“The Porch on Windy Hill” is a new play with old music

The ramshackle front porch of the Beckett house in Windy Hill, North Carolina is the setting for The Porch on Windy Hill, currently at Urban Stages in New York. The three-character play is heavy on old time country bluegrass music, including riffs on old folk tunes, played by a talented cast who also are skilled musicians on a variety of instruments, including violin, guitar, piano, and harmonica.

It is a feel-good show both in its simplistic plot and its robust musicality, aiming to please and oftentimes succeeding.

Korean-American Mira (Tora Nogami Alexander) and her boyfriend Edgar (David M. Lutken) have decided to make a long summer road trip, visiting local Appalachian music festivals along the way, to escape the big city. Their route takes them to Windy Hill, the speck-on-the-map town where Mira’s widowed grandfather Beckett (Morgan Morse) still lives. Mira is irritated that the two haven’t spoken for years, but Edgar is eager both to hear the old tunes and to learn all he can from Beckett, who he recognizes as a seminal folk musician.

Beckett, already uneasy around his estranged granddaughter, is equally uncomfortable with Edgar’s hero-worship. Mira is adamant about not staying the night in her childhood home, but Edgar counters that it’s better than sleeping in their old truck — and Beckett reminds her of the pleasures of feeding the mosquitoes overnight.

As the evening progresses, Mira unleashes her long-held resentment toward her grandfather. Beckett hits back with how the way his daughter packed her family up and left affected him and his wife. Neither father nor daughter made the first move to communicate over the years, and Mira seems to have taken up where her mother left off.

The Porch on Windy Hill is written by Lutken and Morse, along with Sherry Stregack Lutken and Lisa Helmi Johanson. Ms. Lutken also conceived and directed the play, and the four playwrights are credited with the orchestrations and the lovely vocal arrangements of the songs. Scenic Designer Andrew Robinson has come up with a realistically dilapidated, small country town home setting, enhanced by John Salutz’ lighting and Sun Hee Kil’s sound design.

The Porch on Windy Hill was first performed in 2021 at the Ivorytown Playhouse in Connecticut, and has been produced at a handful of regional theatres since then. The production at Urban Stages is its New York premiere, and while it is not yet perfect — especially in its balance between gloriously played and sung music and somewhat pedestrian script — the underlying story is firmly planted in the tradition of inter-generational conflict where music and long-delayed communication brings family members together.

I would be interested to see future iterations of this play, and I encourage the playwrights to keep developing it. As for this production, I do not see any reason why audiences should avoid it during its limited run. If you’re looking for a good play for an autumn evening, make the trip to visit The Porch on Windy Hill.

The Porch on Windy Hill is presented by Urban Stages at their theatre, 259 West 30th St., in New York, through Oct. 11, 2025. For more information, or for tickets, go to urbanstages.org.

Restaurant recommendation:  before going to the theatre, Bill and I went to an Irish pub and restaurant, The Molly Wee, on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 30th St. Bill was delighted with his perfectly poured Guinness, while we shared an order of French fries that were cooked to a perfect, non-oily crispness. The food we saw at other tables looked delicious, and the prices were reasonable for New York. If you find yourself in that part of the city, give it a try!