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Jonathan Franzen essay on settling his mother’s estate becomes a quirky reverie

BY MICHAEL SOMMERS

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

OFF BROADWAY REVIEW

“House for Sale” is Daniel Fish’s adaptation and staging of an essay by Jonathan Franzen from his 2006 memoir, “The Discomfort Zone.” The thoughtful piece relates how Franzen dealt—not especially well—with selling his boyhood home in suburban St. Louis following the death of his mother.

Franzen’s essay not only concerns the vagaries of real estate but also the rueful family memories this experience evoked for the writer, especially a dreary trip to Disneyworld in which glumly spinning on a merry-go-round suggests the downside of the Greatest Generation whose 1950s-60s-70s middle-class American dreams never turned out like they hoped.

A melancholy work, “House for Sale” is now theatricalized as an offbeat event presented by Transport Group Theatre Company, which opened on Wednesday at The Duke on 42nd Street.

How best to describe this 85-minute reverie? For starters, Fish has arranged the essay so that certain passages are repeated in a sort of chorale treatment by five actors. Sometimes they sing the words to music composed by Polly Pen – a syrupy theme for the Disneyworld sequence is particularly effective – and other times they split the text in various ways among themselves. They shout, mumble, whisper and babble. They jog in place, they droop on chairs, they sprawl on the floor.

The visuals and staging are similarly quirky.

The stark scenic design by Laura Jellinek bares The Duke’s utilitarian stage except for a few rows of black folding chairs, a spinet organ, a lectern and, in the foreground, a long expanse of wall, covered with tasteful beige wallpaper and studded with a flat-screen TV, that stretches horizontally across the floor like a modest platform. Projections glow against the back wall, although the primary image is the smiling face of a pretty blond woman, circa early 1960s, who ostensibly represents Franzen’s mother back then.