The Porch on Windy Hill (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Porch on Windy Hill
• Heather Grimm

THE PORCH ON WINDY HILL. Written and directed by Sherry Lutken. Northlight Theatre, Skokie, Illinois. May 5, 2023.

In spring 2023, Northlight Theatre in Skokie, Illinois produced The Porch On Windy Hill: a new play with old music, written by director Sherry Lutken in collaboration with Lisa Helmi Johanson, David M. Lutken, and Morgan Morse, who comprised the cast. Windy Hill is a family drama following white graduate student Beckett (Morse) and his biracial Korean Appalachian girlfriend Mira (Johanson). They travel from New York to North Carolina for Beckett’s research; in North Carolina, they encounter Mira’s estranged white grandfather Gar (Lutken). The evening they spend reconnecting on the titular porch (a trope so stereotypical it is mocked in the dialogue) is punctuated by performances of the string band music that Mira remembers from her childhood and that Beckett now studies. As the play progresses, the reasons for Mira’s estrangement become clear: Gar never approved of the Korean man his daughter married, and, although he loved his granddaughter, he refused to intervene when her cousin lobbed a racial slur at her. By the end of the play, Gar’s racism is revealed to be born of cowardice, an initial discomfort he was unable to express and took too long to overcome. We are left believing that Gar understands his mistakes and will try to communicate more openly. But the liberal politics the play wears on its sleeve conceal a conservative message regarding the dramaturgical engine driving the story: its music.

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Lisa Helmi Johanson (Mira), David M. Lutken (Gar), and Morgan Morse (Beckett) in The Porch on Windy Hill. Photo: Michael Brosilow.

Beckett’s interest in the music featured in the play—ranging from fiddle tunes like “Bill Cheatham” to ballads like “Birmingham Jail” and popular songs like “Columbus Stockade Blues”—often served as comic relief. He stammered out jargony questions about music changing over time, oblivious [End Page 562] to Mira and Gar’s tense reunion. When Beckett asked where Gar learned a song, Gar confesses that he doesn’t remember; he’d known it all his life. Beck-ett lamented, “Wish I had that direct connection,” celebrating Gar’s “real” connection to this music and the fact that he learned it through interactions with family, as opposed to through recordings. Although Beckett was often the clown, the production asked us to take the sentiment behind this line seriously. Though Mira responded by postulating that perhaps people in the past thought they weren’t getting the “real thing” either, the structure of the play reinforced a different message. Mira’s process of reconnecting with this music alongside her grandfather allowed them to reconnect and heal. They could only come together because of their shared repertoire—and shared way of learning it, by virtue of their familial connection. Although Beckett played with them, thus also participating in this coming together, he consistently denied the validity of his performance in favor of the legitimacy of his girlfriend’s, claiming that “[i]t’s in her blood.”

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Morgan Morse (Beckett), Lisa Helmi Johanson (Mira), and David M. Lutken (Gar) in The Porch on Windy Hill. Photo: Michael Brosilow.

The suggestion that music is learned by Appalachians in an atmosphere of isolation and insularity has a deep history, to which the paratexts of the play alluded. The lobby display and the plot synopsis referred to Beckett not as an ethnomusicologist—a term matching his own description of his research—but, erroneously, as a “song collector.” Song collecting, in contrast to contemporary ethnomusicology, was a baldly extractive enterprise. “Collectors” went into rural areas to find music unknown to city dwellers to catalog or sell, often selectively, in order to advance their racist or nationalist agendas. Placing Beckett in this tradition suggested that there is still untouched cultural material to be found and collected. Beckett the character may not be a song collector within the narrative, but in performance, he served as the song collector for the audience, the outsider character whose presence extracted the songs from their keepers for our...