The Hillsboro Story - Reviews/Press
A look back at the 2010 year in theater: Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Third Rail Repertory and more
Named one of the most "memorable" plays of 2010 by The Oregonian theatre critic, Marty Hughley
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'The Hillsboro Story' delves into Civil Rights-era memories of the Ohio (not Oregon) town
The memory that kept coming back to Susan Banyas was mostly the sort of innocent childhood image that many baby boomers would recognize.
"It is 1955 and I am in Mrs. Mallory's class. She is reading us 'Charlotte's Web' by E.B. White. It's my favorite thing in the third grade."
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- Marty Hughley, Oregonian
Theater as history: Getting un-segregated in Ohio
Arts Dispatch was late getting to The Hillsboro Story, Susan Banyas's memory-plus-research play about her hometown, Hillsboro, Ohio. In fact, it closes its run at Artists Repertory Theatre tonight (Saturday) after a short original run and then a four-performance extension.
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- Barry Johnson, Arts Dispatch
'The Hillsboro Story' Desegregating History
The Hillsboro Story is many things: a research project, a personal obsession, a look at the parallel tracks of white and black history in one small town.
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- Alison Hallett, Portland Mercury
Review: David Ornette Cherry: The Hillsboro Story - Soundtrack and live performance
I once heard Gabriel García Márquez say that writing short stories was harder than anything else, because you have the story, the beginning, middle & end... but you let all that go for 20 pages when it could be a novel.
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- Zaph Mann, OPBMusic Blog
'The Hillsboro Story' brings tale of social activism to life at Artists Rep
"What is memory if not an impression?" Susan Banyas asks early in "The Hillsboro Story," her partly autobiographical play about a mid-1950s civil rights fight in her Ohio hometown. As she says this, she gestures as if to mark a trench in the ground before her."
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- Marty Hughley, Oregonian
I Want the Words to Swing
"Basically, the music for 'The Hillsboro Story' came out of my experience writing for No Strangers Here Today. At the time we premiered that play, Susan was working on Hillsboro, so I had the chance to go to Ohio to see the sites of the Underground RR where her great-great-grandmother lived. It was my first time in Ohio, so I was digging the landscape. I started to see the flow of the town, the different cultures, the historical relevance of the town, in so far as where it was located on the Underground Railroad. And I was helping with the transcripts of the interviews, so I was hearing the voices in the story. So as I started to hear the stories and the real people of The Hillsboro Story, I started to get a flavor, a texture."
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- Lynn Darroch, JazzScene, Oregon's Jazz Magazine
"The Hillsboro Story" - Civil rights drama comes to Southern State
"On a hot summer night -- July 5, 1954 -- Lincoln School, the "colored" elementary school in Hillsboro, Ohio, went up in flames, and my sweet, sleepy, segregated little hometown was suddenly awake..."
So writes author-performer Susan Banyas, a third grader in 1954 and witness to the powerful civil rights drama unfolding around her.
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- Kris Cross, Highland County Press
"On Sunday I saw The Hillsboro Story, Susan Banyas's memory piece about a little-known but fascinating piece of American civil rights history that was not so long ago and not so far away, although life has barreled ahead so much in the past 55 years that for an astonishing number of Americans the civil rights years might as well be hung forgotten in the cloakroom alongside the colonial era's three-corner hats.
For that reason alone -- the short communal memory of a culture that consistently shortchanges its own past and often misinterprets it even when it does pay attention -- The Hillsboro Story is worth telling, and seeing. I hope the play has a healthy future in schools and youth theaters -- not that it isn's a good piece of theater for adults (it is), but because still-developing hearts and minds in particular need to understand this vital part of their heritage."
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- Bob Hicks, artscatter.com
Fertile Ground offers eclectic mix of shows
"One weekend standout was "The Hillsboro Story," presented as a work-in-progress at Artists Repertory Theatre. Created by Susan Banyas out of extensive interviews, research and her childhood memories, it tells the fascinating story of her Ohio hometown wrestling with the issue of public school desegregation in the mid-1950s."
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- Marty Hughley, Oregonian
Fertile Ground Day One: The Hillsboro Story
"There are few props and the narration is straight-to-the-point, but this is a powerful play. All four female performers' acting is superb, with the enthusiasm and theatrical prowess of Lanier occasionally stealing the show. Gregg Bielemeier's choreography brings visual charm to the narrative, keeping the show's performers in constant motion, galloping comically across the stage one moment and swaying seductively the next (while talking civil rights court case -- it's one of many poignant, yet hilarious, juxtapositions throughout the piece). Also notable is the show's well-orchestrated musical composition by David Ornette Cherry."
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- Natalie Baker, Willamette Week