by Michael Cox

Common Ground, Revisited – Co-conceived and adapted by Kirsten Greenidge; co-conceived and directed by Melia Bensussen; set design by Sara Brown; costume design by An-lin Dauber; lighting design by Brian J. Lilienthal; sound design by Pornchanok Kanchanabanca; projection design by Rasean Davonté Johnson; wig/hair and makeup design by J. Jared Janas; dramaturgy by Neema Avashia; stage-managed by Emily F. McMullen. Co-produced by The Huntington Theatre and ArtsEmerson at the Calderwood Pavilion/BCA through July 3, 2022.

When a group of people have no voice in the conversation, they interrupt. They make their voices heard through disruption. Colonial Boston did this back in 1765 when we enacted the first public act of defiance against the King of England and rioted in the streets, and we continued the tradition in the 1970s when U.S. District Judge Arthur Garrity Jr. ordered Boston to implement race-integrated busing.

In Common Ground, Revisited, The Huntington Theatre Company looks at the non-fiction book Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, a Pulitzer Prize-winner which in many ways has come to define this city – because it disrupted us. It asked us to look in the mirror and examine – in microscopic detail – our racism.

Read more “The Huntington’s ‘Common Ground Revisited’ Asks Bostonians to Stop Blaming Racism on the Rest of the Country and To Look Within Their Own House”

by Julie-Anne Whitney

Common Ground, Revisited – Co-conceived and adapted by Kirsten Greenidge; co-conceived and directed by Melia Bensussen; set design by Sara Brown; costume design by An-lin Dauber; lighting design by Brian J. Lilienthal; sound design by Pornchanok Kanchanabanca; projection design by Rasean Davonté Johnson; wig/hair and makeup design by J. Jared Janas; dramaturgy by Neema Avashia; stage-managed by Emily F. McMullen. Co-produced by The Huntington Theatre and ArtsEmerson at the Calderwood Pavilion/BCA through July 3, 2022.

Kirsten Greenidge’s new play, Common Ground, Revisited is inspired by and based in part on J. Anthony Lukas’1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction book, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. The primary focus of both texts is on class and racial tensions in Boston during the 1974 busing crisis when U.S. District Judge Arthur Garrity Jr. ordered nearly 20,000 Black and white students to be bused to/from the city’s geographically segregated public schools. The mandate led to years of violent protesting, significant demographic changes in the city and surrounding suburbs, and a dramatic decrease in enrollment in area schools that continues to this day. Fifty years after the 1972 Morgan v Hennigan case that led to Garrity’s ruling, Boston’s public schools are even more divided than they were back then with “two-thirds of BPS students attend[ing] intensely segregated schools where students of color make up 90% or more of the total enrollment.”

Read more “Huntington’s ‘Common Ground, Revisited’ Asks Us to Look Back In Order to Move Forward”