The origin story

In 2014, Geoff Sobelle’s one-man show The Object Lesson played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) as part of the Next Wave Festival, which features avant-garde performance by international artists working across genres. Following the presentation, Joseph Melillo, BAM’s outgoing executive producer, invited him back to create a new work for their Harvey Theater, an 800-seat proscenium space. Thus an internationally minded co-commission with BAM, Arizona State University—Gammage, the New Zealand Festival, the Edinburgh International Festival, and Beth Morrison Projects was born.

Knowing that he was building a show for the Harvey Theater was essential to Geoff’s crafting of HOME, so much so that it often felt like “developing a site-specific piece for BAM.” This approach stood in contrast to his work on The Object Lesson, which featured the audience sitting on boxes in a giant installation, breaking us out of a traditional theatre space. Switching gears for HOME to create a piece of theatre for a specific theatre felt like “doing a 180 on that thinking, and asking what happens when we use the constraints of the theatre as artistic constraints.” Geoff knew he wanted the show to fit the rundown, majestic quality of that space—the Harvey’s 115-year-old façade still shows age-old water damage and scars from its time as a movie theatre. The history embedded in those walls lent a special resonance to Geoff’s theme of observing one home through time that remained an essential part of the piece.

In 2017, HOME was presented at BAM, following its premiere at FringeArts in Philadelphia. Berkeley Rep’s Resident Dramaturg Madeleine Oldham and Associate Director Lisa Peterson saw the production and fell in love with its inventive storytelling. They shared a video of the performance with Artistic Director Tony Taccone, who similarly saw something elusive and exceptional in the piece and decided to pursue it for our 2018-19 season as a stop on HOME’s international tour.

Geoff is no stranger to the Bay Area. He is a graduate of Stanford University and many of his family live or have lived in the South Bay. He’s also found a creative home here: Berkeley Rep presented all wear bowlers, a piece developed by his company rainpan43, in 2006 and The Object Lesson ran at The Curran in 2015. After playing in Australia and Hong Kong, HOME joins us for a month before jetting off to a run in Taiwan, inviting audiences all across the globe to ask what home means to them.