By: Jim Manley
When The Porch on Windy Hill opens at Urban Stages on September 12, audiences will be greeted not with a brassy Broadway overture but with the plaintive strains of Appalachian, Bluegrass, and Old Time tunes—music that feels at once ancient and familiar, yet startlingly alive inside a contemporary play.
The “new play with old music,” as its creators call it, began life not in a rehearsal studio but on Zoom screens during the first year of the pandemic. “It grew from an idea of mine,” says Sherry Stregack Lutken, who conceived and directs the piece, “a kind of camera obscura of the world around me and the events of 2020 and 2021.” Those years of lockdown were also years of unrest, marked by racial violence and bitter political division. “I had long conversations with one of my closest childhood friends, who is biracial, about her experiences—what had changed and what hadn’t,” Lutken recalls.
Out of those conversations, Lutken, Lisa Helmi Johanson, Morgan Morse, and David Lutken began shaping a story of a biracial Korean American woman, Mira, who reconnects with her estranged Appalachian grandfather through music, memory, and uneasy truths. The writing process was democratic but hardly effortless. “Collaboration meant four points of view on everything from themes and metaphors to a single word,” the team notes. “At its best, it was a way of learning lessons—large and small—by means of honest communication through imaginary characters and situations.”
The songs—“Down in the Valley,” “Pretty Polly,” “Mole in the Ground”—aren’t decorative. They’re the marrow of the piece. The creators wanted music that was “intrinsic rather than performative,” allowing actor-musicians to reveal character through the instruments in their hands. “The simplicity and straightforwardness of folk and traditional music is a direct emotional path into our collective consciousness,” they explain. “The audience may not know these songs, but something about them feels familiar.”
In the play, the songs unlock conversations that might otherwise remain buried. “All three characters have difficulty communicating about their common story,” they note. “The songs they resort to, which seem so much easier than talking, guide each of them to the doorway of the conversations they long for, however reluctantly.”
The show was conceived in April 2021 and had its first full performance that September in Ivoryton, Connecticut—a lightning-fast turnaround. In the years since, it has toured the country, shifting subtly as the cultural moment itself shifted. “When we started, the play was set in the present,” they say. “That present has become the past, and that distance enables us to see many aspects more clearly.”
Photo Courtesy: Sherry Stregack Lutken & Lisa Helmi Johanson
Creative Team
Photo Courtesy: Morgan Morse & David M. Lutken
Creative Team
Now, arriving in New York, the creators hope audiences recognize themselves in Mira’s story. “Every person, like every song, is a combination of influences, with ancestors and forebears, all unique, and with the same root effects,” Johanson reflects. “The goal has been to bring our small story, and the music within it, into sharper focus—honestly, and with compassion.”
At its heart, The Porch on Windy Hill is a family drama about reconciliation, but the creators are candid about its broader stakes. “Our country—our world—as a very large, complicated family is in need of reconciliation and understanding,” Lutken says. “We’ve stumbled and picked ourselves back up more than once. That’s an important part of the process.”
The show’s exploration of legacy—musical, cultural, personal—is less about enshrining the past than accepting and building upon it. “Legacy is often paired with rigidity,” they say. “On stage, it plays out in the understanding that we all decide what we bring along with us, that we can honor it while being true to ourselves.”
For all its weighty themes, the creators insist the evening should also be joyous, even communal. They imagine audiences leaving Urban Stages humming, yes, but also reflecting. “Music is a portal through which we can see each other’s humanity,” they say. “Hearing these characters make music together, we hope people feel the joy of community and belonging—and realize that that feeling should continue when the music stops.”
Asked to distill their work into one sentence, the team turns to the 17th-century playwright William Congreve: “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.” But they add a crucial postscript: “Then we must act. We must talk. We must not do nothing.”
As for what comes after New York, the creators are optimistic. “We’d like to see it continue and thrive, to see how other performers and audiences will interpret it,” they say. “There’s a lot yet to be discovered.”
For now, though, the porch is open. And on Windy Hill, the old songs are waiting to be heard anew.
The cast features Tora Nogami Alexander, David M. Lutken, and Morgan Morse. The creative team includes scenic design by Andrew Robinson, lighting design by John Salutz, sound design by Sun Hee Kil, costume design by Grace Jeon, and the production stage manager is Leigh Selting.
Tickets and more information about The Porch on Windy Hill can be found at www.urbanstages.org. Urban Stages is located in NYC at 259 W 30th St, NYC.
