Pulitzer-winner Lynn Nottage and 'This Is Reading': Celebrating Reading in multimedia, film, and dance

Lynn Nottage, Pultizer Prize-winner, has a special bond with the city of Reading.

This spring, her play Sweat, about dispossessed factory workers in Reading, earned the second Pulitzer of her career. Nottage based the play on hours of interviews and research with steelworkers and other workers in the onetime industrial powerhouse.

But the bond between woman and city extends beyond the play – to This Is Reading, a huge multimedia installation in the Franklin Street Railroad Station in downtown Reading. This Is Reading goes up on July 21-23 and July 28-30, with performances at 7:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. each night.

Nottage and a range of other artists have created an epic about Reading in film, dance, music, and live performance, spanning generations, social classes, genders, and ethnicities. This Is Reading reflects the ambition, empathy, and social vision that characterizes Nottage's work.

"The reason that Reading resonates with me," Nottage says by phone, "is that it feels like a microcosm of so many other postindustrial cities. There's something familiar about it, but also wounded. My impulse as a mother is to be nurturing and healing, and that's the way I feel toward Reading."

Collaborating with artists including director Kate Whoriskey, filmmaker Tony Gerber, and Rennie Harris, North Philadelphia-born and founder of Puremovement, Nottage came up with a seven-part, interactive, panoramic look at a city's past, present, and future, in many more than three dimensions.

"When we were conceptualizing the piece," Nottage says, we said, 'We want to build a space where everyone is invited to be together, including people who often are not invited into these spaces, and everyone can sit shoulder to shoulder and feel comfortable. When I watch the audience, people don't realize when they're there that some of the people are from Opportunity House [a homeless shelter in Reading], and some are from the nicer neighborhoods up on the hill. I see them, sitting together without knowing it."

Even the site, the Franklin Street station, is symbolic. Built in 1929 as the hub of the Reading Railroad, it closed in 1981 and was renovated a few years ago – but then left vacant. "We are making this a space for everyone," Nottage says, "and seeking to use art to revitalize these unused spaces."

Among the seven parts of the installation is "Reading," a series of interviews with seniors who remember the reading they grew up in. "Reading 1974" is a film that shows the city before the well-meaning urban renewal that, in Nottage's words, "tore down everything new and destroyed much of the texture that made Reading what it was. In "Reading Behind Doors," Nottage says, "we are invited into spaces we might not necessarily enter, such as a charismatic African American church, or the factory floor of a sweets shop, or a Masons circle, or a party in a recently restored mansion. It tying together people who wouldn't inhabit the same spaces but do occupy the same city."

"Reading Now" is an explosion of dance involving dancers from Reading and Philly, accompanied by video images, including footage of the joyous parade in March when the Reading High School basketball team won the commonwealth finals. "Reading Soars" projects aerial views of the city on the ceiling of the train station, while dancers move through the city, "giving it a kind of beauty treatment," in Nottage's words.

Nottage calls "Reading Speaks" "one of my favorites. People coming to the show, just before they enter, they're invited to share their thoughts on-camera. And then we have an algorithm by which their comments are woven into a smoothly connected flow. We call it the jumbotron effect. When you see yourself on the big screen, you feel part of the collective."

After all that, there has to be a party – and there is, in "Reading Lives," a celebration of the town in which "everybody is invited to get up and dance."

This Is Reading. July 21-23 and July 28-30, Franklin Street Station, Franklin and Seventh Streets, Reading. Free. Information: 610-375-4085, thisisreading.bpt.me. Reserve free tickets online. At 6:30 p.m. each night of the performance, a wait list will be established for both performances. Those without tickets can sign up on a first-come, first-served basis. Unused tickets for either show will be released to people on the wait list (two-ticket limit).