And for two of the girls, at least, there is nothing to be done.

The third, played by Rasooly herself, starts the performance with a framing conceit. She is a cabaret singer, it seems, who has come to look back and sing “a sweet tale of three sisters” with once-upon-a-time overtones. Her song summarizes much of the action to come and then introduces the three little girls in question—one short, one tall, one in between—played by adult women with ribbons in their hair, wearing plain white blouses and skirts that appear more like bloomers. These are the precocious Schmittendorf sisters, Helga (Edna Blilious), Gretchen (Gili Beit Halahmi), and Christiana (Rasooly), who have been hidden away by their mother until some unnamed danger passes. 

Their hideaway takes the form of a simple raised plank floor set up on the larger, otherwise empty proscenium stage of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s Edlis Neeson Theater. The platform has a door and, at one point, the suggestion of a window but no walls or furnishings except for three small wooden chairs suitable for children. And there are three large dolls, one for each sister, antique, expressionless, in bright red dresses with lace collars much like the girls themselves might wear. These dolls are big enough to sit on the lap like a small child, and over the course of the 65-minute performance, they will be manipulated and transformed in ways that reflect the girls’ increasingly desperate efforts to maintain their innocent daily routines in the face of the mounting threat closing in around them.  

Those routines involve the lessons designed to turn them into well-educated, culturally refined young ladies. They practice ballet. They practice German, French, and English. They practice good table manners. And crucially, given the importance of music to the piece, they practice Schubert as a classical trio, with Helga playing the cello, Gretchen the violin, and Christiana the piano. The circular repetition of these various routines, periodically punctuated by the sound of a bell, signals both the passage of time and the debilitating effects of their prolonged confinement. 

So, too, does the trajectory through the piece of the dolls designed by Maayan Resnick. They begin very much as the dolls they are, sitting on the girls’ laps as playthings; they become puppets when the girls manipulate their plastic arms to pantomime the playing of their instruments. But soon the dolls are being disassembled in different ways to create clever and amusing effects. When the sisters squabble, the dolls’ heads are pulled off and tossed about. At other times, the dolls’ dresses are detached and fastened around the actors’ necks, transforming them into humanettes, dancing figures with tiny doll bodies and legs and life-sized human heads. 

Gradually, reality becomes distorted and fantasy takes over at moments. At one point, strings and frets and keys are attached to their bodies, and the actors become, so to speak, the instruments they are playing. In another sequence, they imagine a gentleman prince who will arrive to rescue them, and when he does, he takes the form of a top hat, a waistcoat, gloves, and black boots animated by the three performers to give him the hollow shape of a man. He brings a cage with an unseen songbird inside, first made real by its chirping and then by the flapping of its wings when it escapes through the window. In one of the piece’s more memorable sequences, the girls’ longed-for mother manifests before them as a ghostly puppet of billowing folded fabric that embraces them and dances about for a moment and then disappears suddenly and instantly into the floor. 

There is something going on here with the pull-apart dolls and the other objects in play that suggests a process of disembodiment or an almost literal objectification of the girls. The evocative lighting design by Asi Gotesman, the repeated motifs of Nadav Wiesel’s music, and especially the complex and haunting sound design of Binya Reches convey the evermore ominous threat closing in from outside. But on the inside, the various physical object transformations, as imaginative and even delightful as they are, do not coalesce to generate the nightmare that the piece wishes to capture. They remain a series of theatrical ideas that yield again and again to the primacy of the actors’ bodies. 

Yael Rasooly first created The House by the Lake in 2010 with a team of collaborators at HaZIra Performance Art Arena, a producer and incubator of interdisciplinary new work in Jerusalem. Since then, the show has become emblematic of Rasooly’s unusual blend of storytelling, cabaret singing, design, and puppet theater. While seen widely in Europe, the show’s appearance in Chicago marked its long-awaited US premiere. At the 2025 festival, Rasooly also performed her one-woman show about Edith Piaf called Edith and Me, and she appeared at the Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium. On the panel, Rasooly made several general remarks about puppetry that resonated with The House by the Lake, including the following: “The puppet adds so many layers. For example, between reality and fantasy. Or the present moment and the memory of past trauma. I think this medium gives us the opportunity for complexity and nonlinear movements and being in pieces and then becoming whole and then breaking again. We can transcend the human body.”

The House by the Lake demonstrates this technique of disintegration and reintegration in fascinating and impressive ways, but it does not deliver the emotional gut punch that many expect of a Holocaust horror story.