Burning Down the House

Abstract

Embodying change is never easy, especially when our history is often lost or overlooked. Performance allows us to reenact, reexperience, reclaim and bring those moments into the future. In 1973, a group of hippies moved into a beautiful house in the Oakland/Berkeley Hills. We didn’t know then that we would become a queer family that would endure many personal and political crises, including the AIDS epidemic and the destruction of our house in the great firestorm of 1991. Shifting through the ashes, stories emerge of the personal struggles and politics of the times that have much to offer us today, when we strive once again to do it differently. The following piece is an excerpt from the beginning of the play, which juxtaposes our early experiences with some of the more stark realities the fire would come to symbolize as the years progressed.