House For Sale by Jonathan Franzen (review)

A middle-aged man took a seat in a long row of metal folding chairs behind an elevated platform the length of a hallway in a Midwestern suburban home. He spoke the opening lines of Jonathan Franzen’s “House for Sale,” a 2006 essay about the author’s family memories as he tries to sell his childhood home in Saint Louis, Missouri. Although the original text has one narrator (Franzen?), four more actors of different ages, genders, and ethnicities entered, accompanied by David Bowie’s song “Young Americans.” Collectively, they recited the rest of Franzen’s essay mostly verbatim, punctuating their language with moments of heightened performativity, such as methodical movements and highly stylized ways of speaking. Directed by Daniel Fish, this adaptation’s use of multiple narrators, each representing different demographics, suggested that Franzen’s critical summation of his family’s religious and political beliefs might apply to an entire nation that is overly dependent on religion and too economically conservative. The actors’ interpretive movements contributed to a broader critique of America, producing a tension between action and text. Staged as such, Fish’s adaptation transformed the original text’s focus on an individual’s disgust with his family into an examination of an entire nation in economic distress, and it ultimately argued that although social change seems inevitable, nothing yet, not even the Occupy movement, has made much of a difference.

Fish has adapted single-narrator essays before, but House for Sale is, to date, his most politically charged production. In 2012, he adapted the work of David Foster Wallace into A (radically condensed and expanded) SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN (after David Foster Wallace) for the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City, Queens. As with House for Sale, Fish refracted passages of several of Wallace’s single-narrator essays through the voices of five different actors. Actors listened to Wallace’s words through headsets and repeated them aloud in real time. The speed with which the actors had to speak to keep up with the recording left them little time to interpret the words through action. In House for Sale, the actors memorized the essay and Fish used colored light bulbs to cue the actors to speak. This memorization allowed them to change their vocal cadences and perform interpretive actions that broadened the meaning of the text. Indeed, these rehearsed movements enabled Fish and the actors to not only produce a sense of tension between the text and the action in performance, but also to control where and for how long it would arise.

The first significant moment of tension occurred during a passage wherein Franzen blames his parents’ church attendance for their inability to recognize the disparity between their desire to have expensive things and their lack of enough money to buy them. On stage, Fish’s narrators represented a cross-section of a religious America, and they recited these lines in murmuring unison as if in prayer, lowering their voices until the words were unintelligible. Franzen’s original text was no longer the entire point, as the actors held hands, continued to murmur, and looked questioningly at one another and around the room. This action transcended the story of one young man forming a secular self in opposition to his family and moved toward a critique of a nation that seeks help and comfort through prayer, despite a lack of evidence that prayer has improved their economic condition. Fish thus transformed Franzen’s rant about the consequences of his family’s own religiosity into a series of questions applicable to Americans beyond the Franzens. Has religion and the belief in the perfection of God’s will led Americans to turn a blind eye to the institutional evils responsible for thousands of financially struggling families, or has religion been a soothing balm for families truly powerless to effect change?

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