SHOW PREVIEW
7 Stages’ “The Breakers”
April 16-May 10. 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Fridays; 7:30 and 10 p.m. Saturdays (no 10 p.m. show on April 18); 7:30 p.m. Sundays (no show on April 19); Pay What You Want Night, 8 p.m. April 20. $18-$22.50. The Goat Farm Arts Center, 1200 Foster St., Atlanta. 404-523-7647, www.7stages.org/events/the-breakers/.
People who live in glass houses make for some pretty interesting viewing.
That’s something of the idea behind “The Breakers,” a new theatrical production from 7 Stages taking place at the Goat Farm Arts Center from April 16-May 10. The production invites viewers to leave traditional seating behind and follow the action of a play in a specially built set, a full-sized house with transparent walls that will allow the performance to be seen from any number of perspectives.
“I set out to write a love story, and this is what happened,” writer, director and 7 Stages Co-Artistic Director Michael Haverty says about his new show, which he describes as a dark, erotic thriller set in a glass house where audience members can wander freely throughout. “If you’re in the middle of something and you see something going on somewhere else, you can go. But I’ve also tried to choreograph it so you can always see what’s going on in another scene.”
“The Breakers” tells the story of a married couple, played by Atlanta actors Angele Masters and Kevin Stillwell, who have a turbulent, co-dependent relationship. Their shared home-security business is in trouble, and as a last-ditch effort to raise money to save the business and their marriage, they throw a housewarming party, inviting a group of guests into their tricked-out, surveillance-camera-laden home.
“I’ve always wanted to do a show in a house that people would have to go walking through,” Haverty says. “That’s just been a dream of mine forever.”
Haverty says he initially set out to write a love story, but something far darker, more along the lines of Harold Pinter’s bleak story of marital infidelity, “Betrayal,” emerged during his writing residency at the Yaddo artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
To design and build the house, Haverty approached architect Nick Kahler, an intern at the firm of Lord Aeck Sargent. Kahler had previously worked as an assistant building the set for the 2012 dance production “Threshold” by the Atlanta-based company the Lucky Penny, which utilized a house entirely made out of cardboard as its set.
“It’s something that a set designer would not have been able to do,” Haverty says of his decision to work with an architect rather than a typical set designer. “I wanted someone who would focus on the material in a different way. Nick is almost more of a visual artist.”
“The design is about the disorientation and disintegration of the house,” Kahler says of the set he’s created in the Goat Farm’s Goodson Yard warehouse building. “It has a regular frame on one side and on the other it’s totally rent open and falling apart.”
Many of the walls are made of sliding plexiglass polycarbonate, and parts of the house detach during the show. “The main idea is that the house is a malevolent dream-catcher,” Kahler says. “There’s strife in the relationship between husband and wife, and the house is kind of a collector of those bad vibes. It’s designed as a net to catch those aspects: it’s so intense that the house ultimately falls apart.”
The interactive nature of the performance isn’t new for Haverty and his team: Haverty oversaw the 2013 production of “The Navigator,” an adaptation of the young adult science-fiction novel by Irish writer Eoin McNamee, which invited audience members to follow the action of the show through multiple locations at the Goat Farm.
As in that earlier show, audiences for “The Breakers” will initially be split up into two groups. “From there, you have to make a decision about who you want to follow from moment to moment. … We’ve reduced the size of the audience for this show so we can be sure audience members will have a good line of sight. … Audience members are given the opportunity to make their own play.”
The performance includes assistants to help guide audience members through the experience, benches and seats for occasional seating and a cash bar open throughout the performance.
Haverty says that “The Breakers” and “Navigator” are the sort of experiential, interactive theatrical experiences he’s always longed to create, the type of show that Atlanta artists and audiences seem to be eager to participate in.
“One of my actors yesterday described the play as ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ on acid,” says Haverty. “Come for some fun. Get ready to move around. Get ready to follow these characters. They swallow you up in their drama.”
