{"id":6580,"date":"2018-03-20T12:07:30","date_gmt":"2018-03-20T16:07:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=6580"},"modified":"2018-03-20T12:07:30","modified_gmt":"2018-03-20T16:07:30","slug":"front-porch-arts-collective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2018\/03\/20\/front-porch-arts-collective\/","title":{"rendered":"Front Porch Collective Aims To Change Boston: \u2018We\u2019re One Of The Few Major Metropolitan Cities That Doesn\u2019t Have A Black-Run Theater Company\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThank you. You people are part of a movement,\u201d Maurice Emmanuel Parent said as he stood on a chair in the lobby of Cambridge\u2019s Central Square Theater last night, glass of wine in hand, to lead the crowd in a toast. \u201cLet\u2019s take over Boston!\u201d<\/p>\n

The Front Porch Arts Collective<\/a> was concluding a year of staged readings of seven plays by African-American author Marcus Gardley, who teaches playwriting at Brown University in Providence, with a recitation of his crackling comedy \u201cA Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Reggie<\/a>
Reggie Gibson plays the Righteous Reverend in Front Porch Arts Collective’s “A Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes” at Cambridge’s Central Square Theater, March 19, 2018. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI have touched so many people with these hands. I even healed some too,\u201d actor Reggie Gibson joked as the Righteous Reverend, who is about to lose his church to bankruptcy and hatches a plan to con a fried-chicken-check-cashing-funeral-parlor tycoon out of his fortune. \u201cCome give to me your money. Give your money to God, I mean.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the applause quieted at the end of the show, Parent, an actor and Front Porch’s executive director, took to the stage to announce the company\u2019s plans to stage full productions beginning next fall: \u201cBreath and Imagination\u201d by Daniel Beaty with the Lyric Stage Company; \u201cBlack Odyssey\u201d by Marcus Gardley at Central Square Theater; and \u201cThe Three Musketeers,\u201d Alexandre Dumas\u2019s famous 1844 tale reworked by Catherine Bush, with the Greater Boston Stage Company. The Lyric and Greater Boston Stage approached Front Porch after seeing the staged readings, Parent says. The companies plan to raise funds for the productions together, he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cOver the last 15 years that I\u2019ve been here there have been many attempts at black and brown theater in Boston to varying degrees of success,\u201d Front Porch Artistic Director Dawn Meredith Simmons says. Some have moved away. Sometimes the money didn\u2019t work. Sometimes day jobs got in the way. \u201cRight now the timing is right, the support is right. We\u2019re one of the few major metropolitan cities that doesn\u2019t have a black-run theater company. And we should.\u201d<\/p>\n

The goal, Parent says, is more \u201cblack and brown voices, increasing the number of black and brown people on stage, off stage [in the audience], back stage and in the board room.\u201d<\/p>\n

Simmons says Front Porch wants to create \u201ca place where the stories are being told continuously. So it\u2019s not just a one-off for the theater. So we can create a better ecology of these stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activism by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\"Front<\/a>
Front Porch Arts Collective Executive Director Maurice Emmanuel Parent announces the company’s plans at Cambridge\u2019s Central Square Theater, March 19, 2018. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The idea for Front Porch arose from conversations after Simmons directed an all-black cast in \u201cSaturday Night\/Sunday Morning\u201d for Boston\u2019s Lyric Stage Company in October and November 2015. \u201cIt would be great if there was a theater that did this work year-round,\u201d Parent recalls them saying. By the following summer they\u2019d found a home\u2014and fiscal agent\u2014at Central Square Theater, he says. (Victoria A. George serves as Front Porch’s executive producer.) They won a Live Arts Boston grant from The Boston Foundation to fund the reading series.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople know the value of this kind of company that focuses of these types of stories,\u201d Parent tells me. \u201cA company focused on this type of work is needed in the Boston area.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Front<\/a>
Front Porch Arts Collective Executive Director Maurice Emmanuel Parent announces the company’s plans at Cambridge\u2019s Central Square Theater, March 19, 2018. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Front Porch leaders point to The Boston Globe\u2019s Spotlight series last December highlighting the continued disparities\u2014in opportunity, in economics\u2014between white folks and people of color here. As well as \u201cthe lack of black leadership in Boston in general,\u201d Parent notes. \u201cThere just needs to be a space made for us, for leaders of color.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Donald Trump\u2019s administration has made the nation\u2019s racism more starkly apparent. \u201cIn this space, we resist each time we applaud,\u201d Front Porch playwright-in-residence and reading series curator Liana Asim told the crowd before last evening\u2019s show began. \u201cWe resist each time we sit next to each other. \u2026 We prove the outside world wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

In recent years, Company One Theatre, Harvard\u2019s American Repertory Theater, Huntington Theatre Company, ArtsEmerson and other local theaters have increasingly featured diverse casts, playwrights of color, and stories of diversity. But the Front Porch Collective is perhaps the only actively producing theater company in greater Boston led by black folks and focused on the stories of people of color. (Another local theater leader of color is Christopher V. Edwards, who became artistic director of Actor\u2019s Shakespeare Project last August.)<\/p>\n

Front Porch aims to be the first black-led company staging productions with Actor\u2019s Equity Association (the union of actors and stage managers) casts.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t want to be the only company doing this work,\u201d Simmons says, stressing Front Porch\u2019s support for other theaters in the region. \u201cWe want more opportunity, not less.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHere\u2019s a time where everybody\u2019s working to break down those walls of theater that have kept them so white for so long,\u201d Parent says. \u201cWe\u2019re applauding it, while hoping that will feed into the next logical step, which is a black theater company.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe hope is while we may be the first company in a while to focus on black and brown theater,\u201d Simmons says, \u201cit will kick open the door for other culturally-specific theater companies and hopefully they can make their mark as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activism by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\"Front<\/a>
Front Porch Arts Collective Executive Director Maurice Emmanuel Parent leads a toast in the lobby of Cambridge\u2019s Central Square Theater, March 19, 2018. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThank you. You people are part of a movement,\u201d Maurice Emmanuel Parent said as he stood on a chair in the lobby of Cambridge\u2019s Central Square Theater last night, glass of wine in hand, to lead the crowd in a toast. \u201cLet\u2019s take over Boston!\u201d The Front Porch Arts Collective was concluding a year of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6572,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[110],"tags":[37,42,324,323,87],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6580"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6580"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6586,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6580\/revisions\/6586"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}