We like filling you in about new developments in garage doors and garage door openers, but we know that all that talk can get a little dry. Even still, the garage is one of the most iconic rooms in a home, and even just a mention of “garage door” gives you an instant image of what a garage looks like. Everyone knows that garages are used for parking cars, storing sports equipment, practicing with your band, or plying a trade like woodworking or auto repair. But despite how garages are typically typecast, they can be used for so much more – such as this Los Angeles-area garage that is the stage for a new and innovative play, “In Case of Emergency”.

Chalk Repertory, a theater company shaking things up in LA, is using a garage as the scene for their latest location-based production, which follows two sisters and their professional disaster preparedness expert as they deal with an approaching crisis while trapped inside their garage. What makes “In Case of Emergency” different from other productions is the fact that it is performed in a garage – an actual garage, in an actual home, with actual people living there!

Each performance, the residential garage door will raise to reveal the real mess of the host home, and Chalk Repertory wants the authenticity of the space to play an active role in the performance. The audience will watch the semi-improvisational performance from outside the garage door, as if they were looking in to the lives of normal people. The intimacy of the gathering serves to involve the audience in the events of the stage, a craft that the minds behind Chalk Repertory have previously honed in a downtown high-rise, an open house, and the Museum of Natural History.

This is certainly a unique idea, but the garage door can be used for so many things! Have you ever used your residential garage door (or the garage itself) for something unusual? A Plus wants to know about what you do with your garage door, so feel free to post about it in the comments section below!

Photo used in the blog header by Jim Carmody.