"House Play is sort of about Death of a Salesman and sort of about architecture (however a play can "be" "about" "architecture"). Like so much of the best theater, House Play is actually an intricate community ritual in which a specific group of people come together to construct and deconstruct an entire universe in front of you for an hour. All day it gloomed and grayed, and then, in the yard of the Pearl Street Coop, a group of performers built a house out of canvas and a wood frame. The script of Death of a Salesman (sorta) was projected onto its roof so the performers could be on book. Technicians moved constantly around the house, making the world in full view of us. There were interludes like a dance, a fire, a house worn like a helmet with a small camera inside, a stick with a bottle of poppers attached to the end. House Play is a series of images that thread and layer on top of each other, images constructed in front of us by real human labor. If House Play can be said to be about something, it is about labor- the labor of theater, of community, of image- and how the labor of art making is a mirror for so much other labor, like that of building a house and all its incumbent socio-political-artistic baggage. But House Play resists meaning, like so much of the best theater, preferring instead to assemble and disassemble, offering only image, scent, texture, sound. A lamp that becomes the moon"

Sam Mayer 


"House Play uses the physical building of a house to ask why we create physical spaces to house our lives and emotions. It raises questions through mimicry and mimesis, dancing beavers, and an insanely visible and talented tech team. Even through the mist of chaotic and sometimes off-plot tangents, Gilker returns to the central conversation of who builds a home, who gets to stay in a home, and why any of us would want to be inside"

Riley Church