TIM BOUCHER RAW!

The first show we did this summer at CLOC was West Side Story, and ever since opening night, I’ve been thinking about re-writing the story a little to fit the nature of the social situation where I live in Baltimore. Hampden is a little section to the north of Baltimore proper, but still in the city limits which is being rapidly and radically gentrified, like a lot of Baltimore neighborhoods. So this means you have on the one hand upper middle class white people and on the other lower middle class white people. Put into more colorful terms, you could embody the spoiled rich kid aesthetic in the art school hipster type roaming around Main St in whatever the latest style dictates: too-tight jeans, typically, and any number of rock and eighties references (“flare” if you will). Then you have the chavs, to borrow a British term, or “white trash” or I also hear people throw around the word “yo-boys” or the more inappropriate term “wiggers.”

So I’m sort of picturing a re-telling of that story of immigrant groups vying for territory and identity in Upper Manhattan in the fifties or whatever into a locally-based drama about the clash of cultures and competition for resources happening right on the streets of my neighborhood every day. I’m thinking not only would such a drama – set to music, obviously – be freaking hilarious, with really exaggerated versions of costumes and character types, but that it would also – if done well – bring together “warring” factions within the neighborhood, give them appropriate voices and allow them to talk together within a “safe” public space about the changes happening within the neighborhood, why they’re happening, and what to do about them. That kind of shit, to me, is what the inherent power is within theatre: creating a shared space within which a community of meaning may define or re-define itself.

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