LAFPI

Houses Without Walls
Written, directed, and produced by Susannah Rodriguez Drissi
Magdalena Emar, Assistant Producer
All-female cast with Yelyna De Leon, Magdalena Emar, Maria Ignacia Hojas

PERFORMANCE DATES
Sunday, June 3 – 2:30 PM – Preview
Saturday, June 9 – 6:00 PM
Saturday, June 16 – 1:00 PM
Wednesday, June 20 – 8:30 PM
Sunday, June 24 – 1:00 PM
Running time:
Approximately 35 minutes, followed by Q&A (1 hr. total)

TICKET PRICE: $ 15 http://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/4939?tab=tickets
Appropriate for ages 14+

Houses Without Walls portrays two generations of women coping with motherhood and madness in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Candela and Gloria’s stories are almost impossible to tell apart. Each day, without reprieve, they speak to themselves and to each other across a wall. One day, however, the wall no longer holds, and Candela and Gloria come face to face. Premiers at the Hollywood Fringe Festival on June 3rd at Stephanie Feury Theatre Studio, 5636 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038.

Torn between historical and personal traumas, love, fear, and resentment for their daughters, Candela and Gloria simply can’t forget—if anything, they remember too much. Likewise, their daughters—now women living in exile—grapple with lives turned upside-down by history and personal choices. Their mothers will die without them. Their own daughters, too, will leave them one day. Ultimately, Houses Without Walls reminds us that motherhood, like a revolution, is a life-altering event—often wrought with obligation, madness, and pain.

Houses Without Walls was inspired by events Rodriguez Drissi experienced while living in Cuba during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift when Fidel Castro opened the sea border, unleashing a major refugee crisis. “The mothers and daughters of Houses Without Walls,” Rodriguez Drissi explains, “could be any mother and daughter who has experienced separation, political violence, and the madness that ensues. This play is about walls—the ones we imagine, the ones we build and, ultimately, the ones we must tear down.”

“Houses Without Walls is an extraordinary work exploring the topical issues of emigration, physical and virtual borders and the difficulty of communication between two generations of women. Rodriguez Drissi uses a language that is both poetic and brutal, the lyrical tones being cut through by sharp notes of realism. The main characters, mothers, and daughters inhabit a space that ensures an emotional and sensorial permeability between geographical zones, between life and death, overseen by a narrator whose role is not to provide spectators with more information but to overemphasize the impossibility of the women’s situation. This is a play that clearly captures the pain of physical separation and distance at a time when the plea of refugees and the politically justified need to build walls test our humanity daily.”

Carmen Levick, Ph.D., Department of Theatre University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

Follow as on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/houseswithoutwalls/
at Hollywood Fringe Festival at http://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/4939
Read at excerpt at LCG Lounge: http://www.lcgeditores.com/blog/2017/12/4/houses-without-walls-by-susannah-rodriguez-drissi
Follow us on Twitter at @rsdrissi #houseswithoutwalls