| Length / Year: | 75', 2012, European premiere |
|---|---|
| Created by: | Caden Manson, Jemma Nelson, Big Art Group |
| Direction and scenography: | Caden Manson |
| Assistant director: | Riccardo Fazi |
| Sound: | Jemma Nelson |
| Performers: | David Commander, Nicholas Gorham, Heather Litteer, Willie Mullins, Matthew Nasser, Edward Stresen-Reuter |
| Lighting design: | Hillery Makatura, “Family Portrait” 2022, Claudia Doring Baez |
| Production: | Big Art Group |
| with the support of: | King’s Fountain, NYSCA and Abrons Arts Center |
| Thank you to: | Dan Hansell, Ilaria Mancia, Barbara Pilsbury, Frances Nelson James Davison, Ben Pryor, Lester Manson, Diane White, Jay Wegman, Sarah Lawrence College Theatre Program |
Theatre
Caden Manson / Big Art Group - Broke House
Description
Broke House is Čechov's Three Sisters, The Maysles' Grey Gardens and Jack Smith spliced together into a speculative, real-time, misremembered visually and technologically stunning performance matrix.
On a skeletal set webbed with video cameras, a family of characters and their hangers-on try to recall their given roles as the foundations of their dreams collapse, expelling them into a desert of their futures. Part comedy, part ritual, part love spell. The performance explores a process of construction sharply interrupted by historical events and dissolved into the shapelessness of an aftermath. The 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 societal incoherence, economic upheaval, climate disaster, abandonment, forgetting, and strife – the raw materials and the players themselves become deformed into a new purposelessness and enter a transitional state of potentiality.
Like the pause loop in a video game, takes place in this marginal time. Like all of Big Art Group’s works, Broke House offers our meditation on the current states of America.