Theatre and performance discourse (for better or for worse) privileges phenomenological and materialist engagement with the home, often considering the gendered aspects of it as a repository of personal or familiar memory. Women in/at home can easily reinforce essentialist notions of gender and gendered labor which tie women, their bodies, and the work to the homesite. However, feminist engagement with performances of the domestic and domesticity have pushed back with thoughtful inquiry into the liberatory rather than the all-encompassing, claustrophobically misogyny cultural logics and expectations. My thoughts on home have been shaped by the work of folks such as Dorothy Chansky, Jeanmarie Higgins, bell hooks, Aikko Busch, Nicole Greene, Jennifer Scott-Mobley among others. In this essay, I would like to offer a counternarrative to the binary renderings of home for stories on stage. I want to consider the staged home that is ever-changing rather than static, with porous walls where the intimately personal and the public/political can collapse into each other. 

Home is often characterized by its position in firmly dialectical or binary opposition. It is private, rather than public. Safe rather than dangerous. Permanent rather than transient. Personal rather than political, etc. I am curious about illuminating how this way of positioning can fail us as cultural producers and theatre-makers. In doing so, I would like to highlight this messy domestic as one that is generously productive in its collapse. Rather than rehearsing the static, private, safe, intimate home (or even the opposite), this is an invitation to look at theatrical domestic spaces that are in a state of becoming “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” 

If historically, consideration of the domestic in performance has been shaped by variations of the prompt; “How does this demand a feminist response?” then this brief essay looks at the stagings of homes that prompt additional critical queer, trans, or crip responses which frequently indict systems of power that oppress, exploit, or otherwise harm.

home demands a queer response (The Fever)

Inasmuch as home is a site of intimately personal growth and meaning-making, it is also one that is tied to the creation and sustenance of a public identity. While the home could be aligned with the personal and familiar, the home on stage is one that can be that and its opposite. Here, I’d like to briefly explore the possibilities for collective queering of imaginary homes which serves as a meditation on connection to a community.

In 2018, I encountered 500 Highwaymen’s work The Fever, at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington D.C. With audience members beginning in a seated circle onstage, it quickly became clear that The Fever was a performance that asked its audiences to make a home on stage. While The Fever does not demand a particular response from the audience, it does invite many. At many points, one could choose to be a spectator or, if willing, interpellated into the action via simple instructions or questions from the cast. 

A diegetic home narrated by 500 Highwaymen’s performers, The Fever begins with a party as a performer sets a scene inviting members of the audience to stand-in for different members of a community. There is the hostess who looks out of her home deeply suspicious of The Others, the first neighbor who is first to arrive, the guest who brings drinks, and the person who comes with nothing but wearing the same outfit as the host.

The Fever is marked by narration of a non-linear, non-coherent narrative featuring choreographed collaborative movement and to this day, I struggle to tell people what The Fever was; a single statement of dramatic action is impossible. However, for me and other audience members, the phenomenological experience of the performance had a profound resonance in the ways that it connected the individual with Other. The setting of the performance is imagined and shifting in almost dreamlike qualities, from a inside a home, to outside a home, to an unknown ether where audience members are asked to hold others’ bodies in regard and to be held accountable for the well-being of those around them. We move together, we hold each other up, we regard each other as instructed. As a whole, The Fever facilitates a kinesthetic, embodied grappling with what it means to be at home in our bodies and as part of a community. It is a piece of theatre that forces us like ethical philosophers to consider and reconsider “what we owe to each other.” While it at times operates in an unspecified space, it is worth noting that The Fever begins and ends at home, even if it is one that the audience is asked to imagine. The home is an unseen-scene contrasting with and ghosted by the many constructed living room sets that had previously been on that same stage. The home in The Fever is always already a house within a neighborhood. One that is important because of its position as a larger part of a whole. The home is a site of personal growth and accountability while simultaneously indicative of larger public movements. 

If the privileging of heteronormative kinship narratives in living room dramas and kitchen sink realism act as dialectical poison, performances that stage a sense of queer home is the antidote. In this consideration, The Fever is the porch of our home. It operates as a liminal space where personal and political can be navigated in public/private. The Fever, like a porch, offers us a semi-public space to see and be seen by our community, illuminating the increasingly less rigid and more porous boundaries between us and them.

Home demands a Black Feminist Response

In her work, bell hooks reduces the discursive distance between political and personal vis-à-vis the home offering that, for Black folks in the United States, it is “where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world” (78). Theatrical domestic space, I believe, is often uniquely positioned to collapse the personal and political. Theatre has a long history of issues being “brought home” by actually staging them in the home. One need look no further than the lynching dramas of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century for clear examples of this. Theatre historian, Korintha Mitchell argues that these lynching dramas, set (and sometimes read) in Black homes, were a means by which Black female playwrights could present countertestimonies to domestic terror and its images through staging Black interiority, humanity, and kinship (Mitchell 6). Furthermore, in staging the domestic, these plays also presented a claim to what was understood to be the rights of a citizen which presumably includes the ability to operate in one’s home safely, privately, and autonomously. I argue that domestic space is a site in which minoritarian subjects have historically and contemporarily staged the formation of biopolitical subjects. The home-on-stage, can be considered as a state-of-exception, simultaneously inside and outside of the purview of larger juridical processes. 

Lynching dramas are profoundly impactful because they run counter to domestic space narratives with their implicit understandings of an American Dream ™ home that is unviolated and free from terror. I believe that the presentation of home is often one that is simultaneously a personal and a political project; as audiences are asked to reconcile Angelina Weld Grimké's Black home with Lorraine Hansberry’s Black Chicago home with August Wilson’s Black Pittsburgh home, there exists radical and liberatory potential. 

the home demands a trans response

When I was younger, I learned very quickly that something that delighted most of my peers, was a part of my sensory hellscape; this object of my hatred was a lenticular image, an object comprised of two images which can produce an elusive quality of depth or image, changing based on how the degree to which you hold it. I hated these things, all too often found unexpectedly in a cereal box prize in the form of a trading card, a birthday gift card, or presented on souvenir cups. To this day, the abravisely squeaky sound of fingernails running perpendicular to the parallel ridges of this juvenile amusement is to me, a sound of enacting visceral, whole-body encompassing abject, bile inducing terror. If it weren’t so distressing, it would be funny to me that something that one person could neutrally describe as nostalgic material is one that, for me, summons pre-retching saliva. How could so much disgust and delight be deceptively held in one object, just depending on how you look at it?

Vacillating between personal/private and public/political, theatrical domestic space is uniquely situated to be sites of queering and trans-ing or otherwise illuminating through its staging power, inequity and oppression. This is what I will call the kitchen of my essay; this is where the important arguments happen and lean further into the intersection of theatre, home, and bodies, emphasizing those who dwell in the margins. 

If Suzan-Lori Parks’ 2014 three-part epic odyssey Father Comes Home from the Wars, reimagines a Black confederate’s journey to fight a battle he doesn’t believe in, Taylor Mac’s 2015 play Hir, fiercely focuses on the interpersonal dynamics of a family fighting multiple battles at home. It is a play that firmly wages war against the idyllic notion of “returning home,” alongside gender identity and roles. In Hir, a 28-year-old man named Isaac disgracefully exits the military to return to a childhood family home distinctly different from the one he left three years prior He returns to a series of identity and role reversals. He arrives to find that the once orderly home is in severe disarray mirroring an ushering in of a new chaotic familial order. His abusive hyper-masculine father has been debilitated by a stroke and is now the subject of emasculation and abuse from his mother. He struggles to make sense of the many transitions which include his titular trans sibling who, with the full endorsement of their mother, has embarked on the journey of becoming hirself. The home that Isaac returns to is one that is queered, trans-ed, and distinctly situated in opposition to any site of respite, nostalgia, or normality that he longs for. While his mother and sibling are out, Isaac attempts to restore order by cleaning up the home and his father. His mother is enraged and the action peaks with the son enacting a violent rage on the ongoing contested site of the home’s control, an air conditioning unit. After Isaac assaults his family and violently beats the air conditioner, the son’s mother disavows her son mercilessly as he begs for forgiveness. He can never come home again. 

  As a person who is perpetually curious about those homes that we can’t quite live in and their representation onstage, I was compelled and repulsed by the narrative Mac (who uses the pronoun Judy), lays bare. Hir stages an uncompromising and unapologetic attack on white American dream home with traditional gender roles. It is overwhelmingly a story that vacillates violently between things that exist in seeming opposition to one another. If the Great Replacement Theory’s hermeneutic of suspicion asks, “What if they replace us?” Mac’s play is a home that responds enthusiastically, “What if we replace everything?” A play about hir emerges as one about him. Patriarchal abuse is replaced by matriarchal abuse. Gendered oppression replaced by gender expression. Euphoria is usurped by dysphoria. Order becomes disorder. An overwhelmingly comedic first act is subsumed by a tragic second. And ultimately over the course of the play, the concept of home is one that is aggressively decentered by a pervasive feeling of displacement. Because much of Hir is dedicated to embodying radical acceptance at home, it becomes even more striking the play concludes with Isaac as the Adam cast out of a disordered liberal Eden.

Witnessing the domestic unearthed in Hir is a deeply unsettling experience. The son’s frantic cleaning also strips away the haphazardly hoarder-like bandages that his mother has applied to the household, revealing a deep, festering wound. The son’s inability to reconcile his site of nostalgia with one that is also the same site of his mother and sibling’s oppression results in his further ejection from his homeplace and his family. Ultimately, through its exploitation of binaries, Hir forces the audience to view the image of home through a lenticular like lens, one that shifts abruptly from domestic utopia to dystopia. It just depends on how you look at it.

the home demands a crip response: covid-19 and the stage in home 

When considering the home on stage as it appears in The Fever, I couldn’t help but think of the multivalent nature of a febrile state which occurs when the bodies we dwell in attempt to make themselves less hospitable to viral threats. For me, the pursuit to survive the novel coronavirus has been a sort of fever nightmare. Along with the loss of certain linear time structured by routine, the distance between home and work collapsed as the nation entered a lockdown. And while our shared theatre spaces may have gone dark, theatre makers found ways to sustain our praxis virtually by pivoting to reach audiences at home whether it was through their computers or their mailboxes. Actors went from rehearsal rooms to Zoom rooms in a short period of time. 

During the lockdown spawned by Covid-19, theatre practice was not immune to the collapse of the work/home binary. Pandemic paradigm shifts included a (utopic?) workplace that became the site of a return rather than home. This felt like a fascinating turn for the domestic space which had been recreated or reimagined in public. Now, we were able to see the private domestic sphere, sometimes a college student’s childhood bedroom, turned into a stage. For many, the pandemic was an awakening to disability and the awareness that it is not a question of if one will be debilitated but when. What is awe-inspiring is to consider is that when a creative supply chain was threatened, a collective response was not to stop, but rather to generate and connect with others from home, while at the same time offering a domestic crip response to expose an obvious solution to a history of theatre and performance that has often been made (physically or economically) inaccessible.

I am endlessly excited by how the concept and material realities of home in theatre work on our bodies and psyches in such mysterious and expansive ways. Whether we are staging the home within a proscenium or repurposing actual homes to become a stage, we continue to explore the depths of our connection to this site of paradoxical meaning and identity making. The home on stage has offered us a relatively safe vessel for domestic roleplay and representations and yet tensions emerge when a play is forced into the home. Watching a Zoom production of Qui Nguyen’s She Kills Monsters in 2020, I was hyper aware of the sounds of actors enacting their virtual fight scenes as I imagined a concerned albeit well-intentioned neighbor whose single phone call could escalate the stakes of a pretend domestic fight scene being acted out by Black students. I thought about those same diaphragmatic screams of rage rendered “safe” when expressed in dedicated mimetic play spaces. The pandemic stage homes alerted me to the illusion of safety I can find in staging a home rather than living in one.

In these non-binary, radical theatrical homes, there exists an opportunity to re-evaluate, articulate, and enact practices of care for practitioners and audiences. The home as it appears on-stage, has given us a space within which we can move people and be moved. How do we move forward when we consider how binary renderings of home have failed, or even actively harmed us?

For Issacs’s mother, Paige, her non-binary child is the future. Ze is a container of radical paradoxical possibility. Ze is everything. Paige speaks this obfuscated truth into existence as she does a homonymic dance between “hir” and “here.” For her, hir is the future. 

And for me, the future is always already home.