Stage adaptations of books, movies and even music albums are nothing new. But this spring Christina Rosales ’11 brought an unusual production to Northwestern’s Wirtz Center Chicago: a stage adaptation of a video game.
Dot’s Home Live is a theatrical production based on the 2021 award-winning video game Dot’s Home, which Rosales co-created to raise awareness about housing injustice. In the game, you play as Dot Hawkins, a young Black woman living in Detroit who travels back in time to see how racist housing policies have affected her family over generations. Dot’s family members face difficult choices: Stay put in a crumbling apartment complex or leave a beloved community behind in search of better housing? The choices often feel like lose-lose situations. But as Dot, you must advise her family one way or another — and those decisions change the fate of their community, as well as the game’s outcome.
The game, which is free to play, was well received, says Rosales, who is the housing and land justice director at the nonprofit PowerSwitch Action. But playing the game is a solitary experience. “I wanted to bring Dot’s story into a space where people can grapple with housing justice issues together,” she says. “So I worked with a team to adapt the game script for the stage.”
The jump from screen to stage was a bit tricky, says Rosales, who partnered with Detroit-based theater company A Host of People to produce the show. “We needed a mechanism to help the audience make decisions collectively. So we made a new character called 4D who acts as a game show host and narrator.”
The character 4D (played by Chris Jakob, front center) pauses the action onstage and asks the audience to help Dot’s family make an important housing decision in the play Dot’s Home Live. Photo by Shane Collins.
As the name suggests, 4D breaks the fourth wall by “pausing” the action onstage when Dot is faced with a difficult decision and asking the audience what Dot should do.
“When you watch a show, typically you’re just spectating. You’re not part of it,” Rosales says. But in Dot’s Home Live, the audience plays an active role in deciding how the show progresses — and how it ends. No two performances have gone quite the same way, says Rosales, and that’s part of the fun.
When the show premiered in Detroit in summer 2023, “the audience was gasping and yelling and booing at the villain, and it was really fun,” she says.
Rosales brought the show to Northwestern’s Wirtz Center Chicago in June 2024, and to Nashville, Tenn., in July. The experience was extremely rewarding, she says.
Christina Rosales ’11 (back row, third from left) stands beside the cast on the set of Dot’s Home Live in the Wirtz Center Chicago. See full cast list here. Photo by Shane Collins.
“Folks who never would have played the game Dot’s Home came to the show and were really responsive to it. They were able to see the systemic arc of how we got here, how Black people have lost generations of wealth because of racist housing practices.
“People grappled with the decisions and talked about how the story really clarified how limiting our choices are for housing, especially for people of color,” says Rosales. “It was a good way to talk about PowerSwitch Action’s campaign work for community-controlled housing for all.”
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