‘Life In This House Is Over’ Explores The Intricacies Of Grief

Two writers caught Life In This House Is Over on two different nights and share their thoughts on what stuck with them after the lights came up. First up, Grapevine reporter John Rogers.

The Western world is terrible at grieving. Our structures for handling death have little to offer the living. Overpractised undertakers, anodyne crematoria, and business-as-usual funerals are a brittle facade over a roiling ocean that is always destined to break through. The thinking seems to be that a little structure might help; that bouncing through a maze of admin and services might keep us on track, when the track we knew has vanished. But for many of us, these routines are laughable — a vessel too small to contain the unfathomable agony of loss.

“Real mourning rarely happens at funerals, more often taking place in scenes of relatable dysfunction like these.”

This being the case, pain is processed in other places. Life In This House Is Over is a series of such vignettes. In the cold open, a man tries to carefully set up a row of wooden chairs, for a service, perhaps. As he does so, a distraught woman disrupts him in any way she can. She tips the chairs over, and he replaces them. She crawls beneath the legs, and he sits on them stolidly. It’s an increasingly tragicomic faceoff that the disruptor wins — in a sense. She may have sabotaged the wake, but she cannot reverse the hands of time.

Next, we join a formal dinner at the moment it goes off the rails. A toast blossoms into a drunken tirade, the speaker unravelling before our eyes. First, she praises the tables, giggling as she peels back the cloth to thump the solid wood. Next, she lavishes the attendees with praise, and lashes them with abuse; they sit stock still, paralysed by the awkwardness. The moment breaks, dissolving into a wild party with thrown drinks and dancing, until an emcee takes the microphone to apologise to the audience. “It’s just… we are suffering,” he says. “But… I understand.” The brief moment of certainty passes, and he adds, falteringly: “I think.”

The performance maintains this level of quality for 90 unbroken minutes, delivering a torrent of carefully observed and agonisingly truthful moments. In one scene, a woman sits at a table with a large cake, asking: “Can’t we just talk?” Her request shifts tone from quietly imploring, to apoplectically screamed, to tearily apologetic. When nothing seems to work, she plants her ass firmly into the cake, halting any further debate. The audience gasps, and a hitherto silent man takes the mic. “It’s just that we’ve been hurting so much,” he says, quietly. “So much, for so long.”

Real mourning rarely happens at funerals, more often than not taking place in scenes of relatable dysfunction like these. In Life In This House Is Over, small moments that would be lost are recognised, contained, and performed, like onion-skin layers of anguish. If society and religion have no truth or solace to offer our grief, this urgent, searing artwork certainly does. JR

The other half of our two-person review is by Grapevine journalist Iryna Zubenko.

Grief is a lonely feeling. It could be eating you alive, or helping you push through — and yet even the closest people to you won’t be grieving the same way or understanding exactly how you feel. It’s a soul-crushing, isolating, miserable thing.

One might think that maybe funerals, at least, could be a cheerful celebration of the passing person’s life — a party marking the end of your time on planet Earth, something that brings the community together. And yet, funerals as we know them often make the processing of grief more painful or more awkward, as Samantha Shay’s dance-theatre piece Life In This House Is Over underlines. I’m talking about open-casket funerals, borderline appropriate customs like kissing your dead grandpa at age six (let’s not go further here) — and yet never, ever, ever talking out loud how you actually feel when you lose someone.

The piece is a tragicomic exploration of grief, one that questions the logic behind what happens when your future is suddenly shattered and your life is rewritten after someone close dies. Can you move forward? What does it take to move forward? Does part of you die in that moment as well? The story is told in fragmented sequences, each exploring the rawness of this feeling of loss and grief. In one scene, a group gathers around a big table, the next moment, the room is empty, and it’s just one person talking to, perhaps, the souls that are gone. It’s a signature move of grief — more often than not, it arrives all of a sudden. At times, the roles interchange, and I don’t quite understand whether the characters are mourners or the dead themselves. Later, Samantha tells me, “I try to make a space they can inhabit, and it doesn’t have to be fully consciously understood or interpreted, more like a wash of experiences that leave their echoes on your mind, body, and spirit.  Perhaps when I read your question, I think of the times I have felt more or less alive, or closer or farther away from my vitality, the times I’ve mourned a part of myself, or a memory, or a person, or an idea that feels far away.”

“It’s a signature move of grief — more often than not, it arrives all of a sudden.”

Unfortunately, or coincidentally, I come to the performance already full of grief. Not grief because something horrible happened directly to me, but a strange, collective grief. I had just watched someone my age bury her partner, killed in a war. Social media makes news travel in mere seconds, and the same applies to grief. Did the internet make global grief of all things more accessible? The piece bottles up human suffering, but keeps my wound open, leaving a deep mark by bringing in stories that often linger in the liminal — between past and future, presence and absence, decision and indecision. The lines blur even further through the different perspectives of the characters and a “kaleidoscope of artistic influences,” including tear-jerking performances of folk songs in Bulgarian, Polish, and Ukrainian.

Though not connected, the piece makes me think of Max Porter’s 2015 novel Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, where one of the characters represents grief itself — or the myth of grief.  Samantha keeps the door wide open for interpretation, but Life In This House Is Over feels like that suspended stretch of time before death, the slow-motion period of grief, and the impossible question of what comes after. The show ends in a kind of beautiful catharsis. But if there is a next, what is it? IZ

Life In This House Is Over is by the Grotowski Institute, Teatr ZAR, and Source Material, in cooperation with the Pina Bausch Zentrum. If you’re in New York, catch it next at PS21 Chatham on August 15 & 16.