Only ever staged in a black-box theatre during her residency in the Boston University Theatre Department, Joy Felipe's play They Ride On Us finally saw full production here, at Forest Hill Station, during a period of scheduled line-work that left the southern terminus of the Orange Line cut off from the rest of the Line. A dramatization of the events that lead to the deaths of four men working to build the tunnel under the Bay that connects the Blue Line to the city center, several earlier attempts to mount the production failed when Felipe found she could not produce a sufficiently claustrophobic, dark, and top-heavy feeling on the stage and in the stands. The subterranean train tunnels of Forest Hill, with their oppressive brick walls and squat concrete columns, met her approval, communicating the intense pressure the borers of the tunnel worked under, both from the ever-intruding sea and from the rail companies that directed its construction. The title They Ride On Us is a reference to Thoreau's observation in Walden that
“We do not ride the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man. [...] [I]f some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden on. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception.”
Felipe writes: "My object? To move the audience-member to consider the sublimated human price of the station, the trains, the road, the cars--to have her see the sacrifice."