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Articles

Volume 33, Number 1 (2012)

"No Good. Go Home": Past Lives and Disrupted Homes in Catherine Bank's Three Story, Ocean View1

Submitted
May 17, 2013
Published
2012-01-01

Abstract

Catherine Banks’s Three Storey, Ocean View explores the concept of home from the perspective of a prospective buyer, Peg, and four families who had previously lived in the house listed for sale. In keeping with Henri Lefebvre’s definition of social space, the space of this home is shown to be both physically and temporally determined as the past occupants remain on stage, in the house, for the scenes of the present day, and Peg and her family respond to their movements and dialogue. Many of these former inhabitants have been disenfranchised through race, poverty, language, or disability and, for them, home is a prison as much as a shelter. Examining the house through Una Chaudhuri’s theory of geopathology reveals not only the instability of home and the ruptures between individual and community, home and the surrounding environment, but also the psychogeopathology of those who live there. In addition, both the playtext and the productions of 2000 and 2003 emphasize the vertical structure of the house, which reflects the architecture of Gaston Bachelard’s oneiric house. Banks thereby explores the effect of home not just on those living there, but also on the community and on future generations.