From the American flag, steel-legged chairs, and world map in Sara Brown’s spare but versatile set, I assumed they were educators gathered in a contemporary classroom. The two women portraying Cassandra and Lisa have come together with 10 other Bostonians to wrestle with the text of Common Ground.

The strained encounter is cut short by a voice that suddenly halts the action - we soon realize that we’re not in a high school hallway or in the ’70s at all. The teens do, in fact, share some things in common - both have lived in public housing and come from big working-class families headed by mothers - but Lisa has until recently been an enthusiastic participant in antibusing demonstrations, while Cassandra has become a target for hissed epithets and hurled rocks. The action begins with a fraught exchange between two Charlestown High classmates, Lisa McGoff and Cassandra Twymon. It’s a show that covers a lot of ground and makes the dynamics of a 50-year-old conflict feel all too timely.

Now the venerable tome has inspired Common Ground Revisited, a new play conceived by award-winning playwright Kirsten Greenidge and director Melia Bensussen. Anthony Lukas’s 1985 Pulitzer-winning book, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, a seminal account of Boston’s busing crisis that one writer dubbed “the Bible” for a generation of journalists. “It is long, y’all,” admits an actor clutching J. Photo: T Charles Erickson.Īdapting a nearly 700-page work of nonfiction for the stage is no small feat. Lyndsay Allyn Cox, Shanae Burch, Omar Robinson, Elle Borders, and Kadahj Bennett in Common Ground Revisited at The Huntington.

Common ground by j anthony lukas