“House/Divided” focused on the parallels between the modern housing and financial crisis and the 1930’s Dust Bowl, crops crisis, and Great Depression. It alternated between the Joad family from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath who, forced off their land by the bank, were forced to travel westward, facing death, poverty, and starvation; and the everyday families who now face foreclosure at the hands of irresponsible banking institutions. Each portion was heavy with personal as well as national tragedy.
Though both portions of the performance were heavy with multimedia, it was also mixed in with live, human performers. Live actors portrayed the Joad family, the bankers, and the families facing foreclosure. There was a huge, transformable house as a prop in the center of the stage. However, the media elements were prominent. Interview videos, booming music, and projections on top of the house of everything from a dilapidated modern house to the fields of the Midwest gave the blank canvas of the house a character and a story. Stock market tickers and telephone calls, as well as video conferences and large projections of the actors’ faces were also used.
I am strongly in the Phelan camp when it comes to the debate over media and “live” performance. I believe that media, while creative and sometimes beneficial to a performance, can ruin the live aspect of the work. Live performance is a privilege; it is sacred and unfiltered, unlike mediatized performance. The audience gets more of an experience with live than with mediatized performance. However, the directors took an Auslander view in this performance. Auslander believes that mediatized performance is just as “real” and “live” as truly live performance.
In this performance specifically, I felt that the media often overpowered the actors. While some of the media added to the emotional resonance of the piece, such as the compelling music and the telephone calls, other elements such as the voiceovers, the interviews, and the projections of the actors’ faces seemed to overshadow the human element of the work and made the characters mere digital images. The piece lacked the visceral connection to the human tragedy that truly occurred in both eras.
Nevertheless, though I was less than enamored with the mediatized section of the performance, I felt that there were some very strong elements to the piece that truly made me appreciate my home and my family. By placing the Joads in comparison with the modern housing crisis, it really hit home the idea that these types of tragedies still occur and are still affecting America. The post-performance discussion gave us a good look into the writers’ and directors’ minds and I gained a lot of insight into the theory behind this type of performance, which borders more on conceptual performance art than a play. The performance was a good experience in terms of my views on the “liveness” of medaitized performance. Though I am still strongly for Phelan’s view that live performance is more “true” than mediatized performance, I can see that some elements of media often help to enhance the performance.
“A House Divided” was definitely a play in which media and liveliness were strictly intertwined. I strongly agree with Erica with the fact that the media outshadowed the live performers at times, and that I would recognize myself in the Phelan philosophy. In fact, this performance seemed really interesting and eye-catching at first: I actually thought that the media choices and tricks used were genius; the way the director played with the camera angles and the house was extremely creative. However, I believe that especially for the Wall st. side of the stage, the media was distracting and definitely gave the audience difficulty in following the story, as I found myself bored and confused throughout those instances. I thought the use of the house was more involving and helped follow the story a little better.
Following Phelan’s philosophy, I definitely agree watching people perform live is a completely different experience; so it was great to be able to confront the media and the live so closely because I could conclude quickly “liveliness” wins the battle.
I wouldn’t take such extreme opinion towards the media if I hadn’t been so bored and distracted by the Wall st screens, almost completely unaware of what the stock brokers and CEO were talking about. I also think the music was distracting, as at times it was louder than the characters’ voices themselves.
If I had to judge the play overall, I would say that it was very creative in approaching such dry and depressive book as “The Grapes of Wrath”. I also think the props and use of media were impressive, independently from how they affected the role of the performers. The plot was loyal to the book and I thought the connection to the mortgage crisis was accurately linked and compared.
Getting into the mortgage crisis, after researching about it, I now have a deeper understanding of the play. The whole Wall st section was partly a mystery to me probably because I was ignorant to much of the history behind it. The stock-brokers were reenacting the high confidence and spending that preceded the crisis, thinking that the house prices were just going to rise and that home-buyers could afford buying more houses than it was realistically possible, and that bankers should have indeed trusted them by offering them lower and lower interests loans. This trust by the banks, blindly granting people who even had terrible credit scores thousands of dollars in loans was in my opinion the cause of the mortgage crisis. In “A House Divided”, the stock-brokers and the CEO went on reenacting these historical developing all the way through the stock market crash, when the housing prices started going down and people were foreclosed or left their homes to rot, because they realized they couldn’t afford paying the mortgage any longer, which ultimately connected with “The Grapes of Wrath” and the people of Oklahoma who were forced out of their homes by the banks.
Sara Camnasio