Culture

Frank Lloyd Wright Gets the Interactive Theater Treatment in Chicago

The Walls of Harrow House subjects the architect's orderly principles to anarchy
modern home on green lawn
Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House.Photo: Courtesy of Hollyhock House

Frank Lloyd Wright, but gothic. Plus puppets. That’s the distilled version of The Walls of Harrow House, an interactive theater piece from Rough House Theater in Chicago. Part puppet-populated haunted house, part rumination on design and the role of the architect, Harrow House takes the orderly elements for which Wright was famous and subjects them to anarchy, with deeply unsettling results.

Mike Oleon, the founding artistic director of Rough House, first began considering the ramifications of Wright’s aesthetic while visiting the architect's Hollyhock House in Los Angeles.

“In addition to being in awe of the artistry of the place, I was also struck by a couple of things,” Oleon tells AD PRO. “One was the sort of bizarre concrete building style that made the house feel more spooky than inviting. The other was how the lack of aesthetic compromises had made living in or maintaining the house almost impossible." Floorboards that warped due to an unyielding design and a kitchen nearly unusable due to its small size (Wright didn’t consider that particular space valuable) are just two of the issues that plague Hollyhock House.

“You’re walking through this building that’s a pinnacle of architecture, but it’s a nightmare to maintain,” Oleon explains.

It was this sharp contrast between the rigidity of Wright’s work and the constant barrage of chaos from the natural world that threatens it that grew into the plot of The Walls of Harrow House.

In the piece, viewers play the role of visitors to the fictional Harrow House, the home and studio of famed architect Milton Harrow, which has been closed to the public for years. The guide, Anna Ogilvie, has been a steward of the property for decades, closely guarding the house’s secrets and protecting it from the horrors wrought by its creator’s vision. Visitors are eventually turned loose in the house, free to explore the drafting room, garden and more, while all around them a series of increasingly unnerving and macabre puppets play out their stories.

Kevin Wesson and Claire Saxe perform in The Walls of Harrow House.

Photo: Evan Barr

The set itself incorporates many elements that will be familiar to fans of Wright’s work, though at Harrow House they’ve become skewed and frightening—albeit ideal for performance. "His frameworks made the perfect structures for the chaos of nature to crawl on," Oleon says. "We were able to use Wright’s hard lines and geometry as a stage and playing space for the disorder that comes from the ooey-gooiness of life."

In one scene, Ogilvie interviews a young architect who wants to apprentice in Harrow’s workroom. "Architecture is not about buildings,” she tells him. “It’s about having a vision, and belief enough to make vision into reality.”

The danger, Harrow House seems to suggest, is when you’re unwilling to adapt that reality to the needs of those around you. As the piece progresses, it becomes clear that Harrow’s suppression of anything disorderly only pushed those elements beneath the surface, where they’ve been waiting to reemerge, misshapen and grotesque. The final scenes are both chaotic and cathartic, bringing into sharp relief the potential consequences of adhering to a vision at all costs.

Suffice it to say, after working on the piece, Oleon doesn’t see himself moving into a Frank Lloyd Wright home anytime soon: "You’d have to put up with a lot of his ideas to live in a place like that."

The Walls of Harrow House runs through November 10 at Chicago’s Chopin Theatre. 1543 W Division St, Chicago, IL 60642

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