When a young bi-racial Korean American violinist and her boyfriend leave New York City for the North Carolina mountains and the music of Appalachia, she finds herself facing the estranged grandfather she’s tried to forget. Will their shared bond of music bring them back together? Weston Theater Company presents “The Porch on Windy Hill” — dubbed “a new play with old music” — conceived, written and directed by Sherry Stregack Lutken, with music direction by David M. Lutken, on stage Aug.
22-Sept. 1 at the Walker Farm Theater in Weston. “If the familial troubles of Mira, her partner Beckett and her grandfather Edgar begin with edges jagged enough to draw blood, they end like sea glass, polished into a rough beauty by an eclectic mix of vocals, guitars, violins, banjos and an erhu, the last a Chinese two-string instrument that’s part flute, part violin and makes a wholly unique sound,” wrote Catey Sullivan in the Chicago Sun-Times, reviewing the 2023 Northlight Theatre premiere in Skokie, Illinois.
“It’s a play about America,” explained Sherry Lutken. “It’s a play about this country through the lens of music and a specific family torn apart a traumatic rift — and when the prodigal granddaughter returns to confront, to talk to, to find herself, and to have this moment with her grandfather to heal and hopefully move forward. “So, it’s really a play about race,” Lutken said.
“It’s about music, it’s about family, it’s about all of these things I think so many of us are living through right now, and we just dial into this very specific story about these three people in western North Carolina.” Like the story, the show grew out of the COVID-19 pandemic. “My husband David and I were holed up in Louisiana beating our heads against the wall, and doing stuff on Zoom, all those things every other theater professional were doing,” Lutken said.
They had been scheduled to produce a new show in 2020 at Ivoryton Playhouse in Connecticut, but COVID concerns forced postponement. “When it came around to discuss whether we could do that show, (artistic director) Jackie Hubbard said they couldn’t do anything that big because it had seven people in it. “I had this idea for a three-person play using traditional music.
David, of course, is the music guy,” Lutken said. Inspiration for the show came from troubling current events. “It was only a couple of weeks after the shootings in Atlanta,” Lutken said.
“And, of course, there was a huge uptick in anti-Asian violence happening all across the country. The rhetoric was really disturbing.” All of those events came together into this idea for the show.
“As soon as we had it, we thought of Lisa Helmi Johanson, a bi-racial Korean (violinist/fiddler) and Morgan Morse, and immediately called them and said ‘Hey, we have this idea! Would you like to work on it with us? They said ‘yes,’” Lutken said. “We went back to the theater and asked, ‘What about this?’ She said, ‘Go for it!’” Ivoryton presented the first performances, really a workshop production, in the fall of 2021. The Northlight Theatre production in 2023 was the official premiere, followed by Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell, Massachusetts in April, and now Weston Theater Company.
(The cast changed after the Northlight Theatre production, save for David M. Lutken.) “It’s been this incredible process of ‘it takes a village,’ all of these theatrical institutions coming together to provide us with the ability to continue working on the play,” Lutken said.
“We’re so thrilled to finally be bringing it to Weston, where last summer, everybody had such a terrible time (because of flooding). “We’re really excited that we’re finally getting up there,” Lutken said. “It’s been rewritten and recalibrated, and tweaked — and where we have landed is very exciting.
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