Performing Dream Homes: Theater and the Spatial Politics of the Domestic Sphere ed. by Emily Klein, Jennifer-Scott Mobley, and Jill Stevenson (review)

On the first page of Performing Dream Homes, the editors point out the “domestic affinities between the theater and the home” by invoking the familiar theatre terms “full house,” “dark house,” and “house manager,” then offering analogous linguistic mergings of public gathering places with residential domiciles such as “alehouse” or “courthouse.” This started my wordplay motor, and I came up with housewife, housedress, housewares (is a housedress a form of housewear?), roadhouse, row house, tract house (rowhouses, however fashionable now, were the tract houses of their day, so beware ahistoricism, which is a point made in this collection’s final essay), housekeeping, housekeeper (who, although s/he “keeps” it, does not generally own it), and cat house. Short list.

So, yes, there is a lot to chew on here. The book’s project is to consider theatre’s role in getting us to think about “the malleability of the place we call home” (63), frequently highlighting, in contributor Ann Shanahan’s words, “a meaningful, perhaps even essential, connection between houses, women, and their theatrical representations—a connection with important ramifications for contemporary dramatic criticism and theatre production” (88). The latter quote speaks honestly, I think, to how the anthology opens pathways for critics, directors, and scholars. The editors conclude that “theater has a valuable role to play” in current conversations about who belongs (where) in the United States and in exposing the stakes behind imagining our dream homes, ending with the claim that “theater allows us to rehearse those processes so that we can, ultimately, construct a more just, welcoming global home” (231). Although this will validate the existing biases of many theatre scholars, I am skeptical about claims that theatre will do much to foster tolerance and openness where it does not already exist. Nonetheless, the essays are informative and varied, and in the aggregate, they function as a kind of conversation on which eavesdropping is a very engaging and, in the best chapters, thought-provoking use of one’s time.

The volume is in three parts. Part 1, “Family Homes on Stage,” features chapters analyzing plays that have already been the subject of essays, books, and reviews. I found little new here, but the contributors are sure-handed and the information they convey is useful, especially for newcomers to the plays. Jocelyn Buckner reads Clybourne Park and Beneatha’s Place (both revisit the family of A Raisin in the Sun decades later) to address “racism’s continuing influence on individual and community efforts to realize the very particular ‘American’ dream of prosperity, belonging, and equality for all in an era characterized by post-racial malaise” (21). Lourdes Arciniega considers how Susan Glaspell’s Trifles, Chains of Dew, and Alison’s House dramatize ways “domestic transformations can . . . empower women to revise their attitudes toward the world outside their homes” (47). Amanda Clarke uses a detailed walk-through of Marie Jones’s A Night in November, set in Belfast during the Troubles, to posit that a close look at the house, yard, and neighborhood of the “other,” combined with the perspective of being “detached from home and nation” (81), can yield compassion and a reevaluation of one’s prejudices.

Part 2, “Making Home Material,” comprises first-person accounts of working on widely differing productions of plays where house and home are negotiated sites. Jessie Glover’s “Staging Recovery as Home Work in Rachel’s House” recounts the author’s work as producer and co-director of a play based on the personal narratives of women who have left prison and spent time in the eponymous residence in Columbus, Ohio. The obligatory discussion groups and normalizing routines of a house that both is (for a time) and is not (permanently) home undergird the script and position audience members as witnesses to the everyday lives of a marginalized community. Ann Shanahan details her...