NEW YORK—Music can’t simply wash away years of pain or magically restore broken family bonds, but it can certainly serve as a starting point. This is made heartbreakingly clear in “The Porch on Windy Hill.” Billed as “a new play with old music,” the show is currently in the midst of an encore engagement at Urban Stages.
It’s late spring in 2021, and pandemic restrictions have recently lifted. Mira (Tora Nogami Alexander) is a classical violinist. She and her live-in boyfriend Beckett (Morgan Morse), a musicologist from Brooklyn, who specializes in the history of rural American folk music, are on a trip through the South to visit local music festivals, shindigs, and pickin’ parties as he collects material for his doctorate. When car trouble requires a sudden change of route, Mira suggests they stop at the town of Windy Hill in Western North Carolina to check out the performances at a local church.
