Lou Harry's 'Balsa Wood' addresses festival's gratitude theme insightfully
Soft and easily permeable, balsa wood is not the material for hardy survival. It's enough to furnish a title Jersey boy Lou Harry: Celebrating roots through theater for a thematically apt short play in Lou Harry 's penetrating Wildwood series — a homage to his New Jersey hometown. From the Garden State's dangling appendix up through the storied Asbury Park, the Atlantic shore towns in this alternately overpopulated and sparsely settled state offer a rich opportunity to study matters of identity, leisure, and the will-o'-the-wisp of permanence and the solidity of class structure. "Balsa Wood" is another verse in Lou Harry's way of stage-saying greetings from Wildwood, " Hello America, how are you? Don't you know me? I'm your native son ." It's a feature of this year's " Spirit & Place Festival ," with its 2024 theme of gratitude. It concluded a weekend run Sunday afternoon at Indy Convergence 's modest tent pr