It may be hard to imagine the French Quarter filled with factories, but at the turn of the 20th century, it was bustling with food industries and shipping. The French Quarter was called Little Palermo because of the community of Sicilian immigrants who lived there and worked in food businesses and at the docks near the French Market.
The corner of Ursulines and Chartres streets was the site of a pasta factory, though now it has the kind of courtyard with manicured shrubs and brick paths around a central fountain that attracts tourists in buggies and on walking tours. That garden belongs to the Beauregard-Keyes House, now known as BK House, which was a boarding home in the late 1890s.
The BK House is now serving as the venue for the latest immersive drama from Goat in the Road Productions, which opens this week. “The Family Line” is about the Jacona family, as many of its members run a grocery store in the neighborhood. Natalia Jacona is a young woman who runs the store with the help of her mother Teresa Jacona and her uncle Pascal Jacona.
Vincenzo Jacona is a cousin who has gone into the grocery wholesaler business. As the wholesalers are squeezing the grocery stores on prices, store owners are trying to organize and push back. Dez and Isaac Richardson, who are Black, are siblings who run their own grocery store, which also is feeling the pinch. Meanwhile, grocery store clerks are organizing for better wages and hours, and the play is set against the backdrop of the landmark 1892 General Strike. Eventually involving 30,000 strikers, it was one of the most successful organizing efforts in uniting Black and white workers in a variety of industries.
The drama takes place in and around the back courtyard of BK House. There’s a grocery store with a sitting area where neighbors gather to chat or play dice. Other spaces include a bedroom, a sitting room, a storeroom and the courtyard itself. Audiences can move among the different spaces and choose which characters and action to follow. In Goat in the Road’s format, the approximately 40-minute show runs twice, so people can follow different characters and see different aspects of the story. With eight characters and five areas, there’s plenty of simultaneous action and audience members will get the story without catching every moment.
“You learn that people like seeing the big scenes and the arguments and character development,” says co-creator and co-director Christopher Kaminstein. “But they also like just sitting with characters going about their business and in moments of silence and reflection. You get to be a fly on the wall. Rather than having something presented to you, you get to be the person who is spying on this moment and what a person was doing, even if they were just wrapping soap and humming to themselves. It’s what we do in our everyday lives.”
The BK House will have a timeline on New Orleans’ labor history as well as regular displays on the house itself. The property was built in 1826 and was rented to Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard after the Civil War. In the early 1900s, it was owned by the Giacona family, which ran a wholesale liquor business there until Prohibition. Starting in the 1940s, it was the residence of writer Frances Parkinson Keyes, and after her death in 1970, it became the museum it is today.
Goat in the Road’s first immersive story was “The Stranger Disease,” about how a cross-section of New Orleanians reacted to a deadly yellow fever epidemic that spread rapidly in 1878. It was staged in the Louisiana State Museum’s Madam John’s Legacy on Dumaine Street. In 2019, the company did a show at Gallier House about the social unrest in New Orleans leading up to the race riot at the Battle of Liberty Place 1874.
Each drama falls in the decades after the Civil War, as the city is adjusting to social changes. But this is more of a story about building toward the future than responding to crisis.
After the strife in the first two shows, “the cast was like, ‘Can we do a show about where people come together?” Kaminstein says.
The 1890s were bookmarked by historical milestones in New Orleans. In 1891, following the murder of the chief of police, Italian Americans were lynched in the city, and that event casts a shadow over action in “The Family Line.” Also during the 1890s, the Plessy v. Ferguson decision was handed down. And an era of progressive reforms resulted in the creation of Storyville on the edge of the French Quarter — though that is not in the work.
Goat in the Road had started work on “The Family Line” in 2019, and while the pandemic pushed back its production dates, it made the labor issue more timely, Kaminstein says.
“There’s a slow realization that I think happened similarly during the pandemic,” Kaminstein says. “People were like, ‘Wow, we’re working all the time, we’re not making any money and we’re not happy. Can we do something about this?’ It had a nice modern parallel.”
“The Family Line” runs Oct. 21-Nov. 20 at the BK House at 1113 Chartres St. Showtimes vary. Tickets $40. Find tickets and information at goatintheroadproductions.org.
