The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage in Santa Monica is proud to present the Southern California Premiere of HOME, created by Geoff Sobelle. The show is a house party where the whole audience is invited. HOME will have six performances from March 4 through March 8, 2020 (press opening is March 5). HOME, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, who won a 2018 Bessie Award for Outstanding Production.
An enchanting visual and immersive spectacle that asks what it means to make a house a home, HOME starts with an empty stage. A house appears from nothing. It goes up fast, choreographed like time-lapse photography. Residents move in, move out, get evicted, burn it down, loot it, rent it, remodel it, get married and divorced in it, grow up in it, die in it, haunt it - and all the while, they live among traces of residents present, past, and future. They throw a party, as if everyone who ever lived there could cohabitate, transcending the logic of time and space.
HOME is a large-scale performance work that explores and explodes the relationship between "House" and "Home." A visual physical spectacle, HOME combines illusion, live music, home-spun engineering, movement and an inventive use of audience interaction to compose a work that asks: Where is home? If it is not a place, what is home? In the face of entropy, we struggle to build infrastructure, family, community, art. We fail, and we try again. My house is my home, but it was someone else's before that. We share spaces in ways we don't even see.
Sobelle said, "The story of HOME is the life cycle of a house. And the many dreams of home cast upon it."
Appearing to be an impromptu dance that defies time and space, HOME magically transforms our mundane everyday tasks into a glorious, intimate and profound celebration.
HOME's creative team includes Scenic Designer
Steven Dufala; Sound
brandon wolcott; Lights
Christopher Kuhl; Costumes
Karen Young; Illusion Consultant
Steve Cuiffo; Creative Consultant
Julian Crouch; Choreographer
David Neumann; and Dramaturgy Stefanie Sobelle. Noted singer-songwriter Elvis Perkins wrote and performs the original music.
Geoff Sobelle,
Sophie Bortolussi,
Justin Rose,
Jennifer Kidwell,
Ching Valdes-Aran and Elvis Perkins perform the work.
Jecca Barry and
Beth Morrison Projects produces the work.
Ben Brantley in The New York Times wrote, "
Geoff Sobelle knows where you dream. Even more unsettlingly, he knows that territory you inhabit on the edge of dreams - when you're suddenly half-awake in the middle of the night and aren't sure where you are ... I've ever seen this particular form of nocturnal disorientation summoned as evocatively - on a stage, in real (unreal) time - as it is in HOME, Mr. Sobelle's essential new performance piece."
Lily Janiak in the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "A small ensemble transform an empty stage into a furnished two-story home with electricity and running water, all in mere minutes. A home is never just walls and ceiling: it gives you dignity and humanity. It holds who you are. Such is Sobelle's expansive vision. You might leave HOME wishing he could cast his eyes over your own dwelling, to highlight the magic in your own coffee pot, in the glow of your TV, in the picture frames on your walls. But to attend HOME is also to remember how to see, on your own."
Don Aucoin wrote in the Boston Globe, "Sobelle crafted the ingenious, surprisingly entertaining HOME, a nearly wordless theater piece that speaks volumes about the conflicting emotions that surround those places where the stories of our lives take shape. HOME adds up to a wholly unique blend of concept, stagecraft, movement, music, and visual storytelling that gives fast-moving form to the ways, large and small, in which a house becomes a home. In the process, HOME captures the drama of everyday life - which, of course, seldom feels all that dramatic to us as we live it. HOME is a meditation on the relentless passage of time...a kinetic adventure in build-your-own-set and build-your-own-metaphor. Indeed, the show turns into an all-out party at the end, complete with an exuberant conga line, to which the audience is invited. An invitation to this HOME is very much worth saying yes to."
Tickets starting at $39 are available at
thebroadstage.org, by calling 310.434.3200, or visiting the box office at 1310 11thSt. Santa Monica CA 90401 beginning three hours prior to performance.
There will be a POP! event following the 2:00pm performance of HOME on March 7 for some homespun creative fun on The Broad Stage's plaza with activities inspired by HOME, which is also the seasonal theme of The Broad Stage.
