How to Make a Ropeswing

The issues examined by How to Make a Rope Swing are familiar: racism and the influence America’s dark past continues to exert on the present. However, they’re dealt with in new, perceptive ways through Shawn Fisher’s vivid characters. The play is a remarkable achievement, and its premiere at Salt Lake Acting Company is a rare opportunity for Utah audiences to witness a truly brilliant production at its birth.

Arthur “Bo” Wells (Glenn Turner, pictured left) is an aged, long-widowed custodian, sorting through the detritus of a public school on the eve of its demolition. He is met by Delores Wright (Jayne Luke, pictured right), elderly town matriarch and former educator, who asks him to help choose a name for the modern facility that will replace the old school.

Luke is capable of performing any age—the blue-haired Delores must be 20 or 30 years Luke’s senior—and plays the role with a genuinely patrician stiffness and that curious, casual racism so common to women of that generation. In combination with Turner’s warm and engaging performance, the two generate a natural adversarial chemistry that eventually resolves in an unexpected way.

Fischer’s bold choice to set the drama not in the South, where such tales usually take place, but instead in New Jersey, brings new light to the subject matter. By the conclusion of Act 1, when the chilling double-meaning of the play’s title has begun to reveal itself, the audience has been drawn so deeply into the narrative that the emotional fireworks of Act 2 come as devastating as anything ever performed on that stage. (Brandon Burt)