INTERVIEW: Welcome to the ‘House of Telescopes’
Photo: Daxx stars in House of Telescopes, Kairos Looney’s new play. Photo courtesy of Marcus Middleton / Provided by Everyman Agency with permission.
House of Telescopes, the new play written by Kairos Looney and directed by Lyam B. Gabel, continues through Sunday, April 21, at the Mezzanine Theatre at A.R.T/New York Theatres in Midtown Manhattan. In the show, audience members are invited to Ari’s house in Minneapolis. There’s a lot going on within these walls, including a tattoo parlor in the garage, a character named Fable casting spells upstairs and even some goats about to be introduced to the garden, according to press notes.
Ultimately this piece is about found community and chosen families, with some ghosts that appear along the way. According to Looney’s biography, they write dreamy, unruly plays that refuse monogenre, flipping between speculative fiction to love letter to Theatre of the Ridiculous.
For the playwright, the experience of presenting this work off-Broadway has been a positive one, but there are moments of pause as well. “I’m juggling realities, to be honest,” Looney wrote in an email interview with Hollywood Soapbox.
The playwright referenced the recent decision by University of Texas at Austin officials to terminate approximately 60 people after enacting Senate Bill 17, which makes it illegal for public colleges and universities to have DEI offices and programs in the state, according to The Dallas Morning News. “I am a graduate student (on leave) from UT right now, and I teach there,” Looney wrote. “So it is difficult and yet also life-giving to toggle between the realities of how it feels to be in the classroom out and trans here and also making a tremendous, giant piece of theatre that I thought was too Trans, too giant, to ever be produced.”
Looney added: “I cry multiple times during the show. I know what happens, and I still cry. I find myself in disbelief that a show with so many different expressions of queerness and transness can live at this very moment.”
The playwright explained that their aesthetic has been honed in since their last show, Salt Kid Watches Brooklyn Burn, a punk rock-concert-meets-one-person-show that premiered in the Downtown Urban Arts Festival at Joe’s Pub in 2016. Looney has learned a lot about the dramatic work they want to make, preferring the term “ruminant,” a person who metabolizes macro-level hurt in bite-size pieces over and over until they make something else.
This process and creative change didn’t happen overnight. “I wrote the very first draft during a yearlong residence in Pipeline Theatre’s PlayLab back in 2017,” they stated about the first days of House of Telescopes’ development. “We then did a reading of the play at Judson [Theatre] in their Magic Time series in 2019, and shortly before corona hit in 2020, we did a workshop at Judson. The project paused for a few years — it needed to, we were surviving a collective trauma. I know I myself was not ready to return to writing live performance [for a] couple years. In that time, I also medically transitioned and moved to the South. I rewrote the script after we read it aloud for the first time in four years.”
Looney described the plot as having five characters who connect the audience to a larger ensemble of 16. They said the shape of the play is more prismatic than linear or hierarchical. “That being said, it would probably serve me to write a play with no more than two characters that follows a hero’s journey and doesn’t have puppets, but I’m toxic like that,” Looney stated. “House of Telescopes unfolds, in three layers: a chosen family in Minneapolis, a family of origin in Colorado and a metaphysical realm of ancestors. I don’t believe harm (like microaggression) exist solely on an individual, anomalous level. I believe it’s a cyclical working out of patterns, a micro manifestation of a macro wound.”
These five main characters are named Fable, Sherman, Daphne, Jackson and Saved Things, all trying to “move into fuller versions of themselves despite the ways their circumstances, their relationships, their own ‘childhood scripts,’ as bell hooks would say, reduce them to less complicated existences.”
House of Telescopes comes to New York City courtesy of Pipleline Theatre Company, which Looney called a theatrical home.
“Pipeline is one of the few places that hasn’t pushed me to write Trans 101 into my plays, and I have been given space to experiment with how I can actually write very acutely from my perspective and dreams and beliefs without compromising their complexity for the sake of cisgender legibility,” they wrote. “And at the same time, I have been able to develop a kind of approach that immerses a cisgender audience, where they might pick up on every little thing or they may not, but I want them there, I really want them there. I want them to see themselves reflected in trans stories.”
One theme in Looney’s work, both this new one and Salt Kid, is magic. For the playwright, magic is possibility and the discovery of limits of empirical metaphors. Ultimately, it’s the acknowledgment of coexistent, multi-temporal realities.
“I’m fascinated by what feels like magic to some that feels like reality to me, and vice versa,” they said. “Magic can sound derogatory. What I’m really talking about is imagination, is faith, is going to the edge of our knowledge of each other, and using our hearts and brains to find our ways into a deeper kind of relating. Magic is a spectacular upending of norm, of assumption.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
House of Telescopes, written by Kairos Looney and directed by Lyam B. Gabel, continues through Sunday, April 21, at the the Mezzanine Theatre at A.R.T/New York Theatres in Midtown Manhattan. The play is produced by Pipeline Theatre Company. Click here for more information and tickets.
