A Critics’ Pick in both The New York Times and Backstage when it premiered in 2012, HOME/SICK chronicles the rise and fall of the radical Weather Underground, who bombed dozens of targets in the early 1970s in protest of the Vietnam War. The show was written collectively, with cast members Ben Beckley (Tommy), Edward Bauer (David), Kate Benson (Bernard), Anna Abhau Elliott (Kathy), Luke Harlan (Paul), and Emily Louise Perkins (Anna) basing their characters partly on themselves and partly on historical or literary models. Each actor drops character at some point to address the audience directly and to speak in a personal way to the issues of violence, political power, and social and economic injustice at the heart of the play. In addition to direct address, HOME/SICK combines improvisation, singing, naturalism, expressionism, and audience participation in a maximalist aesthetic that captures the turbulent history of America’s troubled and troubling would-be revolutionaries in the 1960s and 1970s.
Home/Sick guide sections
