Performance Comes Home: Broken Bone Bathtub and the Future of Domestic Theater

Broken Bone Bathtub and the Future of Domestic Theater I t's 7:40 p.m., and your back is pressed against someone else's bathroom wall.The tile's slick with sweat from the back of your neck.Your knee is touching the knee of a stranger, who may or may not be a stranger anymore, having just disclosed his recent divorce while washing the hair of performer Siobhn O'Loughlin.O'Loughlin facilitates the conversation from the bathtub.She has been in the tub for forty minutes now, nude and submerged in bubbles.That stranger-not-stranger is sitting on the toilet lid, and you're squeezed with seven others into the remaining space.You're thinking that if O'Loughlin asks you a question, you will absolutely answer it honestly."You might have been to a show at someone's house-maybe a concert in the living room.But have you ever been to a show in someone's bathroom?"O'Loughlin asked me in a recent exchange.Her one-woman show, Broken Bone Bathtub, traveled to bathtubs around the world between 2015 and 2019.Opening private homes to public audiences, it launched in Tokyo and toured from US cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, and Madison to Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Australia.An evening of guided conversation between performer and audience, the one-hour show tells the story of a broken arm O'Loughlin sustained and the way she then built a care network across New York City by using friends' bathtubs.It "had to take place in a bathtub," she told me."Since the performance is about people helping me when I was injured by inviting me to their homes . . . it allows for an endless cycle of reciprocity and generosity for it to be so very site specific."Broken Bone Bathtub never officially closed, going dormant in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, returning for private audiences as well as in documentary form in 2024.Both the show and the documentary remain available for booking.Last October, I joined the audience during the final weekend of public documentary screenings held in Baltimore at the headquarters of the immersive theater collective Submersive Productions.I entered the screening without much context, which meant that O'Loughlin's signature sincerity, both artistically and relationally, hit me with full force.Though O'Loughlin is currently based in Los Angeles, she chose to end the documentary tour in Baltimore to invite her family: she's