GLBT History Museum: Performance & Talkback | How to Live in a House on Fire (Staged Reading Series)

Please join the GLBT Historical Society and Crowded Fire Theater as we jointly present the first of two staged readings of How to Live in a House on Fire, a new play by Kari Barclay and directed by M. Graham Smith.

Presented for the first time in the San Francisco Bay Area where the story takes place, this staged reading of a new play by performance scholar Kari Barclay looks to queer history as a lens to understand our current moment of climate grief.

Attendees to the program will be treated with a live staged reading of the new play with a cast of actors, followed by a talkback discussion with the creative team after the show and an opportunity to share audience feedback and participate in the development process!

About the play

HOW TO LIVE IN A HOUSE ON FIRE asks how we care for each other in moments of crisis. It builds on a quote from Tennessee Williams: “We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”

The Chateau Homosexuel is a gay commune on the brink of collapse. It’s 1970 in Berkeley, California, and as characters bicker over the future of gay liberation, Benny and Jeremy are falling in love. When they try to decide what to do with an eviction notice, suddenly something starts burning in the oven. Smoke fills the stage, and Benny and Jeremy re-enter in K95 masks. We’re transported to 2020 in the same house in the midst of the California wildfires. Benny and Jeremy are married, and they’re figuring out what to bring with them in preparation for an evacuation. As they sort their belongings and try to pack fifty years of queer history into a cardboard box, they’re confronted with what histories to remember and what to forget.