House/Divided

From Obie Award-winning company The Builders Association and director Marianne Weems comes House / Divided, a high-tech hymn to America’s dispossessed. Alternating between vignettes from John Steinbeck’s Depression-era novel The Grapes of Wrath and stories of contemporary foreclosure and finance, the work revolves around onstage remnants of an actual foreclosed home as it is inhabited, abandoned, repurposed, collateralized, securitized, and ultimately destroyed. On multiple screens and on stage, stirring personal testimonials contrast with a digital vision of our highly automated, mediated global market system, creating a distinctly 21st-century portrait of human struggle in the face of an uncertain financial future.