The Builders Association's HOUSE/DIVIDED Begins Performances 10/24

From OBIE Award-winning company The Builders Association and director Marianne Weems comes House / Divided, described as "a high-tech hymn to America’s dispossessed. Alternating between vignettes from John Steinbeck's Depression-era novel The Grapes of Wrath and stories of contemporary foreclosure and eviction, the work revolves around onstage remnants of an actual foreclosed home as it is inhabited, abandoned, repurposed, collateralized, securitized, and ultimately destroyed. On multiple screens and on stage, stirring personal testimonials contrast with a digital vision of our highly automated, mediated global market system, creating a distinctly 21st-century portrait of human struggle in the face of an uncertain financial future."

Brooklyn Academy Of Music (BAM) will present the New York premiere of House / Divided Wednesday-Saturday, October 24-27, as part of the 30th Next Wave Festival. All performances will take place at 7:30 P.M. at the BAM Harvey Theater. Running time is 1:20. Critics are welcome as of the first performance, which also serves as the official opening. Tickets start at $25 and can be purchased by visitingwww.bam.org or calling 718.636.4100.

On stage in House / Divided is a real artifact of the current upheaval: an actual foreclosed house from Columbus, Ohio, that has been dismantled and will be carried in pieces to the BAM Harvey Theater stage for the performances. In the production, the house is a tragic central character, inhabited and manipulated by the people and institutions that have surrounded it, from an owner and renter to a local realtor all the way to the trading desk at Goldman Sachs and the Swiss headquarters of reinsurance giant AIG.

Outside the house, on the road, the Joads carry on their eternal journey. Steinbeck’s beautiful prose, both stark and lyrical, is used in voiceover as a descriptive soundtrack as we step in and out of their story, illustrating their trials and struggles as they make their way slowly west.

While they build their world onstage, dreaming of “home,” the production ghosts forward to our complex and contemporary digital environment. House / Divided traces a line from kerosene lamps and makeshift roadside tents to the digital glow of screens under overpasses and in parked cars at Wal-Mart parking lots. The work finds us at our current crossroads: with a radically altering sense of home and stability, community and ownership and a retooling of the American Dream.

Under the direction of The Builders Association’s founding Artistic Director, Marianne Weems, the creative team includes Moe Angelos (Writer), James Gibbs (Co-Creator/Writer), John Cleater (Augmented Reality Designer; Scenic Designer with NeAl Wilkinson), Dan Dobson (Sound Designer, Composer), Austin Switser (Video Designer), Jennifer Tipton (Lighting Designer) and Laura Mroczkowski (Co-Lighting Designer). Together they create the Builders' signature style of epic, technological beauty, which The New York Times has said, “makes most other multimedia theater look as if it’s from the Stone Age.”

The House / Divided cast features Moe Angelos, Jess Barbagallo, Sean Donovan, Matthew Karges and LaToya Lewis.

Following the October 25 performance, BAM will offer a Post-Show Artist Talk with Marianne Weems and members of company, moderated by Richard Schechner. The event will take place in the theater and is free for same-day ticketholders.

The premiere of House / Divided is part of a banner year for The Builders Association, which began with the runaway success of the company’s Sontag: Reborn in The Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival in January. (The work will return, to New York Theatre Workshop, in summer 2013.) The Lincoln Center Festival presents the New York premiere of Émilie, directed by Weems (with several of her The Builders Association cohorts as design collaborators), July 19-22.

House / Divided marks a return to the BAM Next Wave Festival, following The Builders Association productions Continuous City (2008), Super Vision (2005) and Alladeen (2003).