The Hot L Baltimore

FEBRUARY 23-25, 2024

CFA 105

The Hot L Baltimore, written by Lanford Wilson and directed by Grant Sorenson

The scene is the lobby of a rundown hotel so seedy that it has lost the “e” from its marquee. As the action unfolds, the residents, ranging from young to old, from the defiant to the resigned, meet and talk and interact with each other during the course of one day. The drama is of passing events in their lives, of everyday encounters and of the human comedy, with conversations often overlapping into a contrapuntal musical flow. In the resulting mosaic each character emerges clearly and perceptively defined, and the sum total of what they are—or wish they were—becomes a poignant, powerful call to America to recover lost values and to restore itself in its own and the world’s eyes. (Dramatists’ Play Service.)

The Hot L Baltimore is one of a School of Theatre project that emerged out of the artistic collaboration of the teams in the SOT Graduate Collaboration course. They are developed in the Fall class and then performed during the Spring semester. Titles are chosen from a curated list of plays created by the students and faculty of the slate committee.

This play is about seeing or not seeing, being seen or unseen, observing, watching, perceiving – it’s a play about what we choose to look at, and what we choose to look away from. The characters we meet are mostly people society tends to overlook – poor people, old people, sex workers, vagrants, migrants; Wilson says to his audience, don’t look away. See these people, see their struggle, see their humanity. And over the course of the play, all of the characters make decisions about what they want or don’t want to look at, literally and figuratively.

Director Grant Sorenson reflects on The Hot L Baltimore