Floor Play: Architect Porn Hits the Stage
The best part about Modernist houses is that you can totally see the sleekly-clad couple inside having passionless, clothed sex on their Le Corbusier chaise lounge. Used to be you'd have to hide out in the Connecticut bushes of some suburb for such a sight, but now, you'll be able to take in the sweatless sex on stage. "The Glass House," a new play by June Finfer, written about by Paul Goldberger in the New Yorkers' Talk of the Town, will bring (like it or not!) hot archisex to Lincoln Center's Rose Theater.
The plot dares the audience to look on with lust and apathy as:
Edith Farnsworth falls in love with Mies, hires him to build what would turn out to be a house of sublime beauty, and then becomes enraged as costs soared and the architect, with the house nearly complete, withdraws from their relationship and returns to his longtime girlfriend, Lora Marx, but not before refusing to allow Farnsworth to bring her own furniture and art into the house, insisting that they would destroy the purity of his design. Farnsworth banned him from the house, whereupon he sued her for unpaid fees, and she countersued, claiming that the building was defective. Mies won the suit, but never again visited the house.
A timeless story and, if one substitutes "the child" for "house," one that describes 51% of America's fractured upbringing. —Josh