Promise of a Love Song

Three Theaters – Three Cultures – Three Stories of Love

Promise of a Love Song is a collaborative play developed from a four-year exchange between Roadside Theater, Junebug Productions of New Orleans, and Pregones Theater of the South Bronx, and their home communities.

A cast of twelve musicians and actors from the three companies meet on stage to discover how rhythms, music, movement and stories illuminate the strengths, struggles, similarities, and differences of three peoples – African American, Puerto Rican, and Appalachian.

Music is central to the play, as it is central to each partner’s culture. Reflecting this diversity, the production’s original score incorporates jazz, rhythm and blues, bolero, salsa, jig, and lullaby.

"We mean to preserve the root of each music in relation to each of the stories being told, not just find a so-called happy blend, which is often dishonest," notes Donald Harrison, noted jazz artist and composer who worked on the show. Composer and musical director Ricardo Pons calls the music "a subtle contest of musical styles."

Promise of a Love Song comprises three divergent stories, one from each culture. In Roadside Theater’s contribution, an aging mother and her 65-year-old son endure the struggles and celebrate the joys of rural life in Appalachia.

Teatro Pregones’ story alternates between a daughter’s memory of her father and her own recollections of immigrant life in New York City. Junebug’s piece sets the life-long romance of Nelson and Donna against the cultural and political turmoil of the civil rights era and its aftermath.

Each story has its own look and sound, but only when compared, contrasted, and seen within the whole is its full meaning revealed.

Promise co-director Steve Kent, long-time collaborator with Junebug and Roadside says, "The storyline may be teased apart, but the real challenge is something different. The stories develop through gesture and choreography and sound. Sometimes the action in one story underscores the action in another. Sometimes it contradicts it."

Los Angeles-based designer Doug Smith conceived the stage set to suit this layered, cross-referential script and score. As the action develops, images borrowed from the text are cast onto three irregularly shaped scrims. Lights burst or fade from one scene to the next and slowly, tangibly a whole is stitched together.

Promise of a Love Song audiences have been diverse, and every performance has garnered a generous response. As a young New Orleans audience member put it, "You don’t know how good it is to see all three peoples on stage together in an honest relationship to one another. You don’t know what it means until you actually see it."

To date, Promise of a Love Song has toured to Davis and Fresno, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; Camden, Maine; Lincoln, Nebraska; Camden, New Jersey; Bronx, New York; Akron and Cincinnati, Ohio; University Park, Pennsylvania; Cookeville, Tennessee; Burlington, Vermont; and Wise, Virginia.

Promise of a Love Song images

Read the American Theatre magazine article on Promise of a Love Song

Read an excerpt from the script of Promise of a Love Song

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