Plays
Northwood History and Theatre Making
A Workshop Series that Brought Northwood History to the Stage
SNAP! hosted multiple workshops and meetings throughout 2015 and 2016 where members of the Northwood community explored their history via participatory theatre. During these workshops, community members and Covenants, A Theatrical Collage about Northwood ensemble members brainstormed ideas for theatrical representations of this history. While these three plays were written or devised by the names listed, many members of the Northwood community were involved in the creation of them — through attending workshops, sharing their own stories, participating in interviews, and conducting research.
Steering part 3
Steering
Natalya Brusilovsky
Steering stemmed from a housing forum and panel produced by SNAP! that now Northwood resident Natalya Brusilovsky attended. This forum led with a performance of Sheila Gaskins’ play Last House Standing: A Play about the Highway to Nowhere. The play depicts an imaginary family resisting eminent domain that led to the demolition of 18.000 homes in West Baltimore to make way for a failed transportation project aptly named by residents, “the highway to nowhere.”
Panelists Antero Pietila (author of Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City), Professor Dr. Lawrence T. Brown (The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America), and real estate attorney Dominique Stanford Moore (deceased) discussed the history (and sometimes present day reality) of people making and finding home in Baltimore communities confronted with the impacts of redlining, block busting and displacement.
After the “Last House” and panel event, Brusilovsky lead a devising workshop series with residents focusing on Northwood housing history. The result of this series, Steering centers around the home buying experience, segregation, racial covenants, block busting, and predatory lending in Baltimore. The play was performed in three “reminescent” parts, set in 1966, 1976, and 2016.
Two Streets Over
Kathleen Barber
Kathleen Barber attended multiple SNAP! events and wrote “Two Streets Over” to share her experiences of living in Northwood and her experiences watching the neighborhood change throughout the years. The play was performed twice during Covenants — once with a white woman playing Althea (the elder organizer confronting anger and grief after the loss of her husband), and once with a Black woman playing Althea. Barber’s openness to double casting (a white woman living in a now 95% black neighborhood called Hillen Road Improvement Association) aimed to consider what part race has played in organizing, partnership and collaboration over the years in Northwood with the community’s history of segregation, white flight and change.
Crossing the Line
Maurice Williams
Crossing the Line is a fictitious play set in Northwood in 1963, based on real events, research, and interviews conducted by Maurice Williams — a TheatreMorgan student at the time. Williams interviewed Anita Turks and Barbara McGill, women who were involved in desegregating the plaza, and based the play on their stories of working to desegregate the Northwood Movie House located at Northwood Plaza Shopping Center.
