Join the East Side Freedom Library for a reading of a new play by Kat Purcell, The Future of Housing. 
Two performances: Friday, May 12 at 7:00 p.m. & Saturday, May 13 at 2:00 p.m.

Sign up to join in person or virtually on Zoom

A staged reading of The Future of Housing, a new play in development. Taking Dario Fo & Franca Rame’s famous “Non si paga, non si paga!” as a point of structural departure, The Future of Housing is an experimental, absurdist farce. We become Sacha Cor’s roommates as they juggle rising rents, a falling apart apartment, gross discount food, and at least one big secret. The Future of Housing is a new play that blends poetic scene vignettes with surprisingly situational comedy to remind us that it’s alllllllll connected.

• Personnel:
  • Playwright: Kat Purcell
  • Actor/Collaborator: Maren Ward
  • Video and Streaming: Maxwell Collyard
  • Stage Crew: Kat Purcell & others

Where & How of Creative Process:

The Future of Housing is a comedy based upon personal experiences of wage work, being an “essential worker”, housing precarity, eviction, and street life, that both offers laughter to mend our broken hearts and an investigation of our role in buttressing these very humiliations. Mounting a reading of the play at East Side Freedom Library situates the story, written for and by working class and poor people, in an architecture built for working class and poor people. It is also part of a longer project of building plays and methodologies that can pull performance and artmaking out of big money arts institutions and into cultural spaces that are more accessible to the audiences they are meant for. We hope you will join us to witness the reading, which will help further develop the text for future showings and productions.

Kat Purcell is a white (irish famine diaspora settler) working class nonbinary trans performer, lighting designer, experimental producer, installation artist and theatrical director. They have performed and worked creatively with TRCSTR, Pangea World Theater, Q-STAGE, Lightning Rod, Northern Spark, Guthrie, Pillsbury House + Theatre, Queertopia, Kudeta Dance, Patrick’s Cabaret, (NYC) HERE Arts Center, Target Margin Theater, Ontological Hysteric, Triskelion Arts, Iati Teatro Todo Vanguardia, Tactical Aesthetics, (Paris) ArtCOP21, (London) Oubliette Arthouse. Kat graduated from the London International School of Performing Arts in 2009. In the streets and in the theatre, Kat braces their shoulder to the work of cultivating new/old formations of community interdependence alongside the many incredible caregivers that have been out here doing this work for years. They have served as a core organizer with Studio he(ART)th Project, Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, Youth Prison Blockade, Free University NYC, and Minnesota Artists Coalition.