Theater has never been the most responsive of art forms.

Due to the prolonged gestation period between conception and stage, a piece that reacts to the moment won’t be seen in a production until years after that moment.

Which might be a reason Covid has made scant appearances on New York stages.

But Dave Malloy is here to rectify that.

Three Houses feels like a companion to his 2019 Octet, with ample creative-team overlap between the two. Thereby, his Signature Residency is becoming a unified project to musicalize the emotional and psychological existence of the modern human condition, all while contextualizing contemporary suffering in the lineages of past suffering.