Safe House at St. Ann’s Warehouse: A Safe House that turns into a Doll House

Walking into Safe House at St. Ann’s Warehouse, I didn’t know what to expect, but within minutes, I was completely drawn in. The young performer on stage was electrifying, Kate Gilmore—her presence crackled with emotion, switching between despair, vulnerability, and outright provocation with astonishing rhythm and volatility. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

As someone who lived in London in the early ‘90s, the raw authenticity of it all immediately struck a chord. It felt like an echo of a past I had experienced—gritty, beautiful, unsettling. And for a while, I was completely on board.

But then, something shifted. Or maybe it didn’t, and that was the problem.

The show’s musicality was striking—contemporary opera meets raw performance art—but I struggled to decipher the lyrics, which made it hard to grasp the protagonist’s journey. From what I could gather, she was an Irish woman haunted by childhood dreams of being a princess, still wearing that imagined crown into adulthood. A dangerous aspiration in a world filled with imperfect men. This seemed reinforced by fragmented video projections behind her—disjointed, evocative, but hard to piece together.

She was obviously struggling. Financially, emotionally. At one point, she found a decaying sandwich in a box, drank wine from another. There were hints of a mother, but no clear father figure. Maybe she grew up in a home for children? Birthday parties flashed by, but they weren’t exactly joyful. I kept searching for a clear story arc, a sense of who she was and where she was going, but it remained elusive.

Then, near the end, she turned to the audience. A confrontation. Were we responsible for her suffering? Were we complicit in her circumstances? It started to feel like the creators of the play were playing with a doll:

"Hey, maybe, she could take her clothes off."

"And then, she could have blood dripping from her face."

"She could open a fridge, and the barking of a dog would come out." What was that dog anyway, Cerberus?

"She could lie down in a coffin like Snow White."

"She could return to a childhood bedroom, a stage-set recreation of something lost."

These striking images were powerful, but without understanding the lyrics, they felt more like symbols floating without a clear anchor. The music was strident, the singing amplified—some audience members left, others dozed off.

Visually, the video projections were aesthetically effective, but I struggled to connect them to the protagonist’s unraveling. Was it chaos by design? A dreamscape of trauma and longing? Or was I just missing a crucial piece of the puzzle?

Safe House was a visceral experience—one I admired but couldn’t fully grasp.

Until March 2, 2025

https://stannswarehouse.org/show/safe-house/