TIO NYC: URBAN STAGES

25 Sep TIO NYC: URBAN STAGES

Urban Stages, How to Make a Rope Swing

Shawn Fisher is not just a pretty face.

Though Fisher earns milk money designing sets, he is also a playwright, producer and director, who runs the MFA program at Utah State University.

Fisher’s most recent play, “How To Make A Rope Swing,” was chosen to launch the 2012/2013 season at Urban Stages. Founded in 1984 by part-time Telluride local Frances Hill Barlow, the mission of the award-winning nonprofit is to “discover, develop and produce plays by playwrights of diversity that speak to the whole of society.”

Urban Stages functions as a launching pad for new playwrights like Fisher, offering the kind of critiques and exposure that allows them to move on to larger venues or get their plays published.

Fisher’s writing tends to focus on American attitude towards race, violence, religion and culture.

In “Rope,” a 300-year-old oak tree is literal and metaphorical center of Fisher’s story exploring racial prejudice and its consequences through the relationship, past and present, of its three central characters (plus a fourth, who is deceased): an aging former custodian and the school’s longest serving African American employee, Arthur “Bo” Wells; the town’s beloved but stern matriarch, school principal and former teacher, Mrs. Delores Wright; and a friend (of Bo’s) and student (of Wright’s) Mick.

“Bo” is like the old oak: tall, proud and unbending. The memories that haunt Mrs Wright are the tree’s scars. And Mick, well, he’s the carefree kid who swung from its branches, his laughter breaking the long dark shadows of the tree’s memories, places where ghosts lurk.

As the threesome come together in the soon-to-be-demolished schoolhouse, they reminisce about the circumstances of their first meeting years earlier when the school was first integrated in 1951 in a region that came to be known as the “Mississippi of the North.” As they talk, an unhappy moment in the town’s history seeps through the cracks of the building’s old bricks, changing their dynamic forever.

At Monday’s staged reading, Arthur French, Lynn Cohen, and Dave Droxler, who all seemed to be straight out of central casting, gave pitch perfect (quasi, since it was a reading, nut a full production) performances.

Fall/winter 2012/2013 continues at Urban Stages with “Up and Up: The Story of Dr. Mac C. Jemison,” the first African American woman in space. “Up” is followed by “Frida Liberado,” about the famous Mexican artist Frida Kalho, “Warriors Don’t Cry,” the story of the LIttle Rock Nine, and “Bird Woman: Sacagawea,” the guide of the Lewis & Clark expedition.

In addition to its Main Stage productions, Urban Stages also celebrates 20 years of its signature Outreach Program. The initiative tours plays, workshops, teaching artists, dance, poetry, music and storytelling  to libraries throughout New York’s five boroughs. Over 25 programs reached 7,000 wide-eyed young audience members over the 2011/2012 season.