Fuse Theatre collaborates with Docktown community in creation of new play in Redwood City to premiere in October 2017.

Fuse Theatre is excited to announce a collaboration with the Docktown Community in Redwood City to create a new play based on the experiences of the residents and the five year battle to save their unique waterborne homes from eviction.  

Fuse/Docktown Project:

Established over the last fifty years, Docktown is comprised of a collection of houseboats and floating homes on Redwood Creek in Redwood City, near the San Francisco Bay.  The residents are of varied backgrounds, but all face a common threat to the future existence of their community.

Fuse Theatre is working with members of the Docktown Community to create a new play that will allow its members to tell their own story.  The play will not merely reflect its current legal predicament, but its long history and, we hope, the spirit of its residents.

In the story of Docktown, several compelling themes overlap with one another to reflect the complex web of factors that manifest in the Bay Area and beyond as ‘the housing crisis’.  The unrelenting rise of property values in Redwood City combined with the economic pressures being placed on this small community, whose occupants live abord flaoting homes, threatens to dismantle the way of life enjoyed there for the last fifty years.

Since April, Fuse Theatre actors/facilitators Stacey Ardelean, Courtney Grile and Bethany Lahammer have let the community through story cirlce and writingi/acting workshops with playwright Lane Pianta.  By diving into the relationships between different members of the Docktown community, this new work will examine the question: what is home and who gets to decide?  In a series of eight workshops, over thirty community members participated to tell their story from a personal perspective.  They witnessed the first staged reading in June of this work-in-progress and provided feedback.

Auditions were held in August including members of the Docktown community alongside professional and semi-professional actors.  Stacey Ardelean will direct this play on site.  This play is supported in part through a CA$H grant awarded by Theatre Bay Area.