Kirsten Greenidge’s play Luck of the Irish at LCT3 takes the single family house as a lens through which to examine race and class. Its story begins in the 1950’s, when an Irish American handyman “ghost buys" a house for an African American doctor and his family in a posh suburb of Boston. The play’s writing is admirably even-handed, exploring each character’s point of view. The play's set, designed by Mimi Lien, is at once incredibly suggestive and incredibly elegant. It gives us the house itself, a clapboard colonial with a pitched roof and brick chimney, as a full-size clear plexiglass cut-out at the back of the stage, tethered to the ceiling with wires. This ghost-bought house is appropriately spectral, more of an idea than a thing. The house’s back yard is expressed as a stretch of artificial turf that covers the entire stage, spilling over its front edge to the floor below. Its sumptuous texture and crazy green color are indelible; they overwhelm the house itself and all the other furniture on stage.

None of the characters seems entirely happy about the house. The handyman’s wife is resentful she can’t live in a home this grand ("This is not the order of things – I got passed over.”) and the doctor is disappointed that the house doesn’t bring him satisfaction (“I don’t feel lifted.) The handyman and the doctor’s wife, however, kindred spirits, are drawn more powerfully to the land than the house. The doctor’s wife rushes through her chores each morning to spend her afternoons lounging dreamily in the back yard. One day the handyman meets her here and observes that the grass "curls up to your toes like the sea." The house promises stability and status while the lawn promises freedom, both physical and imaginative. It’s a tribute to the play that, at the end, we’re not sure what matters most.

Image courtesy of Rose Brand.

March 26, 2013 by Nalina Moses

Just a few years later, the surgical-like strikes carried out by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro at Lincoln Center have healed. Now the LED banners on the steps to the main courtyard, the covered ramps at each side, the wooded garden and green-roofed restaurant pavilion in the north courtyard, and even the clipped southeast corner at the Julliard School, all seem entirely natural, as if they’ve been there forever. There’s been one less noticeable intervention after that: the new 112-seat Claire Tow Theater by H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture, led by Hugh Hardy. It was built right on top of the existing Lincoln Center Theater, which houses the larger Vivian Beaumont and Newhouse Theaters.

The Tow is remarkable for its restraint on both the outside and the inside. So often when I walk into a new building I sense immediately that a professional designer has been there. The place is overcrowded with gestures and even if all of them been executed judiciously there’s simply too much going on, too much to consider, and it weighs down the experience. The Tow isn’t like that. It’s a simple, wood-lined, shoebox-shaped room with rows of fold-down seats and a U-shaped catwalk above. I watched a 90-minute one-act play there seated comfortably in the last row, from where I could see every corner of the stage and hear every word clearly. The new theater, which was built along with support spaces for the other theaters below, is set back on the old theater’s roof so that it’s barely visible from street level. In front there’s an open wood deck where theater-goers can collect before and after performances and observe the fray below, and all around are native plantings. The Tow is planned and finished simply; its refined proportions and one-of-a-kind setting are what bring it to life. Perhaps because Hardy has worked on prominent civic projects like this for four decades, he doesn’t feel the need, as another architect would, to raise his voice or confront the existing building, a beloved one by Eero Saarinen. His discretion is impressive.

Photo by H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture

November 02, 2012 by Nalina Moses