THE LUCK OF THE IRISH Electronic Press Kit

PRESS KIT

The Luck of the Irish Press Release..............................................................................................................................................2 Useful Links.........................................................................................................................................................................................7 Photo Library..................................................................................................................................................................................... 8 Boston Globe Feature: “Home in Black and White” .............................................................................................................10 Selections from Spotlight and the program ............................................................................................................................ 11

Contact: Rebecca Curtiss, Communication Manager 617 273 1537 rcurtiss@huntingtontheatre.bu.edu Coming Up Next: Private Lives performances begin Friday, May 25th 8pm Avenue of the Arts / BU Theatre

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Rebecca Curtiss, rcurtiss@huntingtontheatre.bu.edu / 617 273 1537 PHOTOS: huntingtontheatre.org/news/photo-library (see instructions at the bottom of this release)

March 6, 2012

“THE LUCK OF THE IRISH,” A NEW PLAY EXPLORING BOSTON RACE RELATIONS AND THE UNIVERSAL LONGING FOR HOME, BEGINS AT HUNTINGTON THEATRE COMPANY MARCH 30 WHAT Huntington Theatre Company premieres The Luck of the Irish, a new play by Huntington Playwriting Fellow Kirsten Greenidge about the complex impact of racial integration in Boston and the universal longing for home. Obie Award winner Melia Bensussen directs.

WHEN March 30 – April 29, 2012 Evenings: Tues. – Thurs. at 7:30pm; Fri. – Sat. at 8pm; Select Sun. at 7pm Matinees: Select Wed., Sat., and Sun. at 2pm Days and times vary; see complete schedule at end of release.

Press Opening: Wednesday, April 11, 7pm. RSVP online at huntingtontheatre.org/news.

WHERE Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA, 527 Tremont Street, Boston – South End

TICKETS Single tickets start at $25. FlexPass subscriptions are also on sale:  online at huntingtontheatre.org;  by phone at 617 266 0800, or  in person at the BU Theatre Box Office, 264 Huntington Ave. and the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA Box Office, 527 Tremont St. in Boston’s South End. $5 off: seniors $10 off: subscribers and BU community (faculty/staff/alumni) $25 “35 Below” tickets for patrons 35 years old and younger (valid ID required) $15 student and military tickets (valid ID required)

(BOSTON) – The Huntington Theatre Company presents Huntington Playwriting Fellow Kirsten Greenidge’s The Luck of the Irish, a compelling new play that illuminates aspects of the hidden racial and social situations of 1950s Boston and their lingering presence fifty years later. Melia Bensussen, director of the Huntington’s 2010 production of Circle Mirror Transformation, returns. The ensemble cast includes Nikkole Salter (last seen in the Huntington’s Stick Fly) as Lucy Taylor and local favorites Marianna Bassham (Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s The Hotel Nepenthe ) and Nancy E. Carroll (Present Laughter and Brendan at the Huntington) as Patti Ann Donovan across two generations.

The story of The Luck of the Irish spans two time periods and three generations. In the late 1950s, Lucy and Rex Taylor, a well-to-do African-American couple living in Boston’s South End, aspire to move to a nearby suburb to provide a better life for their two daughters. Unable to purchase a home in a segregated neighborhood themselves, they pay Patty Ann and Joe Donovan, a struggling Irish family to “ghost-buy” the house on their behalf and then sign over the deed. Fifty years later, Lucy’s granddaughter Hannah lives in the house with her family, where she grapples with the contemporary racial and social issues that stem from living in a primarily white community. When Lucy dies and leaves the house to Hannah and her sister Nessa, the now elderly Donovans return and ask for “their” house back. This complex yet intimate new play examines the long-term emotional costs of racial integration in Boston and the universal longing for a sense of place.

“Kirsten’s play speaks so deeply to me of how hard some of us have to work to earn a sense of home and of belonging,” says Bensussen. “It is so specific its particulars, but it really resonates so much for us all because it speaks to that struggle of belonging and feeling you’ve earned something, particularly if you’ve come from any kind of a history that’s more complicated that meets the eye. That’s what makes the resonance of Kristen’s play so extraordinary.”

“The Luck of the Irish tells an extremely personal story while revealing a hidden part of Boston’s history,” says Huntington Artistic Director Peter DuBois. “In this, the Huntington’s 30th Anniversary Season, Kirsten’s play provides us with the opportunity to explore and celebrate our rich history as we also look to our future by producing new work by our talented Playwriting Fellows.”

“The Luck of the Irish is inherently a Boston story,” says Greenidge. “It is also, in my thinking, cousin (perhaps distant, but that’s okay as long as I’m at the dinner table somehow) to the works Mr. [August] Wilson was able to develop at the Huntington decades ago.”

Greenidge is a direct inheritor of playwright Wilson’s legacy. At age twelve, she was inspired to become a playwright while attending a student matinee of the Huntington’s production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. “I looked down onto that proscenium stage and saw, for the first time, an African-American story that simultaneously challenged and affirmed what I knew about how black people fit into the cultural landscape that is America,” Greenidge recalls.

“Previously I had wanted to write novels, but my notions of how black characters fit into American literature melted quickly into the gilt that surrounds the Huntington’s main stage when I sat in that theatre on a gray and rainy day.

For the first time in my life I saw black people on stage who were there to tell stories. Complicated stories.

Rhythmical stories. Stories that were at once proud, true, painful, and funny.”

Kirsten Greenidge (Playwright) is a Huntington Playwriting Fellow and the author of the plays Bossa Nova, Milk Like Sugar, Rust, The Curious Walk of the Salamander, Sans-Culottes in the Promised Land, 103 Within the Veil, and The

Gibson Girl. She has developed her work at Sundance (Utah and Ucross), Magic Theatre, National New Play Network, Cardinal Stage, South Coast Repertory, Madison Rep, Page 73, Hourglass, Bay Area Playwrights, Playwrights Horizons, New Dramatists, The Mark Taper Forum, A.S.K., Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, Guthrie Theater, Mixed Blood, McCarter Theatre, Humana Festival of New American Plays, Moxie, and New Georges. She is the recipient of an NEA/TCG residency at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and a residency at Boston’s Company One. She has also received Sundance’s Time Warner Award for Bossa Nova and a commission from Yale Repertory Theatre. Ms. Greenidge attended Wesleyan University and the Playwrights Workshop/University of Iowa, and is a member of New Dramatists and Rhombus. Greenidge is a part of an accomplished and acclaimed group of Huntington Playwriting Fellows to be produced by the Huntington including Lydia R. Diamond (Stick Fly), Ronan Noone (The Atheist, Brendan), Melinda Lopez (Sonia Flew), Sinan Ünel (The Cry of the Reed), Rebecca Maggor (Shakespeare’s Actresses in America), Ryan Landry (Psyched), and Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro (Before I Leave You).

Melia Bensussen (Director) previously directed Circle Mirror Transformation at the Huntington. She is the recipient of an Obie Award for Outstanding Direction and has directed extensively around the country where she has worked on classics and collaborated with many of America’s leading playwrights. Her directing credits include work with Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Actors’ Shakespeare Project, La Jolla Playhouse, Baltimore Centerstage, Hartford Stage, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, New York Shakespeare Festival, MCC Theater, Primary Stages, Long Wharf Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and People’s Light and Theatre Company, where she received a Barrymore Award nomination for Best Direction, and many others. She has received two Directing Awards by the Princess Grace Foundation, USA, including their top honor, the Statuette Award for Sustained Excellence in Directing. Ms. Bensussen is chair of the performing arts department at Emerson College.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS The cast includes:  Marianna Bassham (Patty Ann): The Hotel Nepenthe (Actors’ Shakespeare Project); Blackbird (SpeakEasy Stage Company, Elliot Norton Award);  Nancy E. Carroll (Mrs. Donovan): Present Laughter (Broadway and the Huntington, Elliot Norton Award); Brendan (Huntington Theatre Company, Elliot Norton Award);  Antoine Gray, Jr. (Miles) – alternating;  Francesca Choy-Kee (Hannah Davis): Letters to the End of the World (Studio Theatre), Bossa Nova (Yale Repertory Theatre);  Shalita Grant (Nessa Charles): The Philanderer (Pearl Theatre Company); Measure for Measure (The Public Theater);  Jahmeel Mack (Miles) – alternating;  Curtis McClarin (Rich): TOPDOG/UNDERDOG (South Coast Repertory); Drowning Crow (Broadway);  Richard McElvain (Mr. Donovan): To Kill a Mockingbird, Bang the Drum Slowly, Lady from Maxim’s (Huntington Theatre Company); Angels in America (Boston Theatre Works);  McCaleb Burnett (Joe): The Normal Heart (The Public Theater); A Little Journey (Mint Theater Company);  Nikkole Salter (Lucy): Stick Fly (Huntington Theatre Company); Gee’s Bend (Cincinnati Playhouse); Inked Baby (Playwright’s Horizons); and  Victor Williams (Rex): “King of Queens” (NAACP Image Award), A Small Fire (Playwrights Horizons).

PRODUCTION ARTISTS Scenic design by James Noone (The Corn is Green and She Loves Me at the Huntington); lighting design by Justin Townsend (Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson on Broadway, Milk Like Sugar at Playwrights Horizons); costume design

by Mariann Verheyen (Fences at the Huntington), and sound design and music direction by David Remedios (Circle Mirror Transformation and Prelude to a Kiss at the Huntington). Production Stage Manager is Marti McIntosh.

Stage Manager is Carola Morrone LaCoste.

SPONSORS  Grand Patron: Boston University  30th Anniversary Sponsor: Carol G. Deane  Season Sponsor: J. David Wimberly

ABOUT THE HUNTINGTON Since its founding in 1982, the Huntington Theatre Company has developed into Boston’s leading theatre company.

Bringing together superb local and national talent, the Huntington produces a mix of groundbreaking new works and classics made current. Led by Artistic Director Peter DuBois and Managing Director Michael Maso, the Huntington creates award-winning productions, runs nationally renowned programs in education and new play development, and serves the local theatre community through its operation of the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA. The Huntington is in residence at Boston University. For more information, visit huntingtontheatre.org. #

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MEDIA NOTES For interviews and more information, contact Communications Manager Rebecca Curtiss at rcurtiss@huntingtontheatre.bu.edu or 617 273 1537.

PHOTO DOWNLOAD INSTRUCTIONS To download high-resolution (or smaller) photos of The Luck of the Irish: 1. Visit huntingtontheatre.org/news/photolibrary.aspx 2. Click on a thumbnail, and let the image load in your browser on the Flickr site. Note caption information is displayed below the image.

3. Click the Action button, located above the image on the Flickr site, and select View All Sizes.

4. Select the size you wish to download from the choices listed across the top of the image.

5. Let the image load in your browser, then right-click on it to save to your computer.

PRODUCTION CALENDAR AND RELATED EVENTS

Post-Show Audience Conversations

Humanities Forum

Ongoing

Sun. 4/22, following the 2pm performance

Led by members of the Huntington staff. After most

A post-performance talk exploring the context and

Tuesday - Friday, Saturday matinee, and Sunday matinee

significance of The Luck of the Irish.

performances throughout the season. Free with a ticket to the performance.

Actors Forum Fri. 4/13 and Thurs. 4/26, following the 10am student

Student Matinee Performances

matinee performances

Fri. 4/13 and Thurs. 4/26 – SOLD OUT

Thurs. 4/19, following the 7:30pm performance

Call 617 273 1558 about purchasing student tickets to other performances.

Wed. 4/25, following the 2pm performance Participating cast members answer questions from the audience.

USEFUL LINKS: THE LUCK OF THE IRISH •

Read a note from The Luck of the Irish playwright Kirsten Greenidge, view a conversation with director Melia Bensussen, and more: huntingtontheatre.org/articles/

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Video of Artistic Director Peter DuBois discussing the production, footage of the first The Luck of the Irish rehearsal, audio feature with playwright Kirsten Greenidge, and more: huntingtontheatre.org/media/

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Biographical information about the artists who created and perform in this production under the "ARTISTS" tab: huntingtontheatre.org/season/2011-2012/The-Luck-of-the-Irish/

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High-resolution production photos – available for download: http://www.flickr.com/photos/huntingtontheatreco/sets/72157629740835887/

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The spring issue of Spotlight, the Huntington’s magazine: huntingtontheatre.org/season/Spotlight/Spring-2012/

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Huntington Theatre Company website: huntingtontheatre.org

PHOTO LIBRARY The Luck of the Irish

by Kirsten Greenidge Directed by Melia Bensussen March 30 - April 29, 2012 South End/ Calderwood Pavillion at the BCA Available at huntingtontheatre.org/news/photo-library/2011-2012/iThe-Luck-of-the-Irishi/

TheLuckoftheIrish_HuntingtonTheatreCompany_20 Marianna Bassham, Nikkole Salter, Victor Williams, and McCaleb Burnett in Kirsten Greenidge’s THE LUCK OF THE IRISH. March 30 – April 29, 2012 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA. huntingtontheatre.org. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

TheLuckoftheIrish_HuntingtonTheatreCompany_59 Curtis McClarin and Francesca Choy-Kee in Kirsten Greenidge’s THE LUCK OF THE IRISH. March 30 – April 29, 2012 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA. huntingtontheatre.org. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

TheLuckoftheIrish_HuntingtonTheatreCompany_73 Marianna Bassham, Nikkole Salter, and McCaleb Burnett in Kirsten Greenidge’s THE LUCK OF THE IRISH. March 30 – April 29, 2012 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA. huntingtontheatre.org.

Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

TheLuckoftheIrish_HuntingtonTheatreCompany_82 Victor Williams and Nikkole Salter in Kirsten Greenidge’s THE LUCK OF THE IRISH. March 30 – April 29, 2012 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA. huntingtontheatre.org. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

TheLuckoftheIrish_HuntingtonTheatreCompany_97 Shalita Grant and Francesca Choy-Kee in Kirsten Greenidge’s THE LUCK OF THE IRISH. March 30 – April 29, 2012 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA. huntingtontheatre.org. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

TheLuckoftheIrish_HuntingtonTheatreCompany_149 Nikkole Salter and McCaleb Burnett in Kirsten Greenidge’s THE LUCK OF THE IRISH. March 30 – April 29, 2012 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA. huntingtontheatre.org. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

TheLuckoftheIrish_HuntingtonTheatreCompany_228

TheLuckoftheIrish_HuntingtonTheatreCompany_263

Antione Gray, Jr. and Francesca Choy-Kee in Kirsten Greenidge’s THE LUCK OF THE IRISH. March 30 – April 29, 2012 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA. huntingtontheatre.org. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

Nancy Carroll and Richard McElvain in Kirsten Greenidge’s THE LUCK OF THE IRISH. March 30 – April 29, 2012 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA. huntingtontheatre.org. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2012

asked a white friend from the South End to help her by pretending to be the buyer. They kept up the masquerade with the owners and the real estate agents, while the Dances got a VA-backed mortgage from a Cambridge lender known for granting loans to the city’s West Indian population. “It was a secret up till they went to closing,’’ says Ariel Greenidge, a social worker who lives in Beverly.

At the time, she adds, it was not uncommon for black families in white suburbs to move into their new homes in the middle of the night. “My parents didn’t do that,’’ she says. “They moved in in the daytime.’’

Kirsten Greenidge, who grew up in Arlington, set The Luck of the Irish in the fictional Boston suburb of Bellington, Mass.: “a rendering of Arlington,’’ she calls it. The action toggles between the early 2000s, when one of the ghost-buying Donovans asserts ownership of the house, and the late 1950s.

By that time in Massachusetts, housing discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity — like the kind New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s parents sidestepped in Medford in 1945 by having their lawyer buy the house they wanted and sell it to them — was illegal.

Enforcement was another matter.

“It’s illegal to speed, too,’’ says Darnell Williams, president and chief executive of the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, bursting into laughter at the notion that the law alone would alter behavior.

The obstacles for black buyers of the era, Wiese says, could include banks that wouldn’t lend, real estate agents who wouldn’t disclose listings or show houses, and white owners who would refuse to sell. Those who did buy a home might face neighbors who would form a mob, threaten the children, throw stones, lob dynamite through the window, or set the house on fire, as well as police who would automatically side with white residents — all things that happened in this country, he says.

“It was a formal as well as informal barrier to black families moving into white communities,’’ he says. “And that was widespread: It was Northern, Western, Southern.’’

In Massachusetts in the late 1950s, even Celtics star Bill Russell needed the help of white friends to sound out the neighbors before he bought a house in Reading. Afterward, in an infamous incident, vandals broke into his home there and defecated on his bed.

Greenidge’s play has some thematic similarities to last year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, currently in previews on Broadway. Clybourne Park — with its purposeful echoes of A Raisin in the Sun, the classic drama by Lorraine Hansberry — begins in 1959, when a white couple sells their home to a black family. That news prompts the community association to make a counteroffer.

Harry and Nancy Johnson, an interracial couple who bought a house on White Place in Brookline in 1967, experienced something similar on their first morning there, but with a twist. The self-described matriarch of the neighborhood knocked on their door and pulled out a petition signed by the neighbors, “asking that we sell the house to them, because they did not want us to live there,’’ recalls Harry Johnson, who is black.

Then the matriarch advised him not to worry about it. “I will take care of this, and they will do what I say,’’ she told him, and tore frequently used “straw buyers or some sort of other subterfuge’’ the petition up. to get around a system stacked against them, according to

Like the Dances, the Johnsons had acquired their property Andrew Wiese, the author of Places of Their Own: African through unusual methods. Nancy Johnson, who is white, went to look American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century. at the house accompanied by their white minister, a friend who was

“It was relatively common,’’ says Wiese, a professor assumed to be her husband. A stay-at-home mother at the time, she of urban history at San Diego State University. “The number applied for the mortgage, while her husband, a technical writer at of African-Americans who pioneered to white neighborhoods Polaroid, “had to spend the next couple of months hiding,’’ he says — was relatively small, but among them, the practice of having from the sellers, from the real estate broker, from the neighbors. to circumvent the real estate industry at the time was usually

“The only time I saw the house was after dark, in the car, with a necessity.’’

Nancy driving and me in the backseat, just peeking up barely above the

Samuel Dance, a quiet man who spent nearly two window so I could see what the house looked like,’’ he says. “I made decades in the Navy before becoming a maintenance worker at every effort not to be seen in the neighborhood.’’ the Veterans Administration in Jamaica Plain, and Ariel Dance,

Kirsten Greenidge didn’t get to listen to her grandparents an administrative assistant at Massachusetts General Hospital, had tell stories of their home-buying experience. “I never heard my tried to buy before in the suburbs: a house in Newton that suddenly grandmother talk about it ever. Ever, ever, ever,’’ she says, shaking her became unavailable, recalls their daughter, Ariel D. Greenidge, the head. Her grandparents, who loved Arlington and loved their house, playwright’s mother. preferred to be positive around Greenidge and her two sisters, she says.

“They wanted us to have a yard and garden and trees,’’ she

Samuel Dance died in 2001, and Ariel Dance in 2007, a few says, and they wanted their three children to go to better schools years after she sold the house on Claremont Avenue to pay his medical than they would in Boston, where the family owned their home bills. “The Luck of the Irish,’’ which is in part about the importance of in the South End. “Education was tops. Everything was about feeling at home, is dedicated to them, and to Greenidge’s 4-year-old education, educating their children.’’ daughter, Katia.

So they moved to Arlington first as renters, in the 1950s,

Because the play grapples with issues of race, class, and becoming one of the town’s few black families. A decade or so belonging in suburbia, Greenidge worries that her opinion of the place later, when Ariel Dance spotted a house for sale on Claremont where she grew up could be misconstrued.

Avenue, she went on her own to see it, prepared to say, if anyone

“I don’t want Arlington to feel slighted at all,’’ she says, making questioned her presence, that she was someone’s maid, her clear that she, too, loves the town. “I do. I’d move back there if I could daughter says. afford it.’’•

And when Ariel Dance knew she wanted the house, she

A TALE OF BOSTON’S SUBURBS ONSTAGE

by Laura Collins-Hughes GLOBE STAFF

Two couples get together for drinks in the South End, and the talk turns to real estate. It’s the late 1950s, and one pair, black and affluent, has a proposal for the other two, who are white, working-class, and in financial straits. We’ll pay you, the Taylors tell the Donovans, if you’ll buy the house we want in your suburb and sign it over to us.

That is the catalyzing event in The Luck of the Irish, a new drama by Medford playwright Kirsten Greenidge that has its world-premiere production starting Friday at the Huntington Theatre Company. The details of the play are artistic inventions, but Greenidge’s inspiration was her own family history: the stratagem her grandparents, Ariel and Samuel Dance, used as a black couple to buy a house in overwhelmingly white Arlington in 1967.

Greenidge’s family used the term “ghost buying’’ to describe the tactic, the playwright says over tea in the South End, not far from where her grandparents used to live. A widely produced former Huntington Playwriting Fellow whose works include Milk Like Sugar and Bossa Nova, Greenidge is interested in what she has called “the crevice of history’’ — and the swaths of the past that are hidden in it. But the territory she explores in The Luck of the Irish is so little known that she feared her play’s central circumstance would be dismissed as an “isolated incident’’ with “no bearing on history,’’ she says.

Across the country, in fact, Greenidge’s grandparents had a lot of company. Black buyers from the 1940s to the 1960s

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“Kirsten Greenidge is a writer of rare lyricism and dramatic punch.”

- LOS ANGELES TIMES

When an upwardly mobile African-American family wants to buy a house in an all-white neighborhood of 1950s Boston, they pay a struggling Irish family to act as their front. Fifty years later, the Irish family asks for “their” house back. Moving across the two eras, this intimate new play explores personal stories of integration and the conflict of calling any place your home.

Kirsten Greenidge

UNTOLD STORIES: A NOTE FROM PLAYWRIGHT KIRSTEN GREENIDGE “Kirsten Greenidge’s compelling play tells an extremely personal story while revealing a hidden part of Boston’s history. As we celebrate our history, we look to our future by producing new work by our talented Playwriting Fellows.” – PETER DUBOIS I decided to become a playwright after seeing August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. I was twelve. I sat in the balcony of the Huntington during that school matinee performance, and looked down onto that proscenium stage and saw, for the first time, an African-American story that simultaneously challenged and affirmed what I knew about how black people fit into the cultural landscape that is America. Previously I had wanted to write novels. But I wasn’t sure how to do that. In the fog that hung over my junior high school years, I had somehow concluded that in order to be published, a story could not include only black people unless they were Southern (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings) or had been hurt and damaged in some way (To Kill a Mockingbird), or existed as a joke (I had fallen utterly in love with Tennessee Williams and A Streetcar Named Desire by this point, but couldn’t forgive or forget Blanche Dubois telling her sister they could play at one of them being “the boy” when Blanche explains she’ll pour the drinks).

But these notions of how black characters fit into American literature melted quickly into the gilt that surrounds the Huntington’s main stage when I sat in that theatre on a gray and rainy day quite some time ago. For the first time in my life I saw black people on stage who were there to tell stories. Complicated stories. Rhythmical stories. Stories that were at once proud, true, painful, and funny. The dilemma, to me, lay in how I could, like August Wilson, write these stories, too. It took six years and a college class by an actual living breathing female writer to reverse my thinking. What I learned in Darrah Cloud’s class at Wesleyan (I took it as many times as I could) was that I am capable of fulfilling the ideas I had experienced in that school matinee in seventh grade. I am capable of creating black characters in a landscape that does not expect them, but certainly should contain them.

It’s fitting that The Luck of the Irish has found itself at the Huntington.

For although it is inherently a Boston story, it is also, in my thinking, cousin (perhaps distant, but that’s okay as long as I’m at the dinner table somehow)

to the works Mr. Wilson was able to develop here decades ago. When I set out to write The Luck of the Irish, I had two objectives: to collect the original commission check for it (from South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California) quickly so I would not have to take any teaching jobs so soon after having my daughter, and to write a play about my grandmother, who had died about a month before. The more I wrote, the more “Boston” the play became, for the Boston I grew up in, and the Boston my parents and grandparents talked of, was not a melting pot. Or, if it was, someone long ago neglected to turn on the stove.

Who your parents were predicted who you could become. Where you and these parents all lived predicted what other places you were or were not allowed to call home, or, in some instances, visit. I remember one St. Patrick’s Day asking my mother when were we heading to the parade “in Boston”— not knowing we were the only group of people decidedly not considered Irish for the day and also not knowing what “Southie” meant—and she looked at me with both horror and sadness. “We can’t go there,” was all she said. In many ways The Luck of the Irish explores why, so far up above the Mason Dixon line, this might be.

And so I began to explore not only my grandparents’ move from the black South End to the suburbs, but also the ambiguousness of being “other” in a town that your people have called home for over half a century. As I raise my daughter (and now son, too), it’s becoming clear to me that the racially stratified world I was taught about from my family has changed. So the play also explores this as well: how do we live as neighbors when we may not have been taught how or expected to do so openly and with the compassion and understanding good neighbors are supposed to exercise.

The most I can say about this upcoming venture is that because of sitting in that balcony however many years ago, the Huntington has felt like home and working on The Luck of the Irish in that home feels just as true as those words that flew up and into me when I was twelve.

- KIRSTEN GREENIDGE

LEARN MORE ONLINE Visit the Learn & Explore section of huntingtontheatre.org/irish to explore a timeline of the NAACP’s Boston chapter including information about the city’s history of segregation, and more.

HUNTINGTONTHEATRE.ORG

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What attracted you to The Luck of the Irish?

Kirsten’s writing has an immediacy and emotional energy about it, while also being lyrical. When I first read the play I couldn’t put it down: it felt fast and funny and amazingly moving. Exactly what you want to find in a script. Kirsten writes real people with real challenges and gives them an importance that elevates them and their quandaries to an almost mythic place. It is also, for me, a play that speaks deeply to an issue I think many of us find familiar: needing to feel at home in the world, and feeling that one has earned that place and belongs in it. The characters are all a little displaced, either because of race or class or the simple fact that they don’t fit solidly into the mainstream culture of their moment.

T. CHARLES ERICKSON

The Luck of the Irish director Melia Bensussen previously directed the Huntington’s production of Circle Mirror Transformation (2010).

What, if any, local resources are you tapping to develop this play?

Living in this city is a resource. It’s a town of neighborhoods where community is often defined geographically. Knowing that and experiencing it first hand is helpful. At Emerson College, where I teach, I am also in the midst of working on a project about the 1970s in Boston and the forced school busing. I am steeping myself in the history of the interplay of races, communities, housing, and neighborhoods in this area. It’s rich, painful, and fascinating material — and there are so many conversations to be had with folks who’ve lived through various iterations of this struggle in this area.

ATA CONVERSATION HOME INWITHTHEMELIAWORLD: BENSUSSEN How will directing Luck differ from your experience with Circle Mirror Transformation?

Completely different! Annie Baker’s writing in Circle Mirror Transformation is much more contained, and the goal in our rehearsal room was to find stillness and meaning in the silences. Kirsten’s writing in The Luck of the Irish is expansive: she is crossing races, generations, neighborhoods, cultures, years! The Luck of the Irish has an epic feel to me. It’s about reaching across as much as it is about searching within.

It leads to a different energy in the rehearsal room and in the theatre.

KIRK J. MILLER

Kirsten Greenidge and Melia Bensussen

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BOX OFFICE 617 266 0800

How does directing a world premiere differ from directing an established work (say, Shakespeare)?

Actually a new play and Shakespeare have more in common for me than an established contemporary work that has already had several successful productions. For me, both new play work and Shakespeare require you to think through every moment verbally, visually, emotionally. You don’t know what the gift of the moment can be: if one thread in a play is brought out more than others, you have an entirely different production and an audience takes away a different play. It’s a fascinating journey.

ON ROBERT FROST’S POEM “MENDING WALL” AND KIRSTEN GREENIDGE’S PLAY THE LUCK OF THE IRISH HANNAH, THE CENTRAL CHARACTER IN KIRSTEN GREENIDGE’S NEW PLAY THE LUCK OF THE IRISH, LIVES IN A SUBURB NORTH OF BOSTON IN THE HOUSE HER GRANDPARENTS BOUGHT. IT’S A GOOD NEIGHBORHOOD WITH GOOD SCHOOLS. HANNAH’S RIGHT TO LIVE IN THE HOUSE IS CHALLENGED AND SHE BECOMES A LITTLE BIT OBSESSED WITH NOTIONS OF BELONGING AND WITH ROBERT FROST’S ICONIC POEM, “MENDING WALL.”

Over the 45 deceptively simple lines of Frost’s poem, he questions the use of the wall he and his neighbor repair each year. Every spring they “meet to walk the line/And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go.” Unwilling to question the status quo, his neighbor simply asserts, “Good fences make good neighbors.” The poem makes a gentle and quiet argument against building and rebuilding walls, especially since nature and hunters seem so badly to want them down.

He cites the cost of rebuilding the wall: “We wear our fingers rough with handling them.”

The Luck of the Irish works similarly to the poem, accumulatively. Both look at one moment and see it as a result of many years of choices. And just as a dry stone wall is built stone by stone, layered one on top of the other, the play and poem build their arguments by layering digressive images one over the other. In the poem, Frost is defeated by the neighbor’s unwillingness to “go behind his father’s saying,” but in the play Hannah has to breach the wall she has built around herself.

- LISA TIMMEL

New Kids in the Neighborhood by Norman Rockwell, 1967

“MENDING WALL” Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

What I was walling in or walling out,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”

And to whom I was like to give offence.

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

The work of hunters is another thing:

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,

I have come after them and made repair

One on a side. It comes to little more:

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He said it for himself. I see him there

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

My apple trees will never get across

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

And he likes having thought of it so well

And on a day we meet to walk the line

If I could put a notion in his head:

And set the wall between us once again.

“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it

He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

We keep the wall between us as we go.

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

- ROBERT FROST

SEE PAGE 27 FOR SHOW PERFORMANCE CALENDAR AND EVENT LISTINGS HUNTINGTONTHEATRE.ORG

15

WHERE WE CAN LIVE: SEGREGATED HOUSING AND GHOSTBUYING

“Andrew Wade wanted a house. He had tried by every open and honest method to buy a house by dealing directly with the people who had built the houses he wanted to buy. There was only one way left for him to get a house, and that lay in deceiving some white owner as to its ultimate purchaser. To do that, he needed the cooperation of someone with white skin. He came to us. […] We were faced with the choice: ‘Who is my neighbor?’”

— ANNE BRADEN IN HER MEMOIR THE WALL BETWEEN, 1958 12

THE LUCK OF THE IRISH

For Americans, a house is more than just a simple building, standing in for national values of achievement, prosperity, and opportunity. In the mid-20th century, the question of which citizens had the right to own homes in which communities became a war, with battle lines drawn by decades of white flight from urban areas and the creation of segregated suburbs.

The demographics of Boston matched the national trend. In 1960, within the city limits, almost one in ten residents were AfricanAmerican; in the Boston suburbs, fewer than one in one hundred were black. The choice for middle-class black Bostonians was between living in the largely substandard housing of the inner city or finding a way to buy into closed neighborhoods.

Americans of color nationwide believed that their future livelihood and the opportunities for their children depended on access to improved housing. “Persistent racial segregation in housing had high stakes,” scholar Thomas J. Sugrue writes. “In postwar America, where you lived shaped your educational options, your access to jobs, and your quality of life. The housing market also provided most Americans with their only substantial financial asset. Real estate was the most important vehicle for the accumulation of wealth.”

Until 1948, court-enforced restrictive homeowners covenants barred home sales between individuals of different races. The Supreme Court struck down these statutes in the case Shelley vs. Kraemer, but more subtle and insidious methods soon took their place.

National realtor boards discouraged mixing races within communities well into the 1950s.

Realtors’ methods included denying that any housing existed in selected neighborhoods, creating impossible requirements for income that were not applied to white applicants, and simply refusing to return calls from black applicants.

“I saw an advertisement in the newspaper, and I called up the real estate broker,” Mrs. Gerald McLeod testified in 1963 before the Massachusetts Advisory Committee. “She assured us she that she had a lot of houses to show us. We made an appointment to meet the next day. Then I thought that perhaps

I should have told her at the beginning that we were Negroes and saved myself an embarrassing trip. […] When I called back I spoke to the secretary. She was very upset about this […] and said that she was very sorry but that the houses that [the broker] was going to show me were suddenly not available; that either they had been taken off the market or they were sold.”

In this hostile national climate, an underground housing market sprang up where buyers would purchase houses through a white third-party. One well-known example includes New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose family became one of the earlier Jewish families to move into a segregated section of Medford in 1945. Their Irish lawyer George McLaughlin purchased the home on their behalf.

In the best-documented case, civil rights activists Anne and Carl Braden purchased a house on behalf of the family of Andrew Wade in 1954. The house was subsequently firebombed, and the Bradens were prosecuted for their involvement. Though the Bradens participated because of antisegregationist beliefs, the Wades were not politically motivated. “When [Andrew Wade] went house-hunting in the spring of 1954, he was not in any way a crusader,” Anne Braden writes in her memoir. “He was simply a man who wanted a house to live in, and along with it, a little breath of freedom for his family.”

Playwright Kirsten Greenidge’s grandparents purchased their first home in Arlington with the help of a white friend. While this piece of family legend loosely inspired the play, the practice of ghostbuying is less the play’s subject than one of its metaphors; buried in ghostbuying and its surrounding history is a story of the nature of inequality, insistent questions about where we feel we belong, and the way those questions can echo through future generations. “The word ‘home,’ one of the symbols of the [housing segregation] problem, embodies the deepest sentiments of American folklore,” writes Charles Abrams in Forbidden Neighbors.

“It is the place one lives and dies in.”

— CHARLES HAUGLAND HUNTINGTON THEATRE COMPANY 13

A PLAYWRIGHT’S THE CENTURY CYCLE: MA RAINEY, THE BLUES, AND INSPIRATIONS THE WORK OF AUGUST WILSON

PLAYWRIGHT KIRSTEN GREENIDGE TALKS ABOUT BECOMING A WRITER, THE GENESIS OF THIS PLAY, AND THE IDEA OF FAMILY LEGACY.

Charles Haugland (Artistic Programs and Dramaturgy): When did you decide to become a playwright?

Kirsten Greenidge (Playwright): In seventh grade, I was going to Cambridge Friends, a Quaker school, and we had a class field trip.

They took us to see Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at the Huntington, and I remember sitting in that audience and thinking, “Oh God, this is what I want to do with my life.”

I had no idea how to do that. First of all, I didn’t know anybody who was a playwright.

I also didn’t know of any female playwrights, or I didn’t think I did, and certainly not any black female writers.

What was it about that play?

My mom took me to a lot of theatre from a very young age, but the plays with black people in them were musicals with huge casts. I hadn’t seen people tell variations of black history or black stories onstage without it being a musical. There could be music in it, but that people didn’t have to break out into song and dance in a way that I was used to – I was really drawn to that.

Being twelve years old, it was a turning point to realize, “Oh, there are many stories to tell if you are black.” It was also a huge time for me as a reader; we read To Kill a Mockingbird, we read The Great Gatsby, and we read A Streetcar Named Desire, all these stories that essentially explore some sort of American Dream. I was really drawn to these different snapshots of America.

Jumping forward a couple of decades, where did this play start?

My siblings and I had grown up hearing stories about my grandparents and how they bought their house in Arlington, Massachusetts, which is a predominately white suburb. It was then in the 1950s and statistically still is now. We were told this story about “ghostbuying.” A family friend, who actually happens to be Jewish, helped my grandparents buy the house by acting as if she was the buyer. The play is not literally

my family’s story in any way, but I tend to draw a lot from family stories. Also, when I started writing it, I was pregnant with my daughter, and I finished writing the first draft just after she was born. These ideas of what it means to create a home or to create opportunities for your kids were fresh in my mind.

The play looks at connections between segregation, housing, and education over several generations. Are there conscious echoes of the American Dream?

It’s a quintessentially American idea that you are going to forge something that will have a positive impact for those generations yet to come. But you say "education" in this country, and it becomes a lightning rod.

It can be very controversial to talk about education in this country – who gets access to quality education and who doesn’t.

Certainly, that is why my grandparents moved to Arlington. It was the promise of better educational opportunities for their kids and the price that was worth in terms of integrating a neighborhood or a place.

You’ve talked about your plays as being structured around images that accumulate and transform. How conscious of that process are you while you write?

I used to think the images just came organically out of nowhere, but I direct it more now. Sometimes there will be images in my writing that do not lead to an accretion of meaning, and I take them out.

There used to be a motif of laundry in this play. We would have had pictures and family photos, very nostalgic on purpose, projected on the laundry. But Melia Bensussen, the director who came on board last year, said, “Let’s investigate what kind of people these are. Are they the kind of people, if they are trying to make a good impression in this town, who would have laundry out on the line?” The answer is probably not, so we got rid of them. If an image isn’t working, I see if I can add to it or question if it’s really necessary.

HUNTINGTON THEATRE COMPANY 15