Other People's Living Rooms

Sometimes you have to give something points for being a good idea, even it it doesn't...quite...work...

Foundry Theatre is currently presenting the play Open House, by Aaron Landsman, in various living rooms throughout all 5 boroughs. It is a cool idea because the play is all about living in New York, and New Yorkers have a perverse desire to see how other New Yorkers live. We look into the windows of brownstones as we pass (nice kitchen! great paint job!) or we look up at the new luxury apartments on the UES and curse (you and your yuppy scum gentrifying ways! and your central air!). We even look at the homeless people we pass and think, man you have a really nice piece of cardboard, AND the church steps are great real estate! So going into other people's homes to see a play is like killing two New York birds with one stone.


The play is quite simple in construction. A young couple Rick and Jane sit on a couch and have a fairly generic couple "should we move? can we afford this place? quit eating at the expensive salad place" conversation. This conversation evolves as the couple, staying on the couch, show laminated cards to demonstrate they are now in different neighborhoods. They are in Williamsburg. In Bushwick. In Flushing. In Astoria. In Chelsea. No, wait they didn't go into Chelsea. They barely touched Manhattan at all, hitting only the northern most neighborhoods like Inwood, which people who ridiculously need to say they live IN MANHATTAN but really live close to nothing worthwhile besides the Bronx Zoo tend to gravitate towards (oh and immigrants).

Staging this simple play in an actual living room, on an actual lived-in couch is a great touch (I saw it in Long Island City). It lends immediate warmth and intimacy to the characters, and helps disguise the fact that the play doesn't really explain who they are or why the keep moving. Are they the same couple who keeps moving from neighborhood to neighborhood in hopes of finding a deal? Or are they the same couple, and this is how they would act in X neighborhood, and Y neighborhood, or are they a more blankly universal couple living in each of the neighborhoods, who all happen to know someone named Olga?

In some ways the play felt like a workshop, like the playwright is going to notice in one of the performances, maybe St. George, that he needs to add a little more meat the their bones. So Rick may or may not have slept with or maybe just flirted with or maybe dated at one point this Olga character, but whatever it is, why do they keep talking about it? What does it have to do with the neighborhoods? And more importantly what does it have to do with the end of civilization?

Oh yeah you heard me. See, this couple is preceded by a prologue of sorts, a real estate agent asking us what we want in a city. The real estate agent returns in the end for an extremely long monologue which reveals that New York has crumbled, and is lawless, and he is promising protection AND solar-generating electricity for one low price. It could have been cool? Maybe? But it wasn't. I wanted the couple to argue a little more.

Still, the conceit of the play is interesting. The right neighborhood is important to any good New Yorker. Ask ten people what they think about Park Slope and you will get answers like, "It is so great, and I love how beautiful it is" to "Um, I couldn't live that far out in Brooklyn for like, anything" to "Lesbians with baby carriages. My idea of hell." And hearing a playwright give voice to struggling New Yorkers who would love to own in the right neighborhood, but who can't stop eating at the expensive salad place is great, but he falls short. I felt like the characters, a personal trainer and a carpenter (I might be making that up a bit, but you get the general idea) were a little too close to puppets for a gripe session disguised as your generic struggling couple. Ones who would just give up and move to Jersey.