Review: In The Porch on Windy Hill, Bluegrass Heals a Broken Family

Music brings us together seems like an eyeroll-worthy cliché, but it’s true. How could it not be when the music I’m streaming on my phone at this moment is the product of generations of listening and reinventing as today’s artists build on the sounds that came before? Music is a social endeavor, intimately tied to memory and community.

The Porch on Windy Hill, now performing a return engagement at Urban Stages, styles itself as “a new play with old music.” The shifting harmony and occasional dissonance between new and old make this show an unexpectedly gripping drama, in addition to being a delightful showcase for bluegrass.

It’s about Mira (Tora Nogami Alexander) and Beck (Morgan Morse), a young couple touring Appalachia for his doctoral dissertation on American folk music. Mira spent her early life in Windy Hill, a small community in the shadow of the Black Mountains of North Carolina. Imagine her surprise when she and Beck arrive at the local hootenanny and discover her estranged grandpa, Edgar (David M. Lutken), picking away at his banjo (sound designer Sun Hee Kil impressively fills in the party around him).

The rest of the play takes place on Edgar’s porch, where the sound of ice clinking in tall glasses of tea underscores what everyone can feel is a tense reunion. Mira has not seen this man for 18 years, and we learn the details of why over the course of the next two hours. We can immediately discern from the way Mira cringes at Edgar’s disdain for the Japanese parts in their old hippie van that it has something to do with her Korean father, who married Edgar’s daughter Ruth and moved his young family to New York all those years ago. But by the grace of Beck’s encyclopedic knowledge and inexhaustible love of American music, an unlikely jam session emerges.

They start with a lively rendition of “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane,” which allows Beck to show off his impressive mandolin skills as Mira hesitantly fiddles, somewhat softening Edgar’s hard Appalachian exterior. Of course, the Yankee academic cannot help but chase the song with a footnote about its origins as a blackface minstrel number.

“So are you telling me I can’t sing that song anymore?,” Edgar asks, dry as an oak leaf in November. The play (co-written by Lutken, Morse, Lisa Helmi Johanson, and director Sherry Stregack Lutken) takes place in spring 2021, and we can always feel pandemic-era social fissures bubbling beneath the stiffly cordial dialogue.

Beck is most interested in the music as a living organism, how successive waves of immigrants shaped the sound of America, and how it risks becoming “rigid” and “insular” without further evolution. But for Edgar it represents continuity, a culture that persists despite the recent arrival of foreign workers and rich urbanites with second homes. Mira wonders aloud, in a tone pregnant with unresolved pain, what guys like Edgar are doing to invite the newcomers into that music.

Everyone’s perspectives and motives are crystal clear under Stregack Lutken’s direction, which is as practical and sturdy as an old house. As the dorky boyfriend, Morse brings genuine golden retriever energy to his performance, pulling his leash-holding co-stars forward whether their characters want it or not. It makes for a hilarious contrast with Lutken’s reserved Edgar, an old widower who, we get the sense, hasn’t talked this much in years. As Mira, Alexander deftly straddles the border between defensiveness and nostalgia. A joyful singing voice and errant “y’all” let us know how much this place once meant to her, but she’s not sure she’s ready to reopen a chapter that she long thought was closed, and which ended with sadness.

But it’s impossible not to smile when all three of these excellent actor-musicians dance up and down the porch steps to “Sail Away Ladies” like merry pirates. The resourceful arrangements (by the playwrights) and excellent musical performances (Lutken also serves as music director) make this a real bluegrass party just south of Penn Station.

Andrew Robinson’s set transports an authentic old-timey front porch to the intimate stage on 30^th Street, complete with peeling yellow paint and a creaky spring in the screen door. John Salutz conjures a gorgeous mountain sunset, bathing the stage in moody indigo just in time for Mira to sing a short chorus of “My Horses Ain’t Hungry.” Grace Jeon’s costumes subtly expose the divide between Brooklyn hipster wear and working man denim, while Edgar’s Vietnam Veteran hat tells the story of a man whose first experience of Asians was in a war zone, long before a word is spoken on the matter.

But they do eventually talk about it, and so much more. A family drama brimming with heart and music, The Porch on Windy Hill is the kind of play that leaves you with hope that the things that divide us might be bridged by the bridge of a good song.