A House With No Walls

Following the extraordinary success of Permanent Collection and Bee-Luther-Hatchee, A House With No Walls represents the final part of playwright Thomas Gibbons’ race trilogy. The play — inspired by real-life events in Philadelphia — dramatizes the conflict between a conservative African-American writer and an ultra-liberal, Afro-centric political activist. The battleground for these two opposing forces is the site of the new American Museum of Liberty, which happens to be on the grounds of George Washington’s Philadelphia home, including its slave quarters. Flashing between a current day debate over what “freedom” truly is, to the dramatic story of one of Washington’s slaves as she contemplates escape, A House With No Walls serves as a springboard for a complex and volatile exploration of whether or not African-Americans should embrace the legacy of slavery as their primary cultural identity or discard it as a mantle of “victimhood.” Seth Rozin directs.

A House With No Walls is featured in The Philadelphia New Play Festival: Where Theatre Begins, a program of the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, February 8 – 18, 2007.