The Balusters – 23 April 2026

What makes a good neighbor? When city folk think about that concept, we generally want someone quiet who keeps to themselves. But in suburban areas, like Mt. Vernon in The Balusters, the good of the community hinges on issues associated with home ownership, like what the aesthetics of the balusters installed on someone’s porch add or take away from the character of the neighborhood. The Balusters follows a community board making decisions about safety concerns in the neighborhood through the eyes of a diverse group of concerned neighbors. Intersectionalities, vulnerabilities, and ideological differences collide as each person must make a choice about the future of the place they call home. The show itself is hilarious in the way it exposes hard truths about political correctness and power, and keeps us laughing despite the serious nature of the content. Ultimately, the show leaves the audience with a feeling of helplessness as we realize that the one thing that is universal is that we would all crumble under scrutiny; even well-intentioned people make mistakes with their verbiage and poor judgment calls from time to time.

This is one of director Kenny Leon’s best works, and the entire cast demonstrates a mastery of comedic timing that delights the whole way through. As shifting alliances and relationships across the room make themselves known to the audience, each character is re-examined and reassessed in ways that make parsing out who is good or bad or right or wrong an interesting philosophical exercise. Protecting the history could be noble. Preventing car crashes sounds good. Stopping package theft is important. Leaving dog poop in a neighbor’s bins should be addressed. What does having these issues say about the people who have them? Ultimately, that, no matter who you are, there will be some things in life you want to fix, some things you want to let go of, some things that matter deeply, and some things that don’t matter at all.

The final scenes of the play call into question the personal integrity of each character. The housekeeper, Luz (Maria-Christina Oliveras) gets the last word as the only person who does not actually live in the neighborhood but sees everything that goes on at these exclusive meetings. It is significant that the board members’ flaws are seen so clearly by its members, but it takes the whole show for them to look critically at the fabric of the board itself. For most of the show, the audience laughs with these characters, but towards the end the tide changes towards laughing at them. Though the makeup of the board is changing, at the end of the day, little was accomplished beyond each character’s recognition of their own hypocrisy. Yet the show itself is full of hopes for change. The Balusters pairs that perhaps even if people can not be perfect individually, collectively we can be closer to perfection.

I attended this performance on a press pass from The Press Room.