“All the world’s a stage,
-Some guy
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…”
We’re doing a show in houses. It’s a show about life, family, home, dying, and all the other things. It’s not about blond hair or sparkles, except when it occasionally is. The entire house is the stage. It starts when we enter the house. The dance is about the people in it, and made by the people in it. It feels incredibly circular and sometimes I wish we’d just written a monologue and called it good. I’m terrified of doing a show in a house. I’m terrified of how unshowlike it is, how blurry the lines between performance and life. I’m terrified that it will seem too much like life, and too much like performance when I want something right smack in the middle.
But the piece calls out for the comforts of a home. For the objects, sight lines, smells of a home. Watching Monica in her grandfather’s house was different from watching Monica in a studio or theater. The content of the piece asks for it. Why build a fake home when we could invade someone’s home, have their memories laced with ours? Where are we from if the places where we grew up used to belong to someone else? Why not ask the audience for support and complicity throughout the piece, just like we do of family? We’ve learned an incredible amount about families, and homes, fitting in, supporting, history. And these house shows feel more like another step in the research than they feel like a big present wrapped with a bow, which is how I normally like it. Come see these experiments. We have two public performances–March 28 and 29–with very limited seating. Come to the show. Rub shoulders with us, hold our hands, tell us about your grandparents. Move and speak with us. We’re learning a lot and want to share with you. And we want to hear your stories and see your family vacation pictures.