The home has been the primary setting for theater since the Greeks. Whether we are standing in the yard before the House of Atreus to hear Agamemnon's death cry or sitting in the spotless kitchen of Willy and Linda Loman, listening to how hard it is to stretch the household budget, we are usually trespassing on someone's property. Yet all of these homes over the millennia have been created within theaters. What if the tables were turned, and theater erupted inside an actual home?

"The question that kept coming back to me was 'Would this be possible?' It certainly turns the world on its head." American actor/director Howard Lotker is discussing his novel idea, DoMa/At home over tea at the Cubist Café in Staré Město.

"It's a bit like archeology ... anthropology, too," Lotker says. "We're invited into someone's home to investigate their space, their lives, and then we create a site-specific piece of theater around what we've found that is then performed in that space."

Homes have certainly served as theatrical spaces in the past. Writer/actor Wallace Shawn has performed his monologue, The Fever, in fashionable flats throughout Manhattan for years. But the living space as stage also has a fine pedigree in Prague. In the silenced Czech theater in the 1970s, many banned theatrical artists performed in houses and flats (perhaps the most famous example was with the Macbeth staged by Pavel Kohout, starring Pavel Landovský and Vlasta Chrámostová, that served as inspiration for Tom Stoppard's play, Cahoot's Macbeth).

Lotker's inspiration for DoMa actually occurred while watching a short performance piece in the home of actress Halka Třešnáková. "As much as I was interested in her piece, I was also aware of how my fellow audience members were reacting," remembers Lotker. "People were looking around, as you do in someone else's home. What books do they read? What CDs do they listen to? What do they tell us about the people that live here? This got me thinking. What was Oedipus' house like?" DoMa was born.

Lotker came to Prague from California, where he had lived since he was 10. He received a BFA in acting from University of California, Santa Barbara, and immediately after found work in his chosen field. He made the rounds in Hollywood, and found himself in a few commercials, but he also started getting cast in regional rep houses, such as the Santa Monica Playhouse and the Utah Shakespeare Company. "I could have made a life as an itinerant rep actor in the States," says Lotker, "but I didn't really want that."

Instead, the young actor came to Prague in '95 for eight months to work with the famed but now defunct English theater group, Misery Loves Company. Lotker liked Prague, and decided to return for a bit longer. In fact, he's now put down solid roots.

Fluent in Czech, he's taught acting for two years in the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague's Theater Faculty. "They call me the Stanislavsky of Santa Barbara," Lotker laughs. "My brand of actors' training, through Stanislavsky and Sanford Meisner, is still exotic here." He also has a healthy side life as a film actor, having grabbed roles in The Knight's Tale, The Illusionist, and a clutch of WWII epics filmed in the Czech Republic. "I've also done a number of Spaghetti Easterns," he says, "though these tend to go straight to video."

Though DoMa was Lotker's very original brainchild, he would not have been able to proceed, he makes clear, without the collaboration of the actors he has surrounded himself with. After numerous conversations about the practicality of the DoMa idea, the company was ready to study and perform their first home last year. After some minor problems, the house of Divadlo Alfred ve dvoře's managing director, Ewan McLaren, was given over to the company. The DoMa group immediately went to work, studying McLaren and his family's space. "The agreement is that our hosts can tell us if something or some room is off limits," explains Lotker. "That's good, as it gives us barriers."

Their explorations done, the company settled down to create its interpretation of the McLaren household. Once having rehearsed within the house, the premiere of DoMa was ready. The success of the evening was startling. One of the invited audience members approached Lotker afterward to invite the troupe to his house to have a rifle about. It's an intriguing theatrical idea — one of those "Why didn't I think of it?" revelations for its marvelous simplicity. It's also a piece of theater that, as writer Edna O'Brien said of fiction, "allows us to sample others' fates."

The connection with Alfred ve dvoře's McLaren (who was also a former member of Misery Loves Company) also bears fruit, as all of the DoMa performances are captured on video by Lotker, which are then shown at Alfred ve dvoře as part of very entertaining, interactive nights of theater in ... a theater. Some artifacts from the performance space are on hand, as are, usually, the owners of the homes. The evening I attended at Alfred, Feb. 23, members of the Lipert family, who had given over their panelák flat for the DoMa cause, were there brewing tea and frying up some rather delicious palačinky.

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Howard Lotker inviting me to a DoMa event that was to be held in a bar in Staré Město. The invitation stated that audience members were to meet their "guide" under the clock in Old Town Square, just where every other guided tour starts. There were 15 of us, and our guide was a DoMa actress that I met at the event at Alfred ve dvoře, Monika Černošková. She wore a mic and small amp and commanded us to follow her toward our destination. En route, she fed us a number of false histories on the square, as well as revealed hurtful incidents from her recently shattered love life.

Our destination was Caffrey's Irish Pub, which the DoMa crew had taken over at the behest of the owner, Frank Naughton, another former audience member, who wanted DoMa to dig around in his space. This was a departure for the troupe; up until now it had only performed in houses and flats. The other difference was that the pub was full of regulars and tourists who hadn't been properly prepared for starring in a site-specific piece of theater.

With a few exceptions, it was impossible to tell who were Caffrey's employees and who were the undercover DoMa actors. Drinks were served and not served, waitresses broke down and had to leave the floor, and the clientele were invited to write "truthful" letters to their bosses, which the pub would then post on. It was chaotic, mad and highly enjoyable. "Prague is so interesting," an Irish woman was heard laughing. Lotker moved about the pub as if he were the host, which, in a way, he was. He was certainly an active directorial presence.