The Porch on Windy Hill

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When it comes to musical theater or its less grandiose, prepositional alternative theater with music, the prevailing options are limited. Typically, they amount to a choice of disappointingly original or disappointingly unoriginal. Billing itself “as a new play with old music,” the rustic throwback The Porch on Windy Hill, could have easily fallen into the nostalgia trap of the latter category, wrapping its audience in the disarming comforts of folksiness while not producing much more personal impact than stumbling upon an old episode of Hee Haw, presumably after channel surfing the furthest reaches of the cable dial.

Admittedly, that’s a trite cultural comparison from a Yankee who has the limitations of a Yankee imagination. But, as evident in the good-natured and unfussily wise The Porch on Windy Hill, ignorance can be the first step toward empathy or, sadly, the last one. In the play, Edgar (David M. Lutken), an elderly widower and Vietnam vet, chooses to stand still, with the dire consequence of enduring a nearly two-decade estrangement from his family. That fateful inaction comes full circle after Edgar’s biracial granddaughter, Mira (Tora Nogami Alexander), returns to his North Carolina front porch, where she once played under the gaze of the Appalachian Mountains. The offspring of Edgar’s white daughter and a Korean immigrant father, the now-grown Mira is on a post-pandemic Southern odyssey in a beat-up van with her Brooklyn boyfriend, Beckett (Morgan Morse), seeking to reconnect with the past, but, like her grandfather, Mira is loathe to express her thoughts and even less willing to reveal her suffering.

There’s a palpably tragic tension between Edgar and Mira, which the play’s quartet of writers–Sherry Stregack Lutken, Lisa Helmi Johanson, Morgan Morse, and David M. Lutken–naturally let develop, trusting the actors (and, in Lutken’s case, himself) to convey it in fraught silences. But The Porch on Windy Hill is no joyless drama; it also includes lots of glorious, soul-stirring sound, which buffers the characters’ pain through a heady musical mélange that links everyone on the stage, even when they seem worlds apart. A classical violinist, Mira’s talent originated from the long-ago example of her grandfather’s expert banjo and guitar pickin’, while her beautiful singing voice, similar to Edgar’s, is much more candid than her speaking one. No mellifluous slouch himself, Beckett joins Mira and Edgar in a series of stringed reveries that run the gamut from Haydn to bluegrass and, as music often does, take up the emotional slack when regular words don’t come easily.

Often acting as an inquisitive bridge between Mira and Edgar, Beckett begins the play, like the audience, knowing little about their relationship. Inarguably, he is a plot device, but one with a great deal of appeal thanks to Morse’s considerable talents and charisma. Additionally, the character, an aspiring academic hoping to study the evolutionary influence of immigration on American folk music, serves as both a historical guide to what the audience is hearing as well as an evangelist for it. Very much a know-it-all, as Mira and Edgar each delicately and not so delicately observe, Beckett is nonetheless never grating, possessing a sincere optimism that quickly becomes infectious. With a preacher’s conviction, he believes that music can and should be an invitation to expand one’s community with new resonant experiences and understanding.

In that spirit, an unbending positivity infuses The Porch on Windy Hill even in its most difficult moments, leaving little doubt that the play will end on a sweet rather than a sour note. There also isn’t any mystery about how the rift between Edgar and Mira formed: racial cowardice turned a child’s love for her grandfather into its opposite. Our lack of surprise at learning this shameful secret is the play’s most devastating point.

As for the truly and delightfully unanticipated, the production values of The Porch on Windy Hill either come passably close to or thoroughly outshine the play’s well-heeled Midtown brethren, many of whom now think it’s acceptable to have all the flair of an unupholstered chair in a vacant lot. Andrew Robinson’s punctilious set design is not technically immersive, but there are moments when we feel mentally and physically transported to that cluttered front porch abutting Edgar’s yellow clapboard house. Supporting this effort under Sherry Stregack Lutken’s sure-handed direction, John Salutz’s lighting, Sun Hee Kil’s sound, and Grace Jeon’s costumes each help to creatively conjure the astonishing illusion of being someplace else. That’s wonderful, needed, and missed.

At heart, The Porch on Windy Hill has a very good one, advocating for healing in a world that increasingly seeks to deepen old wounds. Of course, given this earnest compassion, there’s an argument to be made that maybe the play concludes a bit too neatly and nicely. Fair enough, but when confronted with such unabashed hopefulness, you are allowed to turn off the cynical part of your brain. That’s also wonderful, needed, and missed.

The Porch on Windy Hill (extended through October 11, 2025)

Urban Stages, 259 West 30th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 212-421-1380 or visit http://www.urbanstages.org/porch

Running time: two hours and 20 minutes including one intermission