Most retellings of the Stonewall uprising begin with the bricks. Ike Holter’s Hit The Wall begins with the people who threw them, and that choice is what makes this production at the Barrow Street Theater worth your evening. I went in expecting a history lesson. I came out having watched a handful of strangers decide, over one hot night in June 1969, that they were finished stepping aside.
Holter wrote it and Eric Hoff directed it, and between them they keep the focus tight: small, carefully placed moments that add up to something bigger than any one character.
A riot you sit inside
The play is staged in the round in the compact Barrow Street space inside Greenwich House, with seats climbing up on every side. There is nowhere to hide from the action, and that is the point. The cast uses every corner of the floor, and by the second half you feel less like an audience than a crowd on the sidewalk outside the Stonewall Inn.
The tone swings widely, funny one minute and painful the next, and in a few scenes genuinely hard to watch. The swings feel earned rather than engineered.
The people on the block
Nathan Lee Graham gives the evening its spine as Carson, a trans woman who carries herself with a quiet, steady confidence. She will put the mouthy boys on the block in their place when they talk down to her, then go polite and deferential, all “yes ma’am, yes sir,” the moment she has to deal with the straight world. Graham plays both sides of that survival instinct without overselling either.
Around her, Holter builds a neighborhood: two loud gay friends, one Black and one Hispanic, angling for the attention of a polished white professional who walks past them every evening and saves his interest for blonds behind closed doors; WILD, a Black hippie running a one-woman movement; Peg, a lesbian whose family has thrown her out; a kid fresh from the suburbs trying to find his footing; a draft-dodger who finds himself unexpectedly drawn to Carson; and, on the other side, a beat cop and an uptown woman who resent all of them simply for existing.
Holter lets each of them show us what they are guarding, the fears, the defenses, the small ambitions, before he puts them all in the same place on the same night.
The night it turned
In Holter’s telling, it is not the loudest people in the bar who start it. It is Carson and Peg, hiding in the restroom while the police clear the club and load patrons into the wagons, debating whether to change clothes to get out the door.
A cop finds them and demands to know what Carson is. Her answer, “I’m … INCREDIBLE!”, earns her a beating. He turns on Peg next, in denim and short hair, and the search becomes an assault. Carson, bloodied, gets up off the floor to defend her and is beaten again, this time with a stream of abuse.
Then Peg takes the officer’s gun. Offered a way out, walk away and let Carson be hauled off, she refuses. The cop overpowers her and drags her out as she screams at the people on the street to stop watching and do something. It is the turn the whole play has been building toward, and it lands.
How Hoff stages it
Twice, Hoff slows the action with lighting that plays like slow motion. The first comes before the riot and lets us linger on connections as they form: between the two women, between the draft-dodger and an overwhelmed Carson, between the gay friends sliding from flirtation into want. The second drops us into the chaos of the riot itself. The first makes us care; the second makes us feel it.
What the play gets right is that these people had little in common except being pushed around, and that turned out to be enough. Nobody knows exactly what happened inside the bar that night, and the play does not pretend to. The cast simply insists, “We were there!” After this production, I believed them.
Production details
HIT THE WALL
Barrow Street Theater
27 Barrow Street
New York, NY 10014
Presented by
Scott Morfee, Jean Doumanian, Tom Wirtshafter, Patrick Daly, Burnt Umber, Roger E. Kass, BarLor Productions, Starry Night Entertainment, Christian Chadd Taylor, SKandal Theatrical, Marc & Lisa Biales
Written by Ike Holter and Directed by Eric Hoff
Featuring
Nick Bailey, Jessica Dickey, Ben Diskant, Nathan Lee Graham, Matthew Greer, Gregory Haney, Sean Allan Krill, Rania Salem Manganaro, Jonathan Mastro, Ray Rizzo, Carolyn Michelle Smith, Arturo Soria and Indigo Street.
Reviews
“FIERCE AND FUNNY!”
– New York Times
“AN EXPLOSIVE EXTRAVAGANZA!”
– The Village Voice
“BRINGS STONEWALL TO VIVID LIFE! EVERYBODY MUST GET STONEWALLED!”
– New York Post
