Please don’t feed the actors

The audience is free to wander in
the unsettling and provocative Domestik

MOVING HOUSE: Domestik

by NEIL BOYCE

I’m scribbling in a notebook discreetly, or so I think, when a young dude in a baseball cap walks up to me and says, hesitantly, “Excuse me, are you part of the show?”

It’s understandable when we’re all involved in a 3-D, surround-sound performance, and you don’t know at any given moment who are the inmates and who are the visitors in this particular asylum.

The show, Domestik, at the industrial Eastern Bloc space on upper Clark, is put together and directed by Sophie Gee. She assembled a group of her favourite writers and local actors to create a show of “situations that could happen in a house.”

We’re given a program prefaced by simple instructions: “Please don’t go into any closed doors. Feel free to wander around. The show will loop once so don’t worry if you can’t see it all the first time.”

And although the concrete, metal doors and reinforced glass of a factory are omnipresent, a convincing—and slightly sinister—house has been constructed within.

We’ve been dropped into the piece like invisible alien spectators. We’re ghosts here, unseen voyeurs wandering from bedroom to kitchen to living room as performances shift and evolve around us. You may find yourself between two characters in mid-scene, or turn a corner and suddenly encounter an actor up close, talking right through you.

Sometimes characters are off by themselves, immobile in a chair (uttering bits of fragmented monologue), sometimes they’re in bed, asleep. Four stories combine into a fractured larger piece.

Humming a tune, a woman frantically cleans a room amid a clutter of hangers, books and clothes. She greets her guests, a couple, and the tension between them cuts the air. Later, there’s an attempted seduction over a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a sleepwalker who drifts into the kitchen and grabs a large knife off the counter before she’s disarmed by a song whispered in her ear.

Elsewhere, two lovers smooch in the hallway and head off behind closed doors. Later the man emerges, leaving a note on the door: “Gone to get bagels.”

A guy starting a band—UberZone—is conducting auditions in his bedroom. In the only sort-of interaction of the night, he invites viewers to try out, then says; “No, you’re no good. Next!” Afterwards, he’s spotted pounding on the ceiling with a broom and yelling, “Some of us have jobs to get up for in the morning!”

Drifting from room to room like a zombie is the maid, muttering to herself, baking pies, tearing down shower curtains and ramping up the creepiness factor all around.

The audience, too, started to behave erratically, creating their own play as some danced alongside the cast to an old doo-wop recording, while another even prodded an actor for a reaction.

“We expect people in our face, but I was quite surprised that people would actually touch and poke at the actors,” says Gee. “I could see they were getting into the show.”

It was a great experiment—unsettling and provocative. Strange, though, to have the spell broken when the actors left the house and re-emerged, grinning, to signal the end of the show, a return to “reality,” and a round of applause.

DOMESTIKAT EASTERN BLOC (7240 CLARK),
TO OCT. 11, 8 P.M. INFO: (514) 585-3759,
INFO@NERVOUSHUNTER.COM