A real yard sale and a real theatre play.
The central experiment of ROMANOV FAMILY YARD SALE was formal: to make a real play and a real yard sale occupy the same event. The production was not a play pretending to be a yard sale, or a yard sale used as decorative theatrical business. It had to function as both: a fully realized theatre work and an actual yard sale, with objects, prices, bargaining, spectators, performers, and transactions all operating inside the same frame.
That formal collision gave the work its politics without requiring the production to behave like a thesis. The Romanovs, capitalism, nostalgia, inheritance, family mythology, and historical violence were not only represented; they were put under pressure by the practical reality of selling things in the room. The audience was asked to watch, shop, interpret, and participate in a structure where performance, religion, American patriotism, and transaction could not be separated. That tension between performance and transaction, fiction and function, and the tragic-farcical spectacle of survival became the engine of the piece, culminating in the screening of a real Moviefilm: THE LAST OF THE ROMANOVS.
(left to right) Ellie Schwetye as Little Yelena ,Cassidy Flynn as Rasputin, Miranda Jagels Felix as Aunt Baboushka, Chrissie Watkins as Doty, Rachel Tibbetts as Big Yelena, and Alicen Moser as Pig Bat in Act II.