LOCATION
GLBT Historical Society Museum
4127 18th Street
San Francisco, CA 94114
ADMISSION
$10; Free for GLBT Historical Society Members
Doors at 6:00 pm / Reading at 6:30 pm
RSVP and reserve your tickets here
Please join the GLBT Historical Society and Crowded Fire Theater as we jointly present the first of two staged readings of How to Live in a House on Fire, a new play by Kari Barclay and directed by M. Graham Smith.
Presented for the first time in the San Francisco Bay Area where the story takes place, this staged reading of a new play by performance scholar Kari Barclay looks to queer history as a lens to understand our current moment of climate grief.
Attendees to the program will be treated with a live staged reading of the new play with a cast of actors, followed by a talkback discussion with the creative team after the show and an opportunity to share audience feedback and participate in the development process!
About the play
HOW TO LIVE IN A HOUSE ON FIRE asks how we care for each other in moments of crisis. It builds on a quote from Tennessee Williams: "We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love."
The Chateau Homosexuel is a gay commune on the brink of collapse. It's 1970 in Berkeley, California, and as characters bicker over the future of gay liberation, Benny and Jeremy are falling in love. When they try to decide what to do with an eviction notice, suddenly something starts burning in the oven. Smoke fills the stage, and Benny and Jeremy re-enter in K95 masks. We're transported to 2020 in the same house in the midst of the California wildfires. Benny and Jeremy are married, and they're figuring out what to bring with them in preparation for an evacuation. As they sort their belongings and try to pack fifty years of queer history into a cardboard box, they're confronted with what histories to remember and what to forget.
SPEAKERS
Kari Barclay (they/them) is a playwright, director, and theater maker interested in deepening audiences’ sense of time and sparking curiosity about sexuality and gender. Based in Cleveland, Ohio, they serve as Associate Professor of Theater at Oberlin College. Kari is a 2026 Dramatist Guild Foundation National Fellow and Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence in Playwriting awardee.
Kari's playwriting and directing has shown at Ars Nova, Cleveland Public Theatre, convergence-continuum, and Duke University, among other theaters. Kari’s original comedy Can I Hold You? was one of the first full-length plays about asexuality performed in the U.S. and enjoyed a sold-out run in San Francisco and workshop in New York. It has been taught at colleges and universities across the country and published in Marathi language translation. Kari’s play Stonewallin’ was the winner of the 2021 Southern Queer Playwriting Festival and opened at Richmond Triangle Players in February 2022.
In their other life, Kari is a theater scholar and historian. Their nonfiction book, Directing Desire, examines the rise of intimacy choreography in theater and is out now from Palgrave Macmillan. Kari earned their PhD in Theater and Performance Studies in 2021 from Stanford University, where they studied with playwright Young Jean Lee. kari-barclay.com.
Members Perks
Interested in becoming a member of the GLBT Historical Society? Members enjoy all sorts of perks, including free access to this event. Learn more.