Our Town

[Gregory_de_Bois]

You betcha! My school drama class is putting on a production of Our Town, by Thornton Wilder. And guess who is the Stage Manager? That's right-ME!!

*Applause*

I am so excited. Drama is essentially my life. I lost my brain when they made it one semester..those anti-artists....
Actually, I was able to do a capella choir first semester(Christmas Program). It was awesome. (I was one of two baritones for the Chorus of the Bells, and was a tenor for the two spirituals we did, Sister Mary and O Mary.)

Just thought I would gloat.

[Zerbie]

Congrats, Greg.

I take it this is your first stage managing experience? Cool!

Could be the beginning of a long career, ya never know.

[Jennifer5]

Congrats!

[tpdncr4christ]

I should be doing homework, but I just wanted to tell you, Our Town, is ONE OF THE BEST PLAYS EVER. Now that I got that out of my system, I'd just like to say, congrats. Stage managing is fun, you'll have a good time with it I'm sure. Break a Leg sir.

[Gregory_de_Bois]

The Stage Manager is the coolest character in the play(in my opinion). I hear that Thornton Wilder actually played this role for quite some time because they couldn't find an actor that fit the part well enough. (Acually Zerbie last year I directed a rendition of a scene from Beckett's Waiting For Godot) I love how The SM transcends time, talking about the past, present, and future as well as interacting with both the audience and the characters. He also creates the atmosphere and "scenery". The Abstract and Absurdist, although different, are some of my favourite plays. I love how there are so few props and so much pantomime.
(Austin, I should also be doing homework, myspace and here are such distractions for me )

[Jennifer5]

Originally Posted by Gregory_de_Bois

(Austin, I should also be doing homework, myspace and here are such distractions for me )

Doesn't everyone have that problem... it's soulforce, myspace, and msn... it's hard to ever get anything done.

[Zerbie]

Originally Posted by Gregory_de_Bois

The Stage Manager is the coolest character in the play(in my opinion). I hear that Thornton Wilder actually played this role for quite some time because they couldn't find an actor that fit the part well enough. (Acually Zerbie last year I directed a rendition of a scene from Beckett's Waiting For Godot) I love how The SM transcends time, talking about the past, present, and future as well as interacting with both the audience and the characters. He also creates the atmosphere and "scenery". The Abstract and Absurdist, although different, are some of my favourite plays. I love how there are so few props and so much pantomime.
(Austin, I should also be doing homework, myspace and here are such distractions for me )

d'oh!!!!!! I didn't realize it was a character! Which means I am thinking of another play, and don't know Our Town (so now I have no idea what show I'm confusing it with, hmmmm. )

Anyway, congrats on such a plum role!!!!

[Daniel]

Congrats to you Gregory!

My HS did this show when I was a senior- and I was invited to be in it- but decided not to do it because I was involved in another production outside school. And boy, do I regret that decision! What a great show! You have the part that holds the whole work together- not an easy task. The last scene alone is a stroke of genius.

I hope you have a great time!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Town

The author- Thorton Wilder- was a member of our church.

http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/gaybears/wilder/

He formed a close, fervent and life-long friendship with Gertrude Stein, but his shyness and natural reserve kept him from acknowledging their shared homosexuality. In the introduction to his collection of letters from Stein, writer Samuel Steward records the reticence which kept this close circle of friends deeply in the closet — even to one another:

Suddenly she grabbed my knee. “Sammy,” she said, “do you think that Alice and I are lesbians?” I had a genuine hot curl of fire up my spine. “I don’t see that it’s anybody’s business one way or another,” I said. “Do you care whether we are,” she asked. “Not in the least,” I said. I was suddenly dripping wet. “Are you queer or gay or different or ‘of it’ as the French say or whatever they are calling it nowadays,” she said, looking narrowly at me. I waggled my hand sidewise. “Both ways,” I said. “I don’t see why I should go through life limping on just one leg to satisfy a so-called norm.” “It bothers a lot of people,” Gertrude said. “But like you said, it’s nobody’s business, it came from the Judeo-Christian ethos, especially Saint Paul the bastard, but he was complaining about youngsters who were not really that way, they did it for money, everybody suspects us or knows but nobody says anything about it. Did Thornie tell you?” “Only when I asked him a direct question and then he didn’t want to answer, he didn’t want to at all. He said yes he supposed in the beginning but that it was all over now.” Gertrude laughed. “How could he know. He doesn’t know what love is. And that’s just like Thornie.”

Wilder and Steward were lovers for a brief period, but it was not a happy nor easy relationship. “If one accepts the essentials of Steward’s story....,” writes Gilbert A. Harrison, “the sexual act was so hurried and reticent, so barren of embrace, tenderness or passion that it might never have happened. Steward felt that for Thornton the act was literally ‘unspeakable’.” If Wilder ever experienced a deep and lasting relationship with another man, it has not been recorded.

Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town has become a staple of high school drama departments, attractive perhaps more for its economical lack of scenery and props than for its sad story of love, loss and regret. There has been speculation that the character of Simon Stimson, the town drunk and organist for the Congregational Church who eventually commits suicide, represents a closeted gay man destroyed by life in a small town.

The isolation which he felt as a schoolboy in Berkeley evidently never left the playwright. In The Journals of Thornton Wilder he speculates about the damaging effects of a lonely childhood:

Starved of the environment of love: hence forever after exhibiting so greedy and omnivorous an expectation of love that no affection they receive is adequate, and (what is worse) their affection for others is not truly love but a demand and command to be loved. I am more and more willing to agree with certain authorities that homosexuality is negative — that it is, even when apparently aggressive, a submission to solicitations. These solicitations are not necessarily those coming from the outside; they come from within also, from an exorbitant need for tenderness, i.e., to be valued by another.

I see Thornton's words as very revealing, showing that he suffered from a marked streak of internalized homophobia- which is understandable considering the time, circumstance, and place that he grew up in, as well as his religious background.

This makes for interesting 'backstory' for your character.

[u-dog]

One of my sons is very into theater. Its a wonderful experience. I, myself, am congenitally unable to memorize anything (I have trouble with the Lord's Prayer if I'm by myself ) so I always did set construction. Sigh.

Anyway, Break a leg, Greg !

[suzer1013]

Way to go, Greg! Great role, great play. I have fond memories of playing Mrs. Gibbs in high school. I hope you will enjoy it! Break a leg!

Susan

[beat0it]

Score for you!



--Lindsey.

[Daniel]

Gregory- thought you might find this article interesting. Hope your production is going well.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/bo...ks&oref=slogin

Essay
The Genius of Grover’s Corners
By JEREMY McCARTER
Published: April 1, 2007

Mary McCarthy liked Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” more than she cared to admit. It was 1938, and the theater of social protest — of Odets and Blitzstein — was at its zenith: an inconvenient time for a politically minded critic to fall for this homespun tale of life in Grover’s Corners. In enjoying this Broadway hit, she later remembered wondering, “was I starting to sell out?”

McCarthy was not the first, and very far from the last, to feel the strange queasiness that sometimes besets Wilder’s admirers. With his slender output and whiff of Norman Rockwell wholesomeness, he can seem an odd figure alongside Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams on the Rushmore of American drama — if he’s granted a place there at all. His new enshrinement in the Library of America, which has just published Wilder’s Collected Plays & Writings on Theater (Library of America, $40), may not convince everyone it’s finally safe to love him. But this anthology of some of America’s most bewitching theatrical writing offers the best chance yet to figure out how the man who might be our greatest playwright could also be our most misunderstood.

Great reputations, we tend to think, should be held aloft by imposing columns of major works. But producing one magnum opus after another was never Wilder’s style. Much of his energy went into writing one-acts, the kind of little pieces that many playwrights treat as fodder for the next company that asks for help with a fund-raiser. For Wilder, who disdained kitchen-sink drama in favor of the absolutes — finding the universe in a grain of sand, then reversing the lens to view the whole cathedral of existence — the short plays were as likely to be masterpieces as the long.

Thus the one-act “Pullman Car Hiawatha,” the story of a sleeper car making an overnight trip to Chicago, features not just the petty concerns of the passengers but the voices of the planets and the hours: human mortality in its smallness and its largeness. “The Long Christmas Dinner” telescopes 90 years of a family’s history into one never-ending holiday feast, and as generations appear, have children, wither and depart, only we in the audience appreciate what changes and what doesn’t. “Every least twig is wrapped around with ice. You almost never see that,” young Genevieve marvels, not realizing that her mother has made this observation years earlier nor that her daughter-in-law will one day do the same. Wilder’s tone is dry, fond; if God were to dabble in anthropology, and the recording angels to write with wry humor and infinite tolerance of human folly, this is how the holy books would read.

These qualities find their fullest expression in “Our Town,” a show you might recall, if your high school had a drama club. For all the play’s ubiquity, though, how well do we really understand it? Everyone remembers the folksy Stage Manager leading us through the story, as pretty Emily Webb grows up in picturesque Grover’s Corners in Act I, marries the local baseball star George Gibbs in Act II, and is buried in Act III. You may remember, too, how she decides to relive one day of her life, and sums up the play’s cosmic gospel as she returns to her grave: “Oh earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

Frequently lost in the sentimental haze that most revivals inflict upon the play is the contrary voice of Simon Stimson, the town drunk and suicide. “That’s what it was to be alive,” he snarls. “To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those ... of those about you.” He makes a good point. Grover’s Corners is, in retrospect, an unbearable place: quite content to be homogeneous, conformist, anti-intellectual and lacking “any culture or love of beauty.” When staged properly, the play doesn’t let us to feel simple nostalgia. We ought to weep at Emily’s famous line not because she finds earth wonderful, but because she was unable to find it so during her close-minded life in her close-minded town — which is, of course, our town. Wilder makes a profound statement about the limits of human understanding here, one that requires delicacy and a little steel to convey. “ ‘Our Town’ is one of the toughest, saddest plays ever written,” Edward Albee has said. “Why is it always produced as hearts and flowers?”

If Wilder had moped around in black, drunk himself into oblivion or — if you’re feeling romantic — hanged himself like Simon Stimson, people might not have so much trouble finding that note of radical despair amid the bathos. But like Alfred Hitchcock (for whom he wrote the unmistakably Wilderian screenplay for “Shadow of a Doubt”), he confounded the popular image of the genius as a tortured, self-destructive soul. Wilder cultivated a wide circle of friends and remained throughout his 78 years an enthusiastic teacher and lecturer. Though he had plenty of frustrations and some Broadway flops, he rewrote the highest-profile of these to create the hit farce “The Matchmaker,” then watched someone else rewrite his rewrite to create “Hello, Dolly!” It made him a fortune without his lifting a finger. With habitual modesty, he said he differed from his contemporaries in one respect: “I give (don’t I?) the impression of having enormously enjoyed it.”

All this unfashionable contentment might make the creator of Grover’s Corners sound like some dismissible hayseed. In fact, he was among the worldliest writers of his generation. Born in 1897 in Madison, Wis., Wilder — the survivor of a pair of twin brothers — followed his consul father to China and Hong Kong before settling with his highly cultured mother in Berkeley, Calif. After Yale, he began a lifelong circuit of the hubs of the intelligentsia (MacDowell, Harvard, the home of his close friend Gertrude Stein) with a year doing archaeology at the American Academy in Rome. He read voraciously in at least four languages, becoming so erudite it sometimes seemed to work against him: the fragments of his unfinished play “The Emporium,” included in the Library of America volume, are less captivating than the journal entries in which he wrestled with how to blend Kafka, Kierkegaard and Stein in a Philadelphia department store. Yet he remains the only writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama (twice) and for fiction (“The Bridge at San Luis Rey”). To really do him justice, the Library of America needs to publish volumes of both.

In the meantime, J. D. McClatchy, the editor of this volume, has included many of Wilder’s essays on theater, an inspired move that helps dispel the gravest misunderstanding of all. To audiences reared on the realistic dramas of O’Neill, Williams and Miller, Wilder’s plays can seem overloaded with self-conscious trickery: the Stage Manager who guides the action, the imaginary props. His prefaces and other writings reveal these aren’t mere flights of fancy: they’re the essence of his art, his way of acting on an uncommonly sophisticated view of drama.

For Wilder, theater’s ability to present the universal and eternal made it “the greatest of all the arts,” but the 19th-century vogue for box sets and realistic props had reduced it to “a minor art and an inconsequential diversion.” He realized that for theater to regain its old pre-eminence, it would need to abandon naturalism and rediscover the tools of Shakespeare and the Greeks: stage conventions that convey — a marvelous distinction — “not verisimilitude but reality.” Thus Wilder’s lack of scenery and other brazenly theatrical devices are all ways of escaping the literal and picayune, of stretching theater as far as an engaged audience’s imagination can take it. The uncanny result is plays that pursue the emotional aims of Chekhov with the adventurous theatricality of Brecht.

That doesn’t necessarily make Wilder our greatest playwright, but if we really understand him, he seems by far the most essential: the homegrown writer who made the largest claims for the theater, who put its special capacities to better use than his contemporaries — or his successors. While you can see hints of his influence in later playwrights — John Guare and Lanford Wilson, for instance — American theater today remains in thrall to the “childish attempts to be ‘real’ ” that he decried. All the family-room dramas and stagy sitcoms that pour forth every season show he still represents a road largely not taken.

Though this collection helps make sense of Wilder, what he really needs — what our theater needs — is producers willing to stage these plays, and directors sensitive to their fragile allure. In hands like those of the Keen Company, which staged an exquisite revival of “Pullman Car Hiawatha” three years ago, Wilder leaves you feeling that you haven’t just watched a show. With the actors and other playgoers, you’ve tried to make a little better sense of the funny, scary, bewildering business of being alive.

Jeremy McCarter, the theater critic at New York magazine, is editing a collection of Henry Fairlie’s writing.