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Multimedia fanfare puts a face on foreclosure

Posted on | October 5, 2011 | 1,157 views | 1 Comment

Wex collaboration, HOUSE/DIVIDED, brings home the housing crisis

By Julia Harris

Eve Marie Wendzicki is a smart, capable, accomplished woman. Now a graduate assistant enrolled in Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business in the MBA program, with an expected graduation next June, she’s poised to launch into a successful career.

Not so very long ago, however, her life looked quite a bit more bleak.

“I lost my job in 2009 and found myself on the job market unexpectedly, a single woman who owned a home bought with no money down,” Wendzicki recalled, sitting on a shaded bench in the courtyard adjacent to Fisher Hall.

“I was the classic example of someone who bought into the idea that everyone deserves a home, the bank doesn’t need 20 percent down, it’s the American Dream.” she added with a bitter laugh. “With a full-time job, that was fine, I could stay current. But when you’re unemployed, when you’re marginalized like that, you’re pushed to the outskirts of society and your options become very limited.”

Despite cutting back on every non-essential expense she could, and taking a series of lower paying and part-time jobs, her home ended up in foreclosure.

“I think a lot of people feel that the folks who get into this situation are irresponsible,” Wendzicki said. “Well, I wasn’t. There’s a lot of humiliation and emotion tied up in it. It’s one thing if you’re 26 and you have to go back and live with your parents; it’s another if you’re almost 40.”

She finally sold the house for a loss and counts herself lucky to be rid of the burden. She also says she’ll think long and hard before buying property again.

Wendzicki’s story might well have remained untold — she’s not someone who tends to trumpet her own misfortune — if it weren’t for a workshop held last October, during which members of New York theater group the Builders Association came to campus seeking input for a new multimedia production they were developing about the foreclosure crisis in America.

The scaffolding of this production, titled HOUSE/DIVIDED, is the bleak Depression-era landscape of John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath, in which a dispossessed Oklahoma family follows a ragged hope to California for a better life. The play, which has its world premier Oct. 6-8 at the Drake Center’s Thurber Theater, interweaves this family’s struggles as they make their way west with stories from our contemporary foreclosure crisis, unfolding in an accelerated, media-saturated era. These stories of today will focus on houses themselves, serving as a lens to view their various inhabitants, evictees and squatters.

The Builders, who have a long history with the Wexner Center and have been supported in this work by a Wexner Center Residency Award and a Creative Campus Innovations grant, hosted a series of information-gathering conversations with faculty and students from departments all over the university.

“They had two sessions at the business school, said they wanted to know if we had any insights into what happened and how this came to be, and if we knew anybody going through it,” Wendzicki said.

She grinned. “I said, ‘Well, I’m going through it!’”

According to Katherine Bennett, assistant professor in the Knowlton School of Architecture, we are all going through it — even if we don’t personally have a home in foreclosure. “We’re all touched by it. The current crisis is changing how and where we live, eat, sleep, think, operate and express ourselves,” she said. “It redefines everything. Redefinition is creative, though also frequently painful.”

As part of her own interaction with The Builders, Bennett took members of the group to visit urban farms and “guerilla gardens” in Cleveland and worked with them to conceptualize the HOUSE/DIVIDED set design. Her work with the Weinland Park neighborhood adjacent to campus helped color in the residential landscape and context of the production.

“This extended collective access to artists who are reshaping the terrain of performance has been engrossing,” she said.

The Wexner Center’s Charles Helm, director of Performing Arts, echoes Bennett’s enthusiasm for wide-ranging collaboration. “It’s been terrific working with the Builders Association and my academic colleagues across campus to design HOUSE/DIVIDED, and even more fascinating to watch it unfold here.”

For Wendzicki, the process has been nothing short of cathartic. “I learned through this how wasteful I was and how I took things for granted,” she said. “I learned how insulated and isolated I was from the typical standard of living for most Ohioans. You learn humility pretty quickly.”

if you go…

The Builders Association HOUSE / DIVIDED runs 8 p.m. Oct. 6-8, Thurber Theatre, Drake Center. $15 members, $10 students, $18 general public.

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