BU Today feature: Winter People Shines a Light on a Different Side of the Hamptons
This article was originally published in BU Today on December 13, 2018 by Sara Rimer.
Laura Neill grew up in Southampton, on eastern Long Island, but no, she doesn’t know the Kardashians or any of the other fabulously rich and famous people who descend on the Hamptons each summer. Neill’s family—her father is a Stony Brook University psychology professor, her mother a fiction writer—lives in the Southampton hamlet of North Sea, but not in a $14 million McMansion like the Kardashians rented for $300,000 in summer 2014 for a reality TV show.
This Southampton—the Hampton that interests Neill (GRS’19) as an artist and an MFA candidate in playwriting—is the year-round community of academics, teachers, librarians, pharmacists, firefighters, restaurant workers, and landscapers who live in the shadows of the McMansions. They are white, African American, Latinx, and members of the Shinnecock tribe, who live on a reservation in Southampton. Some are immigrants, documented as well as undocumented, who look after the homes, and sometimes the children, of the summer crowds.
This is the world that Neill re-creates in her latest play, Winter People, running at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through December 16.
It’s March and a Hamptons mansion is burning. Who’s to blame? Five families—white, black, Latinx, and Shinnecock—protect their own. Racial tensions rise. Long-held secrets are revealed. Fights break out. Relationships splinter.
Neill wanted to use double casting for Winter People: 5 actors to play all 14 of the play’s characters. She won a graduate arts research grant from the BU Arts Initiative and the associate provost for graduate affairs last year to study double casting by seeing plays in Chicago, Washington, and New York that used that technique.