The Ensemble in Home Street Home. Photo by Dan Stewart
Why do some plays falter by being too preachy and earnest while others with similar loads of heartfelt information and a clear agenda take flight? Home Street Home, currently in a short run at in the Guthrie Theatre complex, is one such drama that takes wing. Written by the zAmya Theatre Troupe with playwright Josef Evans, the play features eighteen actors most of whom have spent some part of their lives being homeless, living on the street or in shelters.
The show opens with a rendition of “Oh Happy Day†sung with a stage filled with a scant dozen vinyl covered mattresses strewn over the Dowling Studio floor. The mattresses fill up with bodies, a fully integrated cast of males/females, Whites/Blacks/Native Americans, young/old, the able bodied and persons with disabilities.
The deft manner in which bits of storyline and flat out information about the homeless experience is layered into the show needs to be credited. There is humor and grace and determination in this production. As in all good theatre the audience is sometimes left to draw its own conclusions. At one point Zeke, a Nicollet Mall busker, (Richard Brinda) quotes an article from Mpls. St Paul Magazine concerning the Nicollet Mall redesign which hopes to rid the homeless from the avenue’s bus shelters to make the street more appealing. This segues into a rendition of the theme song from the Mary Tyler Moore Show with the lyric “Love is all around no need to fake it.†The scene ends with a half-hearted toss of a cap in the air. It’s moments like this that give the play its verve. No need to explain the irony or the reference.
Two of the best bits in the show are when a fictitious mayor of Minneapolis by the name of Linda Carter (Arminta Wilson) appears. Her answer to any problem or probing question is to hand out her card. It doesn’t take much imagination to draw the conclusion that she too is glad handing and panhandling for votes to make a living, just with better clothes and fancier shoes.
By far the segment that got the biggest audience response was the one that took place inside the newly opened Vikings stadium with its 979 bathrooms and its 2000 video screens. The stadium was built with $600,000,000.00 of. our taxes but the hot dog vendor at the stadium (Stayci Bell) is living in a shelter and can’t get a leg up to get herself and her children into permanent housing. Director Maren Ward brings all the necessary boisterousness and near pandemonium into this scene and it is placed at just the right place in the play.
A note in the program states that most of the monologues, songs and spoken word pieces in the play were written by the actor who performs the piece. The immediacy of this type of theatre is infectious. It lives its message that homeless people are no different than the rest of us.