A House With No Walls Timeline Theatre Company
The irony of a symbol of liberty standing on an artifact of oppression isn’t lost on Gibbons. But ultimately his dramatization of the furor has more to do with competing approaches to history. On the one hand we have Salif Camara, an activist of the generation that came of age in the civil rights movement. He speaks movingly of Washington’s “nine specimens of human property” and vents his justified wrath over American racism. But his methods—setting up camp on the construction site, giving histrionic press conferences, citing racism as the primary cause of every ill—keep him stuck in a state of outraged victimhood.
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A House With No Walls is engrossing because of its willingness to tackle head-on one of the biggest elephants in the room of American culture. But Cadence and Salif come across as less interesting than the topic, because their engagement with the history of slavery and racism remains rhetorical. (For a subtler, less bloodless view of a psyche invaded by a site from the racist past, you could try Brett Neveu’s play Heritage, in which two black men are demolished by working on the restoration of an old plantation house.)
