Dream Hou$e by Eliana Pipes
“One house, two sisters, and everything on the line.”
–Dream Hou$e, Eliana Pipes
I just took my first trip to Cinnabar Theater after I found out that Petaluma’s cultural treasure is about to get the heave-ho from the 1908 schoolhouse that has been their artistic home for the last fifty years. Boy, will I miss that cute old schoolhouse. It’s on a hillside. It’s red. It has goats. You catch a vibe there, a Spidey sense that you get to experience art inside walls varnished in five decades of collaboration and music and human experience. Sigh. All because their landlord is a big opera nut. Petaluma, that makes one of you. (No shade on opera nuts, though. We are all nuts for something.)
I expected to chill out and bid farewell to my favorite venue – but let me tell you, my crybaby nostalgia for vibes vanished when Eliana Pipes’ killer script and the cast of Dream Hou$e yanked me into their vortex of magical realism and incredibly funny dark comedy. Keenly directed by Mary Ann Rodgers, this production is a complete banger. After their mother’s death, the Castillo sisters Patricia and Julia (a powerful Bethany Regan and an emotionally compelling Linda Maria Girón) have offered up their ancestral home to an HGTV-style home improvement show called “Flip It & List It” in hopes of capitalizing on their gentrified neighborhood. But is it okay to cash in? Or is moving on selling out? Played with menacing perkiness by Heather Shepardson, Tessa is both a slick TV host and a manifestation of white colonization. Maybe Satan. “Name your price,” she wheedles Patricia in a stunning scene that I really can’t spoil, “It's the last sacrifice you’ll ever have to make.” Chills.
The design team is firing on all cylinders and theater magic abounds. Dream Hou$e was written for three actors and a non-speaking onstage camera crew, however the Castillo home is a highly significant character itself. Think the Giving Tree on truth serum. Skillfully lit by April George, Hector Zavala’s set defines Casa de Castillo in all its fantastical viscera, like when Frida Kahlo would paint blood and guts and it would be achingly beautiful. Costumes by Reynalda Cruz forge an immediate visual understanding of each character’s humanity – or lack thereof – especially Tessa’s exaggerated blond wig and bizarre pinks, which communicate something inhuman about her and unsettling about whiteness in general. Pretty brilliant. Mad respect for The Crew, played utterly silently with nonchalant creepiness and laser focus by Parker VonThal, John Sheridan and David Smith.
Bummer to lose that schoolhouse, but I should clarify that Cinnabar’s Dream Team Diane Dragone (Executive Director) and Nathan Cummings (Artistic / Education Director) are excitedly moving on to build a brand-new, state of the art 200-seater at the Petaluma Outlets, expected to open in fall 2025. Greener pastures and bigger parking lots. No goats though. Oh well. I am confident that their devoted subscriber base will follow them. I definitely will.
