Immigrants stir conflict in ‘One House Over’
Given that we’re a nation of immigrants, how and why do we focus on the borders and boundaries dividing us rather than all we actually share?
That’s the core question in playwright Catherine Trieschmann’s “One House Over,” a world premiere being directed by Mark Clements that begins performances at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater on Tuesday.
Set in a western Chicago suburb in 2010, Trieschmann’s play opens with 50-something Joanne hiring 30-something Camila as a caretaker for Milos, Joanne’s ailing 89-year-old father and a first-generation Czech immigrant. A violin teacher, Joanne works from her home. But she can’t teach students while ministering to her demanding father’s emotional and physical needs.
Once she’s hired, Camila and husband Rafa, a cook, move into the basement apartment in Joanne’s Craftsman home. And while Joanne studiously looks the other way, we’re quickly made aware that both Camila and Rafa are undocumented. Camila came north from her native Guadalajara as a teenager; Rafa crossed the border from Mexico when he was 2.
That makes Camila and Rafa’s story both typical and topical; during a prerehearsal interview with Clements and Trieschmann, Clements frankly admitted that the current immigration debate was among the reasons he wanted to stage this play now.
But the genesis of Trieschmann’s play predates the current controversy over the plight and future of our more than 11 million undocumented neighbors — living one house, street or town over but often unacknowledged or flatout ignored.
Coming to America
“The genesis of the play was two actual immigration stories,” Trieschmann said.
“My grandfather traveled from Prague in 1939 after Hitler took over. Like Milos, he made his way to Chicago and worked in a metal shop. His story was captured in a memoir written by my grandmother and has always been part of my family’s mythology.
“And then there’s also the story of a friend, who traveled across the border from Mexico City as a teenager and also wound up in Chicago. Like Rafa, he worked without papers in restaurants; a lot of the kitchen stories in the play come from him.
“One night over wine, my friend shared his story with me. I thought a lot about these two stories — what they had in common and also what they didn’t have in common.
Among their salient differences is the Czechs’ longstanding status — going all the way back to their days as an oppressed minority during World War I and continuing through idealized representations in novels like Cather’s “My Ántonia” — as model immigrants.
Conversely, Mexicans and their country are routinely vilified with epithets like “wetback,” which gets hurled in this play. And because they don’t have papers, Camila and Rafa are both vulnerable and powerless — never mind that Joanne considers herself progressive and manifests the comically painful self-consciousness of a do-gooder liberal feeling guilty about privilege.
Limits of liberalism
Joanne’s good intentions only go so far, something Trieschmann understands well because of a third true story influencing her play: her own experience working as a live-in nanny during her twenties.
“Before I got there, my boss told me ‘I have a big, beautiful house in which you’re going to have your own room,’” Trieschmann recalled. “But when I got there, she had me sleep on the couch. I don’t know why I didn’t complain.
“And it was confusing, because she’d also treat me like her best friend, drinking wine at night and taking me out to eat. But then she’d complain because the house wasn’t clean, even though I’d been hired to take care of her kids rather than clean the house. It was a strange relationship, involving a lot of different, crisscrossing boundaries.”
Things grow similarly fuzzy in Joanne’s household, where Camila and Rafa’s live-in status becomes a metaphor for our ongoing efforts to share living quarters in that larger household called America.
Joanne is already feeling ambivalent and guilty about another woman functioning as a surrogate daughter; when Camila and Milos forge a tenuous bond, Joanne also grows jealous.
It doesn’t help that Camila is younger and attractive. Or that Joanne develops a bond of her own with Rafa, who takes on increasing responsibilities around the house. Or that Joanne is lonely and isolated, even from her own neighbors. “We share a yard and yet we aren’t friends at all,” laments Patty, the play’s
fifth character. “And it’s not like I haven’t tried. I’ve tried.”
Set in her ways and used to her longstanding solitude, Joanne’s suddenly shared household makes friction inevitable. And when it arises — when, in Clements’ words, “minor transgressions ratchet up to something bigger” — Joanne must confront ugly things inside her that she didn’t even know were there.
“There’s that song in ‘Avenue Q,’ pointing out that everyone’s a little bit racist,” Trieschmann said. “I think that’s probably true. But that doesn’t mean everyone is a raging racist underneath a polite veneer. I don’t believe that, and that’s not what this play is going for.
“What I’m really interested in is why racism rears its head when it does and why it’s doing so now. And I think a lot of it has to do with replacement. Racism rears its head when communities — and families — change, and when what’s been homogeneous for 50 years suddenly starts to look different. Joanne worries she’s being replaced as a daughter, and she’s scared.”
“There’s a lot of dynamics in play for Joanne,” Clements agreed. “And there’s a lot of boundaries and borders being crossed, regarding what’s acceptable or expected behavior.
“What there isn’t in Catherine’s play is bad people. ‘One House Over’ reminds me of ‘Clybourne Park,’ another play featuring neighborhoods and race where people are messy and complicated rather than evil. Those sorts of plays, with a lot of gray, are the plays I want to do at the Rep. They allow us to have conversations.”
Cultivating empathy
Engendering conversation is par for the course with Trieschmann plays; it’s what stood out for me when watching “How the World Began” at the Rep five years ago.
In “How the World Began,” a liberal,
IF YOU GO
“One House Over” runs from Feb. 27March 25 at the Quadracci Powerhouse Theater, 108 E. Wells St. For tickets, visit www.milwaukeerep.com. single and pregnant high school teacher from New York tries to find common ground with a fundamentalist Christian student in rural Kansas (which is where Trieschmann actually lives). As I wrote in my review at the time, Trieschmann’s play reflects a “generous attempt to see a problem and those fighting about it from all sides.”
“I get asked what perspective from that play is mine,” Trieschmann said. I answer “all three of them,” referring to the play’s three characters. “I’m always more interested in human behavior than argument. And I like to place characters in uncomfortable social situations and relational dynamics.”
Confronted with such dynamics, can we learn to do and be better? However resistant to change we are, can we nevertheless see things anew and grow?
“I hope audience members think about what happens to Camila and Rafa, and why,” Trieschmann said. “I want them to ask, ‘why did this happen? Is there anything inside me that’s contributing to this happening, if not in this yard then in another one?’”
And if “One House Over” makes us think a bit about how fenced in and isolated we’ve become, might we reach past our accustomed perimeters to embrace new ideas and experiences?
“When I was a girl, we didn’t have all these fences,” Patty says at one point in the play. “Yards rolled into one another, and we ran from house to house like it was one big playground.”
Her lament channels the yearning in this piece for a better and more inclusive America, in which your land is my land, from sea to shining sea.
Such an expansive vision might seem beyond us — a pipe dream from another time. But maybe, Trieschmann’s play suggests, we could at least learn how to peer over the fence, looking one house over from our own.