The Wash
Written by Kelundra Smith
Directed by Tasia A. Jones
Front Porch Arts Collective
October 31 – November 22, 2026
Roberts Studio Theater at the Calderwood Pavilion
Making theater from history is fraught with challenges. Oftentimes, the audience already knows the outcome. Sometimes, historical fact does not fit a satisfying narrative arc. Almost always, the gaping middle between establishing the situation and achieving resolution is a slog. These challenges are amplified in ‘message’ plays, where the desire to present history from a different perspective is noble, but the tendency to preach unavoidable.
The Front Porch Arts Collective is Boston’s premiere Black theatre company. Their mission—to produce plays that amplify and honor Black achievement—signals that most everything they present will result in Black triumph. Before the audience even takes their seats to see The Wash, a dramatization of the 1881 Atlanta Washerwoman strike, we know the women will succeed. So why drag ourselves out on a rainy night to sit for two hours, rather than stay home and read the Wikipedia account?
Because The Front Porch Arts Collective knows how to create theater that casts a spell.
The opening minutes of The Wash are magic. Five women enter a stage festooned with beams and ropes and pullies, weighed down by bland, heavy skirts and blouses. They mime laundering in Atlanta’s 1881 summer heat. When washing clothes was back-breaking, ripe with lye burns and iron scalds. The women are silent in their labor; their choreography simultaneously world-weary and strong. We feel their load, yet also their power. There’s a bit of humming, a splash of spontaneous joy, a return to their drudgery. Lights dim as they reach out and contract. More laundering. Again: dim, reach, contract. We understand the passing of days. The tedium. The never-ending cycle of dirty clothes, turned cleaned, only to be soiled again. A powerful sequence one could never absorb through mere reading.
Before a single word is spoken Director Jones and her actors have created a world for us, and also established the language through which we will understand change of scene; passing of time.
The story begins. Five women, overworked and underpaid, each with a predictable backstory. A struggling widow, a young girl in love, another battered, a third aspiring to education (also a lesbian, given the script was written in 2022), and a mammy, sage from slavery days. The casual dialogue is terrific: witty and knowing. As long as there’s banter, the play’s a delight. But, of course, there’s a history lesson to be told, and we suffer lecture. But we suffer gladly because every time we’re between scenes, the spellbinding interplay of set and light and movement is so enchanting.
By Act Two the strike is full on, and each woman has faced various consequences of her participation. Their wearing bright colored skirts now, as if they’ve come alive. The most interesting plot point occurs when a sixth woman—a white woman—arrives to join the strike. Can she be trusted?
The denouement takes too long to resolve and is, frankly, silly. Every woman’s dilemma is resolved beyond expectation (though we never learn the fate of the white accomplice). No matter, for now all the hanging laundry has been replaced by colorful African garments and the women all wear gorgeous patterned jackets that warrant full attention.
The Wash is not a great play. But The Front Porch production is extraordinary. I came away mesmerized by the evocative transitions; all the ways that light, set, choreography, and costume added richness to a totally predictable story.
It’s an historical fact that in the summer of 1881 over 3,000 washerwomen went on strike and successfully won more money, and more respect. They moved out of the interstices of society and demanded to be seen. That is what this production does. It demands we pay attention to the details that can make history become theater.
