Description:
On a skeletal set webbed with video cameras, a family of characters and their hangers-on try to recall their given roles as, inevitably, the foundations of their dreams collapse, expelling them into the desert of their futures. Part comedy, part ritual, part love spell.
The Performance explores the process of construction, when that process becomes sharply interrupted by historical events, and dissolves into the shapelessness of an aftermath. Those processes that were “building” previous to the play’s beginning include a life, a family, architecture, or a system of beliefs, an economy of values, and the creation of the performance itself. But when events intervene— events like collapse, upheaval, disaster, abandonment, forgetting, fear, and strife— all the raw materials and the players themselves become deformed into a new formlessness, and enter a transitional state of potentiality. Like the pause loop in a video game, Broke House takes place in this marginal time zone.
Like all of Big Art Group’s works, Broke House offers our meditation on the current states of America, which we believe have been in flux for at least as long as our ensemble has been up and running. Beyond the symptoms of housing crises, credit crises, occupy movements, and extremist rhetoric, we suppose that the metaphorical heart of the country has been suffering, and perhaps has decided to rebuild the body that surrounds it.
European Premier: La Biennale di Venezia Teatro June 2022
US Premier: Abrons Arts Center January 2012
Video Documentation:
Citations (pdfs):
Broke House by the Big Art Group: Queer Transgressions on the Contemporary New York Stage
Performance Addict
Theatre Journal, Vol. 64, No. 4
Il Manifesto – Feature (Italian)
La Biennale di Venezia Teatro Reviews Packet
Credits:
Created by Caden Manson, Jemma Nelson, Big Art Group
Direction and Scenography by Caden Manson
Sound by Jemma Nelson
Lighting Design by Hillery Makatura
Video System Design by Caden Manson
Assistant Director Riccardo Fazi
Performed by:
David: Edward Stresen-Reuter
Manny: David Commander
RiRi: Heather Litteer
Olga: Willie Mullins
Jerry: Matthew Nasser
Jeri: Nicola Gorham
Broke House is produced by Big Art Group with support from King’s Fountain and NYSCA
Con il sostegno di Azienda Speciale Palaexpo – Mattatoio | Progetto Prender-si cura
Supported by James Davison, Desi Santiago, Ted Henigson, theARTcorps, Ryan Davis, Alan Cumming, joan Raspo, Drew Brody, William Lynn, Julie Tolentino, Hill Family, Ivan Gothner and Betsy Davison, Alyssa Fannick, Robert Litteer, Jen Parker-Starbuck, Sean Pierce and Lucy Pierce and Theo Kogan, paul gardner, John Issendorf, Grant Shaffer, Jill Emerson, Brian Bauman, Amy Sadao, Mambo Movers, Ryan Sorkin, Linsey Bostwick, Mikeah Ernest Jennings, Ilaria Mancia, Hillery Makatura, Justin Vivian Bond, Davis Freeman
