Pack up the car and hit the road for adventure, new sights and experiences, danger, thrills, revelations, family and laughter–some of the things we seek and find when the miles accumulate going someplace new, and after we arrive. That’s the case for the Flint, Michigan Watson family after Daniel, Wilona and their three young children pack up the cooler and the “Brown Bomber” for a trip to visit Grandma Sands in Alabama. “The Watsons go to Birmingham – 1963” is this year’s UCSB New Plays Launch Pad production, and the premise for the journey is that oldest son Byron has problems at school and elsewhere–he’s a bully and a delinquent–and the Watson parents think that some time with Wilona’s force-of-nature mom will straighten him out. The play is centered around occasional narrator younger son Kenny, who becomes wiser and braver after encounters with the racism of the south that literally exploded in the summer of 1963 with the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. The whole family is changed when they return to Flint, and for the better, in this wonderful and imaginatively staged and directed play adapted from Christopher Paul Curtis’s novel by Cheryl L. West. February 19th through 24th at UCSB’s Performing Arts Theatre.
