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| Jennifer Lanier, K.B. Mercer, Susan Banyas and LaVerne Green in "The Hillsboro Story" |
Arts Dispatch was late getting to The Hillsboro Story, Susan Banyas's memory-plus-research play about her hometown, Hillsboro, Ohio. In fact, it closes its run at Artists Repertory Theatre tonight (Saturday) after a short original run and then a four-performance extension.
Perhaps we haven't seen the last of it, though. It's fairly easily staged (it appears, at least); its subject, race relations in America in the 1950s when legal segregation began to crumble, is engaging; and its light, poetic approach encourages our own memories and thoughts to gather for further exploration. Banyas has already lined up a tour of the show back to the Midwest next year, and I think it has lots more to tell us here, too.
The Hillsboro Story isn't conventional theater, but Banyas (who wrote, directed and stars in the play) isn't a conventional theater artist. Her practice has focused on the "performance art" part of the theater spectrum -- the personal story deeply considered and converted to words and movement, often accompanied by music. She has done this herself, and she has helped others get to the bottom of their own stories, too.
So, the play doesn't have conventional structure or elements. It's episodic, but the episodes really aren't scenes. It has a narrative direction, though it pauses for purely personal bits that are more atmospheric than crucial elements of the narrative. It has lots of characters, but not a lot of character development, even from the narrator, Banyas. ART demonstrated that it has an elastic idea of theater to schedule it in the first place, for which the company (and artistic director Allen Nause deserve a hand of their own).
Enough set-up. Hillsboro in the 1950s, when Banyas's father owned a Buick dealership there and Susan spent a mostly idyllic "Leave It to Beaver" childhood with swimming pools and best friends and kindly teachers who read from Charlotte's Web, had the same dirty little secret that just about every American town had. It was segregated -- mind, body and spirit. And after Brown v. Board of Education in 1955, the "body" part of that equation started to become illegal. That meant Hillsboro arrangement for educating its African-American children wasn't any more in compliance with the law than any town in Alabama.
