Walking into the Foundry Theatre’s production of Aaron Landsman’s “Open House” will feel like walking into someone else’s living room — because you will be walking into someone else’s living room. This won’t be the result of brilliant set design — it will stem from the fact that the play is actually taking place in a different person’s New York City apartment each evening of its run — 24 apartments in all, beginning February 9.

“I am really interested in theatricalizing spaces where everyone goes every day. There is incredible dramatic tension there,” Mr. Landsman said. “You could do it in a theater but I think the envelopment of someone’s apartment makes the stakes higher.”

“Open House,” which explores the economic and social challenges of living within New York City, grew out of a 2006 public dialogue series the Foundry hosted entitled Food/Water/Shelter. “It was a very depressing series of panels because we couldn’t figure out how to make living here work better for people without a lot of money,” the director of “Open House” and the head of Foundry, Melanie Joseph, lamented. “The only way we could think of to make ourselves feel better was to make art.”

Originally, Mr. Landsman wanted to bring Foundry a home-based work he had done in Texas, but the group instead commissioned him to do this new piece, based on Ms. Joseph’s idea that the play would be presented in multiple homes and areas throughout the five boroughs. Between February 9 and March 16, “Open House” will travel from the tip of the Bronx to the edge of Brooklyn, every night hitting a new place. All the show’s props are contained in a bag and its limited technical effects come from a laptop.

“We are doing it this way because it’s about celebrating the city,” Mr. Landsman told The New York Sun. “People are naturally curious about other people’s homes and neighborhoods. That is thrilling.”

The Foundry found its “stages” by sending out inquiries to its audience list. According to Ms. Joseph, the response was overwhelming, so not all volunteers were accepted. Living rooms that could not accommodate an audience of 10 or more were eliminated immediately. Ms. Joseph and her team then tried to insure heterogeneity when establishing their final list. “We are not doing this in a bunch of artists’ homes,” she said. “We’re doing it in other people’s homes who love theater. And we wanted to make sure that there was a huge diversity of renters and owners and of socioeconomic class.”

Walking into “Open House,” audience members will be greeted by one of the play’s three characters, a real estate agent named Three (portrayed by Raul Castillo). He will hand attendees a form, asking basic information (name, address, etc.) and four questions: What do you love most about the city? What would you do to stay in the city? Do you have an exit strategy? How is your neighborhood changing? As audience members scribble away, Three will walk around commenting on the answers, raising issues echoed in the written script. Then two actors (Heidi Schreck and Paul Willis), playing a young couple, will recount their New York love story. When their tale winds down, Three will return with his big real estate sales pitch, and it will soon becomes clear that something catastrophic has happened in the city since the romantic tale just enacted.

Each evening’s performance is tailored to the neighborhood in which it is taking place, with details drawn from factual research and prior discussions with the venue’s inhabitants.

“I was myself surprised at what I felt most compelled to talk about,” art historian Yvonne Rubin, a longtime Foundry supporter who volunteered her Upper East Side apartment, said. Ms. Rubin told the Foundry team about a grocery deliveryman who she still spots in her area even though the supermarket he worked for went out of business. “This story summed up some of the incredible tensions in this neighborhood between people who really don’t quite have a place to go and the people that have so many terrific places to go,” she explained.

Just how this story — and others of its kind — will fit into “Open House” and the general discussion it hopes to engender remains to be seen. It will be enough for the Foundry if people attend curious and leave questioning.

“This is not a prescriptive play — we don’t know what to do,” Ms. Joseph said. “There is nothing about the downtrodden and the enemy. The feeling of wanting to look through the window into somebody’s apartment is very much a part of the dramaturgy of this. But it’s about asking what the city means and is.”