This is a play about Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case in which the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the segregation of public schools is inherently unequal, and therefore unconstitutional and illegal; the case is the event many consider the first major step in the American Civil Rights movement.
Scattered, boring and hard to watch
This is a play about Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case in which the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the segregation of public schools is inherently unequal, and therefore unconstitutional and illegal; the case is the event many consider the first major step in the American Civil Rights movement.
This is also a play about Hillsboro, Ohio, a small town that—like many small towns in America (including Portland)—has its own, highly personalized story about the struggle for desegregation.
And perhaps most importantly, this is a play about a little girl named Susan Banyas. That little girl grew up in 1950s Hillsboro, observing societal changes she didn’t yet understand, and then moved on to earn an MA in performance and documentary art and wrote, directed and starred in this play, “The Hillsboro Story.”
Not even the resources of Artists Repertory Theatre could save this production.
Somehow—and really, I’m not quite sure how—a play about such riveting and inspiring subject matter as racial integration and civil disobedience is boring and hard to watch. Within two minutes, it became painfully clear that my decision to spend Saturday evening as a “Hillsboro” audience member was a mistake.
The culprit could be Banyas’ performance, which feels immensely awkward and forced. Her wide eyes and loopy gesturing make her seem completely unaccustomed to the stage, as though everything about her performance—even her blinks—is mechanical, either a memory trigger for her own lines and choreography or a cue for those of others.
Banyas sticks out like a sore thumb against the backdrop of her all-female supporting cast, each member of which is gifted with great and natural stage presence. Most notable are the performances of K.B. Mercer and Jennifer Lanier, who each deftly and convincingly portray a variety of characters. Mercer has performed with Artists Repertory Theatre before, and Lanier is an apparent newcomer to the Portland stage, according to the “Hillsboro” playbill.
But even though Mercer and Lanier handle their multiple roles so well, representing the gamut from schoolteachers to mothers to fathers to lawyers to teenage girls to the elderly with both control and charisma, the scattered characters are hard to follow. Consequently, the plotline is hard to follow. Our point of reference is the young Banyas, who does not resurface consistently enough to hold the narrative together and who—regretfully—seems more childish than naïve; it seems that civil rights stories told from the perspective of a white child are best left to Harper Lee.
There is no doubt in my mind that Hillsboro, Ohio, offers an interesting story. Banyas spent years interviewing residents of her hometown, working hard to sift truth from hearsay and uncover the facts that set Hillsboro apart from (and simultaneously link it to) other American towns. To assemble her narrative, Banyas pulled excerpts from these interviews as well as from newspaper articles, judicial opinions, political speeches, a biography of Rosa Parks and the memoir of Philip Partridge, the white man who lit Hillsboro’s decrepit black elementary school on fire after the Hillsboro Board of Education decided to ignore the Brown ruling and postpone integration.
Perhaps the Hillsboro story would have been better served if told from the perspective of Partridge, who was forced to plead insanity and even so was convicted of arson, or from the perspective of a black child denied entry to the school they were supposed to attend. Perhaps “Hillsboro” could succeed, presented from Banyas’ perspective, if the story were only more firmly rooted in her childhood experience. Perhaps the fix would be as simple as replacing Banyas with a more talented performer.
Whatever “Hillsboro” needs, it’s not going to arrive by next weekend. Save yourself the $20 ticket price and stay home, or channel the play’s good and generous spirit and donate the $20 you might have spent on this production to a more worthy cause.
“The Hillsboro Story” is approximately 90 minutes long, and there are cast and crew talkbacks after every performance. ?
