There’s new construction happening at Yale’s University Theater on York Street. This act of construction is as fascinating to watch as any episode of your favorite home-makeover program on reality TV, except this one is live, with no time lapse. You watch a two-story interior get established before your eyes — with some intriguing sleight-of-hand — and then inhabited by a very busy cast of seven, eventually joined by as many audience members and ancillary personnel as they manage to entice onstage.
The point of Home — running through June 22 — is to make us feel at home, while dramatizing both the thoughtless everydayness of that condition and its essential estrangement. How many of us only ever lived in one home? How many others have lived or will live in the places we call home? And if we are at home, for how long?
Creator Geoff Sobelle, with his co-creators Sophie Bortolussi, Jennifer Kidwell, Justin Rose, Ching Valdes-Aran, Elvis Perkins, and Josh Crouch, demonstrate the ephemerality of our nesting instinct, as well as that instinct’s ubiquity. From its origins in the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, the show has played in major U.S. cities, including New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and in England, Scotland, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia, before making its home at A&I.
The show begins simply. Sobelle comes onto a stage bare but for a portable lantern. From the wings he pulls in what looks like a frame for a bookcase, which we then realize is a three-part frame. He begins stapling plastic to it, sets it up as if it’s a window — and voila! we can make out a bedroom through the plastic.
The bedroom furniture comes forward and what follows is a dreamlike roundelay of persons inhabiting the room. Sobelle undresses — with a comic awareness that he’s about to strip for an audience — and gets into bed. Then we see what might be a sequence of those who have slept there, sometimes a young boy, an older woman, a couple. The quick displays ask us to infer relations and possible scenarios. The vocabulary of the piece is established. Without dialogue (or almost none) we witness how a domestic space becomes a set for the lives that pass through it. Most vocalizing is handled by Elvis Perkins, on zither or guitar, who tends to drone in a folksy way, occasionally coloring our grasp of the proceedings with musings on Moses or Noah.
The pacing, the instrumental music chosen to accompany the action, and the piece’s many wild mood swings are impressively well-integrated. And the group of seven who initially work on and share the house — Sobelle, Bortolussi, Rose, Valdes-Aran, Crouch, and Ayesha Jordan — make work seem fun and turn routines such as using the same bathroom simultaneously into comic choreography.
Much of what occurs is simply fun for the eyes — like a bit with a toilet plunger or a shower curtain or closets that disgorge any number of persons — but, as the show goes on, we become aware of how things are changing. A crib in a bedroom comes and goes; relationships shift and change; stuff breaks or falls off the wall; someone is upset, another is lonely; time goes on; the people come and go. The house is home to any number of persons doing what they do — laundry, cooking, coming and going.
Then comes the big party. The boy goes into the audience and brings up someone to play host. With lights strung from the bannisters and — with viewers’ aid — above the audience, more and more people drop by, each bearing a de rigueur bottle of wine. The entire cast, plus audience members, who integrate with the action to a surprisingly seamless degree, move through a variety of occasions: a birth, a birthday, a marriage, graduation … eventually there’s even a funeral.
The fluidity of the occasion, like the sprawling activities of the participants, defeats summary. Any event that can happen at home happens there. And, whoever’s home it is, everyone feels at home there.
If all the world’s a stage, all the world’s also home. Home’s staging is extremely playful, maintaining a certain quizzical sense of how people accommodate to whatever the situation requires. After all, as a species we may be best remembered for having made ourselves at home. As the partiers drift away, a few of the audience-actors onstage speak about their current or childhood homes. It’s a unique moment for the people in whichever locality the show is in to talk about living there. If you have a house near and dear to you, maybe you’ll want to get up there and share.
In the end, there are departures, as there must be. No matter how at home we may feel, we’ve got to be going. And the house, its plastic flapping as it awaits renovation, seems to beckon from the future and the past at once. This place was someone’s home. Maybe it will be again.
Home plays at the University Theatre, 222 York St., as part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, through June 22. Click here tickets and more information.