OPEN HOME
Newtown Community Centre, Wellington
09/08/2014 - 17/08/2014
Production Details
Pat-A-Cake Productions present their newly devised production of Open Home on the corner of Rintoul and Colombo Street.
Bang of the hammer and this house will… become your home! Open Home opens up a conversation about first homebuyers exasperation mid-housing crisis.
After their sold out season of Bus Ticket for this year’s Fringe festival, Pat-A-Cake continues to inject their work into the main veins of the community, taking it out of the theatre and bringing it this time into an actual Open Home!
Pat-A-Cake delve into the dream – and the reality – of needing to own a house to connect with our kiwi identity. Relevantly timed one month before the election, the show is a response to the vivid imagery used in media; housing market is being pulled out from under us, property ladder is out of reach and the exasperated response first homebuyers feel.
“It’s a topic we all connect to,” says director Bop Murdoch. “Our dreams are our identity, and at the moment a better option than kiwi-saving the world is opening a dialogue about our future”.
Pat-A-Cake Productions is a new emerging company that aims to create visceral and relevant devised theatre. With a unique style, they focus on play and use the body and mind as a starting point. Without claiming to know how or when to begin saving for a mortgage, the ensemble uniquely generates conversation into the how unfeasible it is to get onto the property ladder. Questioning whether it is actually our dream or our parent’s dream we have been to conditioned think is ours.
Patacake have relevantly set up an actual Open Home to explore the issue. Adopting a promenade style theatre, this site generic work will keep the audience central to the action, and allow them to actively engage with the topic.
Open Home is a delightfully devised spontaneous experience that will surprise in every room of the house just like the one they may – or may not – look to purchase one day.
Good for ages 15-99. Ideal for those fed up thinking about the housing crisis.
Open Home will have only four shows in a house on the corner of Rintoul and Colombo Street (formally known as the Newtown Community Centre)
Performance dates are Sat 9, Sun 10, Sat 16, Sun 17, August.
Book tickets at www.eventfinder.co.nz/2014/open-home/wellington
Performers:
Sarah Tuck: Auctioneer, Rachel
Elli Yates: Jean
Leo Gedye: Billy
Audrey Banach-Salas: Molly
Ben Reason: Finlay
Michael Hebenton: Ross
Rowan Brooks: Mason
Lewis McLeod: Frank
Sam Skoog: Exasperado
Renee Leenders: Agent
Set/Prop/Lighting design: Anna Robinson
Sound Design: Jonathan Shirley
Costume Design: Samantha Cotton
Publicist: Sarah Tuck
FOH: Renee Leenders
Filming: Sara Pattison
Production Photography: Callum Devlin
Sat & Sun only
A gorgeous experience
Review by Lena Fransham 10th Aug 2014
Pat-a-Cake, in keeping with their name, behave less like actors than like children deeply involved in an imaginative game. As soon as you arrive, you are invited to play too. Renee the real estate agent (Renee Landers) asks whether you wish to view the beach house, the top floor apartment or the country cottage, then ushers you into an auction room to take part in an auction. This is your introduction to an elaborate exploration of questions around the Kiwi dream of homeownership.
The smashing of a teapot begins a fragmentation of both audience and narrative. Groups are led off in three directions depending on the property they wish to view. The ‘game’ then consists of a looping tour of domestic spaces, each contributing to a bewildering montage that slowly begins to make its own kind of sense. The manoeuvring of three audience ‘tour’ groups separately, so that each group criss-crosses through the scenes in a different sequence, is done with choreographic flair. Relationships between characters link each space, where the scene portrayed is not a plot development but a revelation of a character in his or her relationship to the notion of ‘home’.
The success of the play centres on the actors’ seemingly effortless connection with the audience. It is easy to love the characters and the small, playful details: the endearingly awkward Billy (Leo Gedye) has a hilarious bubblebath scene with Frank (Lewis McLeod) that epitomises the engaging spontaneity of the cast. In a showhome bedroom, Ross (Michael Hebenton) and Jeanne (Elli Yates) invite you into their vision of becoming homeowners; what follows is an intimate, and then increasingly panicky, scene revealing the anxieties and unexamined beliefs so central to that dream: “A home for my children! A home for my children! A home for my children!”
This element emerges in surreal forms throughout the tour: a kitchen scene in which Jeanne ‘cooks’ her life according to a recipe in a book, a tensely compulsive shopping trip with Rachel (Sarah Tuck), a whiteboard covered in protestant work ethic commands that we have all heard before. Questions and alternatives emerge, a meeting is held, dialogue opens up. And all the while poor Exasperado (Sam Skoog) is still piecing together his broken teapot.
Pat-a-Cake’s trademark discontinuous narrative style is consistent with their aim here: to take things apart in a curious, childlike manner, to examine them minutely and then try to put them back together in other ways. They make you their partner in their exploratory game and you find that you are playing too, as if you are one of them. A gorgeous experience.
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