Sacramento, California is the site of the next disastrous flood waiting to happen. Situated at the meeting point of California’s two major river systems, the city lies protected by an intricate tangle of levees that deteriorates more every year. This time, it won’t only be poor, black people who stand to lose everything—the affluent white suburbs of Sacramento will be the first to go under when the levees crumble and the floodgates of Folsom Dam smash open.
From Stu and Marlene’s floodplain living room, the aging couple scurries through their routines, unable to comprehend nature’s effect on their safe, bounded suburban sphere. As Stu staves off ruin by expounding about his “groundbreaking research into bird gestures,” Marlene extrapolates caffeinated flood solutions from newspaper headlines and becomes the neighborhood’s central processing unit for flood information, as if staying informed equaled staying afloat.
Take This House sets up the illusion of normalcy using the basic theatre conventions—this is just a regular play in a regular living room, set over a couple of irregular days—and then shakes that illusion, leaving the characters’ vulnerabilities exposed. Glimpses of Stu and Marlene’s private lives, unknown even to each other, are revealed through dream scenes. Time stretches and snaps in a game of cards. Then the world slips back to normal as if nothing had ever happened. Suburban hegemony descends once again.
When disaster finally unleashes, audiences find themselves asking, “What was the problem here?” Could Stu and Marlene have saved themselves? Or is the house of cards we’re living in much larger than we’d like to believe?
Photo by Anora Winter Johnson
Photo by Anora Winter Johnson
Photo by Anora Winter Johnson
