For all you voyeurs who love to peer into your neighbors’ windows and ogle their built-in bookcases, high loft ceilings, or crown moldings, now through March 16, The Foundry Theatre is making it possible for you to enter private living rooms in all five boroughs to see “Open House,” by Prospect-Lefferts Gardens playwright Aaron Landsman. Already the play has been staged in the West Village, Astoria, Cobble Hill, and a schoolhouse-turned-loft in Bushwick, where BB saw it last week.

It begins just like an open house — you fill out a fake form from Three Opportunities LTD., specifying everything from your cash on hand to the reason you love the city. They’re collected, and the agent, Three (Arthur Acuna Raul Castillo), asks the host about the place and gives a spiel about the values of city living, before our attention turns to a couple, Jane (Heidi Schreck) and Rick (Paul Willis), who spend the entire time on a couch, having conversations like this:

Jane: I wish we could buy something here.
Rick: Well maybe in a couple years.
Jane: It’s just now’s the time, you know?
Rick: I don’t think it’s going to gentrify this far out.

They continue to move through the city’s last resorts (Inwood, “West Bushwick,” Crown Heights), as New York gets increasingly tough for (we think) these struggling creative types to live in. Only when Three finally addresses us again, and encourages us to come back to the city to rebuild it, do we see that the whole city’s in deep shit. (”You might have to roll up your sleeves,” he says. “Would you do that? I have to tell you, the plus side is that you have never felt so good as when you’ve just held the tide off with your neighbors.”)

The two narratives don’t fully mesh, but this is a disorienting show. (You’re watching it in a stranger’s living room, remember?) Yet the dialogue throughout is laugh-out-loud familiar, and the play seems to touch our collective nerves dead-on, from our ambivalence about staying or going, to our uncertainty of where the city is heading. It’s an incredibly effective, fun piece of interactive theater — and the tickets are going fast. thefoundrytheatre.org

Other shows of interest this week: BAM’s Brooklyn Next begins on the 15th, with local musicians playing area venues and free shows at BAMcafe, like TV on The Radio’s Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe this Friday, and on Sat., the seven-piece girl rockers Effi Briest with White Rabbits. bam.org

For fixer-uppers, the Neighborhood Housing Services is offering workshops on home repairs starting next Wednesday. And NY City Tech begins its home toolkit courses this Sat., Feb. 16, with “Green Home Furnishings and Healthy Home Decor,” taught by green architect Ellen Honigstock. Download the course catalog here.
Photo by Colin Miller.