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It's the birthday of the writer who said, "My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate." Thornton Wilder (books by this author), born in Madison, Wisconsin (1897). His father was a diplomat, so Wilder and his four brothers and sisters moved back and forth between Asia and the United States. His parents were supportive, but sometimes overbearing. They dictated what Wilder did with his time, and made him work on farms in the summer so that he would be more well-rounded. They decided where he would go to college: to Oberlin, in Ohio, and then to Yale.

After some time in Rome, Wilder got a job teaching French at a boys' boarding school. In 1926, Wilder spent the summer at MacDowell Colony, a writers' retreat in New Hampshire, and he started work on his second novel. It was set in the Spanish colonial era of the 18th century -- the story of a bridge that collapses in Lima, Peru, while five people are crossing it. The collapse is witnessed by a Franciscan monk, who becomes obsessed by the tragedy and tries to figure out why those five people had to die. Wilder finished it less than a year later and sent it off to his publisher, who almost turned it down, complaining that it was written "for a small over-cultivated circle of readers." But when The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) was published, it was an immediate success. It won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize, and by that time, it had sold nearly 300,000 copies and been through 17 printings.

Wilder earned enough from The Bridge of San Luis Rey to quit his job and build a house for himself, his parents, and his sisters in Hamden, Connecticut. He called it "the house the bridge built." That house was his official residence for the rest of his life.
In 1962, Wilder was 65 years old, a famous writer. He was best known for his plays, like his Pulitzer-winning Our Town (1938) and The Matchmaker (1955), which was adapted into the musical Hello, Dolly!. He had not written a novel for almost 20 years. He was tired of being in the limelight, and he wanted to escape his comfortable life in Connecticut, so Wilder got in his Thunderbird convertible and headed southwest. The car broke down just outside of Douglas, Arizona, a town on the Mexican border, and that's where Wilder stayed for a year and a half. He was happy to be somewhere where nobody knew much about him or his writing. He rented an apartment with one bed for himself and one for all his papers. During the days he wrote, read, and took walks, and in the evenings he hung around the bar asking questions -- so many questions that everyone called him "Doc" or "Professor." When he left Douglas at the end of 1963, he had a good start on a novel. In 1967 he published it as The Eighth Day, and it won a National Book Award.

He said, "There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head."

And: "The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself, 'Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home.' And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure."

Was Our Town in YOUR town?
Join us in celebrating the 75th Anniversary of Our Town with

Thornton Wilder's Our Town was produced 658 times in the first 20 months in the United States and Canada after the Broadway production closed in 1939. We found a list of the communities in which these first productions were mounted, but it identifies only the city (or town), state and month and year.

This is where YOU come in: Find out if your home city or town may have hosted a production of Our Town between 1939-1940!

Type Our Town in the box below, along with your location, and click 'Search.'

For example, type in Our Town Fargo ND to find that a production of Our Town was mounted there in February of '39.

If it turns up, we invite you to do some digging at your local library and online!

From the name of the theatre, to the performance dates, names of the director, cast and crew, to images from the program or poster for the production, and of course, reviews, we'd love to find out more about Our Town in your town as part of the 75th Anniversary Celebration in 2013.

As this information is sent to us, we will put it on the website and begin to build an individual page for each production. Please send all information to Programs Director Rosey Strub: rosey@thorntonwilder.com.

By Charles McNulty
For The LA TIMES
Grover's Corners, the fictional New Hampshire community of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," uncannily resembles our neck of the woods in David Cromer's starkly sublime and strikingly unsentimental revival, which opened Wednesday at the Broad Stage with Oscar-winner Helen Hunt assuming the role of the Stage Manager.

It's a safe bet that Chicago and New York audiences saw their own reflections when incarnations of this purposefully unadorned production took those cities by storm. Landscape obviously has nothing to do with it. This is a play that has forsworn realistic scenery and props, so there are no purple sunsets or hints of the San Gabriel Mountains off in the distance.

How then does Cromer make us believe that this "Our Town" is really our own? For one thing, you can't help being aware of your fellow theatergoers. The house lights are blazing throughout much of the show and the rectangular playing area, lying between two opposing sets of bleachers and chairs (the Broad has been especially reconfigured for this production), has the effect of subtly incorporating the audience into the acting company.

For another, the production is performed in contemporary clothing you might throw on for a trip to the mall or a movie. There's no striving for early 20th century New England manners or mores. The Gibbs and Webb families, whose interwoven fate makes up this three-act drama about the mournful beauty of everyday life, wouldn't seem out of place at Olive Garden or P.F. Chang's.
There's certainly nothing old-fashioned about the way the siblings scream and tussle -- or how their parents reprimand them. Lori Myers, one of several original cast members, lends Mrs. Gibbs a contemporary Midwestern tone that recalls Laurie Metcalf at her most exasperated. And Jeff Still as Doc Gibbs and Tim Curtis as Editor Webb might very well be standing on line with you at Home Depot.

In short, there's no escape from the familiarity and immediacy of this world.

Although there are several sharply distinctive performances (James McMenamin's sweet but slightly slow George Gibbs being the most original), the acting isn't what distinguishes Cromer's production. In fact, the roughness of the playing style can take some getting used to. When Myers' Mrs. Gibbs and Kati Brazda's Mrs. Webb busily and rather bafflingly mime their household chores early in the first act, I was reminded of Wilder's suggestion that the actors in these roles turn their backs to the audience so as not to "distract and provoke" with their puzzling displays of cooking and washing up.

Cromer, for the most part, takes what Wilder describes as the play's "scorn of verisimilitude" quite seriously. Emily, the notably bright Webb daughter whose romance with George is recollected in the second act, is played by Jennifer Grace, an astringent actress who hardly seems like a teenager. The piano used in the raucous choir practice scene is called an organ. And there's little attempt, beyond the presence of two wooden tables, of establishing an interior outline of these domestic lives.

Somewhat more daringly, the director stands behind Wilder's belief that the occasional amateur note can deepen the artistic experience. Several of the supporting performers, for instance, have a raw quality that dissolves the distinction between us (the audience) and them (the actors). Wilder, who set out to show "the life of the village against the life of the stars," wants us to feel implicated in this story, and Cromer employs a new palette to achieve this end.

No one thinks of "Our Town" as avant-garde anymore. How could this homespun staple of American drama, so beloved by community and student theater groups, be remotely considered experimental? Yet when the play first appeared in 1938 at Princeton's McCarter Theatre, it was thought to be groundbreaking, and Wilder himself was aware that the "new bold effect in presentation-methods" was a crucial part of its interest.

Cromer comes up with surprises that may startle traditionalists. The casting of Hunt -- one of several replacements for Cromer, who initially played the part of the Stage Manager during the production's record-breaking New York run as well as during its world premiere in Chicago -- is the least of them. Hunt's manner is so confident and smooth as she strides about the length of the stage playing, pausing and fast-forwarding the action that gender never becomes an issue.

The final act, however, contains a theatrical coup that, while flying in the face of the stage directions, presses upon us with new weight the haunting grace of the play's postmortem ending. It would be unfair to give this away, but let me just say that the actors who portray the assembled graveyard dead are positioned in such a way to magnificently symbolize the background of patient eternity on which our lives fleetingly unfold.

But perhaps the biggest shocker of this "Our Town" is its refusal to bask in amber glows, wallow in folksy sentiments or indulge in shopworn sermonizing. Admittedly, the production's power would be greater in a more intimate space. Still, this is a stunning theatrical achievement. Cromer throws dazzlingly harsh light on the truth that's been there all along yet is always such a challenge to see.

Photos: Upper: Helen Hunt. Lower: James McMenamin and Jennifer Grace.
Credit: Iris Schneider

'Our Town' director David Cromer was unprepared for the strong positive reaction to his version of Thornton Wilder's play with Helen Hunt as Stage Manager, coming to the Broad Stage on Jan. 18.

By Margaret Gray, Special to the Los Angeles Times

David Cromer never set out to make anybody cry.

"It's not the hardest thing in the world to make people cry. You can make people cry if you play 'Danny Boy,'" says Cromer, director of the production of "Our Town" that will open at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica on Jan. 18, starring Helen Hunt as the Stage Manager.

So he didn't anticipate the strong emotions his pared, intimate staging of Thornton Wilder's American classic would provoke first in Chicago ("utterly astounding," said Tribune critic Chris Jones) and then off-Broadway at the Barrow Street Theatre, where, to critical raves and word-of-mouth testimonials about its cathartic powers, it officially became the longest-running production in the play's 72-year history, with more than 500 performances.

That record was previously held by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway production in 1938, which had 336 performances. Since then, "Our Town," a staple of regional theaters and high school drama clubs (large cast, minimal scenery), is often regarded as a folksy period piece, an homage to small New England towns and homespun values -- not so much as must-see radical theater.

Cromer had no intention of breaking records or starting perceptual revolutions.

"I'm a freelance director, I was offered this job, and so I did it. You don't know you're going to end up in a really long, complicated relationship with a play. You'll go, 'Eh, I'll do this job,' and you get through it."

Looking back, though, you can sometimes see the seeds of a great romance destined to blossom.

"A good friend of mine, the actor Ian Westerfer, saw an early preview in Chicago," Cromer recalls. He developed the production there with the company the Hypocrites, who perform in a cozy basement space at Wicker Park's Chopin Theatre.

"We were just furious at Ian because he was laughing and cackling and guffawing. And we're up there acting our ... off. Then lights come up and we realize that he's blubbering, red-faced, with projectile tears," Cromer says. "We're like, 'Oh. Wow, wow, wow. What the ...?"

Cromer, 47 and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, is at least a finalist for the smartest person in any room. Even his habitual self-deprecation can seem like a form of noblesse oblige. He has a prickly, unsentimental attitude to his work and reacts somewhat irritably to suggestions that his widely admired directorial approach was anything more than a respectful reading of the play.

"The design team and I felt like Wilder's intent was to get rid of artifice, which is why he did things that were relatively radical in 1938 on Broadway: no scenery, a very casual conversational feel."

Cromer's choices, including playing the Stage Manager himself in the initial productions, may have struck traditionalists as bold and edgy, but for him they emerged from the same impulse.

"I wasn't really directing myself because I wasn't really acting," he explains. "The Stage Manager comes out and sets up the play to the audience very straightforwardly: 'We're in the town of Grover's Corners, the train tracks are over there, etc.' It felt artificial to hire an actor to run the evening, and I thought, what if I just did it myself since I was doing it anyway, and that would erase one more layer of artifice."

After a while, though, in New York, "The play kept running, and I had to leave. And while my conceit was very clever, having better actors in the part actually improves the evening."

Replacement Stage Managers during the New York run included Michael Shannon, Michael McKean and Hunt, who is reprising the role here.

"People think the Stage Manager should have a pipe and elbow patches," says Hunt, who while not the first female Stage Manager in "Our Town" history is definitely part of a select group. But she and Cromer stress that his decision to cast her was, as Hunt phrases it, "pure and not some cool, flashy idea."

"I have to say that I had not been that open to the idea of a woman doing it prior to Helen coming up, which I know is a terrible thing to admit," Cromer says. Pressed about why, he shrugs and says, "I don't know." He ultimately offers, "I guess there's something that seems male to me in the emotional recalcitrance of the part."

"But when Helen came up, I realized it was just that no one had suggested the right person. She has that dry wit, that great, dry wit."

Hunt is an "Our Town" veteran, having played Emily in a production at Lincoln Center with Spalding Gray as the Stage Manager in 1989. When she saw Cromer's production in New York, as she puts it, she "had to be carried out sobbing." She called him to express her admiration, but it wasn't until about a year later that some lighthearted jokes turned into a serious offer.

She recalls, "I said, 'Are you sure?' Because the unadorned quality of the production is what allows the work to come through, and am I going to 'adorn' it in some way, being a girl, and one who's well known? What gives me the authority to come out and say these words?"

"And he said, 'You have the authority because you love it, because you have a strong feeling about it, and because you have something you want to say about it.'"

No text was changed to reflect the Stage Manager's new gender identity, but Hunt, 48, who has a daughter, Makena Lei, and a stepson, Emmett, with her partner Matthew Carnahan, interprets the role in a distinctly maternal light.

"If you run the play through the filter of mothering, aging, being a girl, having a girl, all these things start to pop out of the play, and when David does it, other things pop out."

"People who had never seen the play before told me, 'I don't understand how it was not played by a woman your age. It seems to have so much to say about what it means to be a mother every day.' My friends said they ran home afterward and looked their kids in the eye, because of the scene where Emily begs her mother, 'Just look at me one minute.' You go home and you stare at your kids as hard as you can."

Hunt, best known for her Emmy-winning role on "Mad About You" and her Oscar-winning performance in "As Good as It Gets," has kept a lower profile since the 1990s. She wrote and directed the movie "Then She Found Me" (2007) and is increasingly returning to her stage roots, not only acting but working behind the scenes to make productions happen. She was a major force behind the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles' "Much Ado About Nothing" last December at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, in which she starred as Beatrice. And she was also instrumental in bringing "Our Town" to the L.A. area.

"I really wanted people I care about here to see this. There's a world of smart, artistic people here, in my neighborhood, in my "Our Town." I had begun to talk to Dale [Franzen, Broad stage director] about how I live here [on the Westside], and I want to be part of a theatrical community.

"I initially thought we could go in the smaller space [The Edye Second Space]," Hunt says. "Then David came out with the designer and they got very excited about how they might re-imagine the show on the main stage."

Cromer says, "Wilder goes back and forth between looking at very intimate, close-up details of human life and then pulling back to say, 'We are specks in this universe.'" Although the Broad's stage and seating will be reconfigured to create the intimacy of the original production, "the big, cathedral-like space offers us this sense of theater as a universe around something small."

Cromer, who has never worked in L.A. before, acknowledges that there's some pressure. "It's difficult to deal with how praised this thing has been," he says, cautioning, "I mean, the Messiah has not arrived. It's merely an evening in the theater."

"It has always been our intention to get out of the way of the play, and I think we can trust the play is going to work, and I hope people will enjoy it. I am terrified, yes, but there's nothing we can do about it except take our chance."

BY CYNTHIA HAVEN
for Stanford University News

"Why don't we do something in America?" the famous French director asked Stanford's Jean-Marie Apostolidès over dinner in Paris. So Georges Lavaudant came to Stanford to direct "Our Town."

It's been called the greatest American play ever written, but Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer-prize-winning Our Town is too often treated like a hoary old chestnut, the staple of high school drama departments.

The renowned French director Georges Lavaudant, in collaboration with Stanford French professor Jean-Marie Apostolidès, will put a new twist on the familiar tale. The Stanford Drama Department's Our Town will be performed at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 9, through Saturday, Nov. 12, in the Pigott Theater.

"We've never invited a theater director of this stature to produce a show at Stanford," said Apostolidès. This month alone, he said, Lavaudant, most recently director of the Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, has engagements at the Louvre and the Paris Opera.

The collaborative Stanford gig was born of their friendship. The two were having a long dinner in Paris, talking about the possibility of working together on a production. Lavaudant asked, "Why don't we do something in America?" Apostolidès replied that the only venue he could offer was at Stanford, working with student performers.

"He said, 'Let's do it,'" said Apostolidès. "I thought he was only drunk. Of course he was drunk, but he said it again when he was sober."

"Ultimately, we did it. I'm very proud of it," he said. Apostolidès, who has been Lavaudant's "dramaturge and assistant - a little bit more than that," said he is pleased to participate in making "something strong for Stanford."

Our Town is more a mystery play than merely a familiar chunk of Americana. It illuminates our casual waste of time, our preoccupation with the trivial, and the eternity that underlies our least utterances - all through the psychological scrim of a Norman Rockwell painting.

On the surface, at least, what play could be more American?

Apostolidès agreed that he thought so, too - in the past. "But now I'm convinced that something different can happen. I would not see this production as totally America - it's the middle of nowhere. I'm convinced this production brings out things that are in the play and that haven't been seen before."

At a rehearsal, Lavaudant is a restless, dominating presence, attentive and intense. Frowning slightly as he listens, he instructs the cast in a mixture of French and English. When he lapses into French, a student rushes in to provide a quick translation.

"Our production will sever the connection with a precise history as well as realism. It is built on a different conception of what theater is," Ladauvant said on the website of the French Consulate in San Francisco.

He intends his production "to enhance the poetic dimension of the play in order to reveal its universal dimensions." He added modestly, "We hope that our audience will be willing to follow us on our iconoclastic path."

According to Apostolidès, "He wants constantly to do new things. It's an atmosphere of excess, trying to get the best out of everyone, and himself. He expects people to go beyond their limits. It's worth it, because you have the feeling you are working with a genius."

Michael Taymor, a Palo Alto pediatrician - and brother of Broadway director and choreographer Julie Taymor - has composed music for the production, which will include songs and dances. Dancer Aleta Hayes, a lecturer in the Drama Department, is the choreographer.

In Act III, the dead of the play's mythical city, Grover's Corners, are consigned not to heaven or hell or purgatory, but instead a grim, yet luminous, waiting, waiting . . . for what?

Wilder had been a student of the Greek and Roman classics, and his afterworld is akin to the Greeks', where the dead are shadows of their former selves, reflecting on their lives. What kind of world was Wilder trying to create?

"What is amazing is that he wrote the third act when he was in Switzerland," said Apostolidès, where Wilder was immersed in Marx and Nietzsche. "Yet it's not there at all." Such is the world of Wilder - a world of the mind as much as of observation.

The Soviet Union stopped a 1946 production of Our Town in the Russian sector of occupied Berlin, claiming the drama was too depressing and might inspire a wave of suicides.

Elsewhere, it has left audiences rapt with the wonder of the everyday.

Maybe Nietzsche, who wrote The Birth of Tragedy, found his way into Wilder's Our Town after all. Nobody famous ever came out of Grover's Corners, Wilder writes in the play.

"Can we create tragedy with people who are not very remarkable?" asked Apostolidès. "It's a challenge, and Thornton Wilder does it."

http://drama.stanford.edu

Written by
Jackie DiMarzo
For The Poughkeepsie Journal

It's become a tradition each fall for many local residents to participate in the Poughkeepsie Public Library District's annual community-wide reading program, the Big Read.

This year, the library district has selected the two Pulitzer Prize-winning works by Thornton Wilder, the novel "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" and the play "Our Town." From Sunday through Nov. 13, these works will be read, studied and used as the theme for many programs and activities throughout the Poughkeepsie area.

"Throughout the following month, the Poughkeepsie Big Read will offer lectures, book clubs, ballet, walking tours, theatrical performances, slide-shows, comedy (improvisation), cooking demonstration, movies, creative writing opportunities, hands-on creative programs for teens and more," said Jewel Ratzlaff, coordinator of the Big Read program.

Ratzlaff said the Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest and local organizations and is designed to encourage literacy and restore reading to the center of American culture.

"I have always loved the literature of Thornton Wilder," said Tom Lawrence, executive director of the district. "When we consider the books for each year, we need to select from a list made available to us from the NEA. Happily, Wilder appears on the list."

One of the titles, "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," focuses on themes of fate and coincidence.

" 'The Bridge of San Luis Rey' is a wonderful little book that seeks to find meaning for the simplest of events. A bridge collapses in 1700s Peru and the narrative explores what brought the people on the bridge to that spot at that moment," Lawrence said. "It's a timeless question, and ... Wilder ... transcends the unfamiliar (setting) with a situation we can all relate to."

The Big Read kicks off with an opening reception at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, October 16 at the Mid-Hudson Library System Auditorium at 105 Market St. in the City of Poughkeepsie.

"Dr. Lincoln Konkle, executive director of the Thornton Wilder Society, will share his expertise and insights on (the) 'Social and Spiritual Progress in Thornton Wilder's Writing,' " according to a written release.

"Our Town" will be the focus of upcoming programs in October and November, such as walking tours of the Freedom Plains Presbyterian Cemetery and the Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery.

"In the third act, the scene is a cemetery in Grover's Corners, the mythical New Hampshire town that serves as the setting for the play," Lawrence said.

The author will also be discussed at the Nov. 6 event, "An Insider's Perspective on Thornton Wilder." Tappan Wilder, Thornton Wilder's nephew, will present an illustrated talk drawn in part from the Wilder family records. The event will take place at 2:30 p.m. in the Mid-Hudson Library System auditorium.

Ratzlaff said they are also planning on building a virtual time capsule. Inspired by "Our Town," local residents are encouraged to consider what they would place in a time capsule that would tell people 1,000 years from now what their lives were like.

A flier announcing the Poughkeepsie Public Library's 2011 Big Read Virtual Time Capsule project reads, "What are the most important factors of your daily routine, your surroundings, your history, your culture that would speak to future generations?"

Participants are asked to choose their items, take a digital photograph of them -- or create a video of under three minutes in length -- and submit it to the project. Items are limited to three per entry and submissions should be emailed to 2011bigread@gmail.com by Nov. 6 along with a name -- class or organization -- town and a short description.

Submissions will be chosen at the Big Read closing reception on Nov. 13 at the Mid-Hudson Library System auditorium.

By David Ng for The LA Times

The 2011-12 season at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica will feature a healthy dose of star power in the forms of actress Helen Hunt in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, directed by David Cromer.

"Our Town" (Jan. 13 to Feb. 12) comes to Los Angeles following a critically acclaimed run at New York's Barrow Street Theatre, where Hunt was one of several actors to rotate into the central role of the Stage Manager. The Oscar- and Emmy-winning actress said in an interview that she wanted to reprise the role primarily for personal reasons.

"It's nourishing to work on this play," she said. "It reminded me of everything I cared about in life, and when I stopped playing it, I missed it."

Hunt said the role of the Stage Manager -- which is traditionally played by a man -- takes on new resonance when played by a woman. "It's the same words, but it's not the same," she said. "Some friends who saw it said that they could not believe it wasn't written for a woman. My daughter and stepson saw it in New York and I told them that a man was going to play it after me. They were like, a man's going to play that part?"

Cromer's staging brings the actors and audience together in close proximity. The director will reconfigure the Broad's main space, reducing the number of seats, to achieve the intimacy that is crucial to the production. Cromer's staging of Our Town played in Chicago in 2008.

Photo (top): Helen Hunt. Credit: Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times.

By: Jessica Stark
Originally published by The Rice University Shepherd School of Music

In his cool Southern drawl, Tyson Miller talked about his wide-ranging opportunities during his first year in Rice's Shepherd School of Music. A slight Texas twang hung onto his words as he discussed his lyric tenor role in scenes from "La Boheme," a leggiero tenor role in scenes from the "Barber of Seville" and a character tenor role in "The Coronation of Poppea." The latter role was his first in a fully staged opera performed in its original Italian.

"Obviously, it can be a challenge to perform and sing in a language you don't speak every day," said Miller, a graduate student in the voice program. "But, as I'm finding out, it can be just as challenging to perform in your native tongue."

Miller stars as the stage manager in the Shepherd School's spring opera "Our Town," which opens March 17. It's the Houston premiere of the opera. Unlike his other roles, this one calls for him to sing in a low, conversational tone and serve as a narrator for the audience.

"I love the diversity of roles I've had at Rice - they've been different vocally and dramatically and allowed me to tap into different parts of myself," Miller said. "What I really love about this role is that I get to interact with the audience."

"Because this show is set in New Hampshire, I had to work out a lot of my native Texas-isms," Miller said. "I have to become more neutral and sing like someone from up North. I have to watch my diction and delivery and make the conscious effort not to say things like 'y'all.'"

It's a challenge faced by even veteran classical singers because it requires them to take apart their own language and what comes naturally to them.

"Many classical singers don't pay that close attention to their diction when performing in their native language," said Richard Bado, director of the Opera Studies Program. "So while it can be much easier for them to listen, react and express in their own language, they have to actively think about and remove any regional dialects from their singing."

Leading lady Chelsea Morris found that to be true.

"I've really enjoyed singing in English," said Morris, a graduate student. "It's easier in the sense that you understand the nuance of the meaning of the words, and you can really listen to the other singers."

Emotion in the everyday

Adapted from the Thorton Wilder play of the same name, "Our Town" is a three-act opera by composer Ned Rorem and librettist J.D. McClatchy. It tells the story of people in an average town in the early 20th century and focuses on George Gibbs, a doctor's son, and Emily Webb, the daughter of the town's newspaper editor and George's future wife.

"What's really interesting about this opera is that it's about normal life," said Morris, who is portraying Emily. "There are operatic moments, but the story doesn't have your typical love triangles, betrayals or mistaken identities. But there's still so much emotion."

That's what has created Morris' biggest challenge in a scene where, after her death, Emily revisits the memory of her 13th birthday.

"It's very emotional, but I can't completely give into that emotion because I still have to be able to sing," she said.

She also can't give into the nostalgia she feels with the performance. "Our Town" will be her final opera at the Shepherd School as she completes her degree this spring.

"I have grown so much since my first opera scenes," Morris said. "I am much more aware of my abilities and am able to be much more expressive with my voice. I'm so grateful for the opportunities I've had at Rice - the Shepherd School has created an environment where it feels safe to take risks and realize that you're capable of more than you even thought."

Engaging imaginations
In last fall's opera, Morris portrayed Poppea, a manipulative, ungrateful and mean woman who "couldn't be more different" from her current character, Emily. The roles are also different musically with the "Coronation of Poppea" being a Baroque opera written in 1643 and "Our Town" being an American opera written in 2005.

Because "Our Town" is a relatively new opera, Bado said, it offered fantastic training for the cast because they couldn't prepare for their roles by seeing a DVD or renting a recording.

"It engages their imaginations," Bado said. "I've seen this opera a couple of times in the past few years and knew immediately that I wanted to perform this program at Rice. The story is timeless and the characters are all so rich. I saw it as an opportunity for lots of roles for our singers and for them to find honest characters to play."

A character-driven opera, "Our Town" has basically no sets, a bare stage and limited props.

"It's a great opportunity to present the art of music and show people what can be done," Miller said. "It really gives the audience the opportunity to engage in the performance because they too have to be imaginative - it allows them to use their imagination to really build the story for themselves."

"This opera doesn't need an elaborate set," Bado said. "The story and libretto for this opera is fantastic. It forces everyone - me included - to examine their thoughts and beliefs. Great art will always do this."

"Our Town" will be presented in Alice Pratt Brown Hall's Wortham Opera Theater March 17, 19, 21 and 23. All performances will be at 7:30 p.m.

Bado is the conductor, and Mary Duncan is the stage director.

Tickets are $12 for general seating and $10 for students and senior citizens. For tickets, call 713-348-8000.

From The Big Read websiteEdward Albee is known as an iconoclast whose work is dark, often cynical, and populated by the disaffected. Thornton Wilder, on the other hand, was endlessly enthusiastic, drinking in life to the fullest. But the author of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? has a deep admiration for the writer of Our Town. NEA media producer Josephine Reed sat down with Albee and opened the conversation by asking him about the first time he saw what he considers to be the best play ever written.

Listen to the full interview on The NEA's Big Read Blog.

Edward Albee: I remember the experience, and I was both moved and devastated, and amused and all the good thing s that a play is meant to do to you. And I have seen since so many dreadful productions of Our Town, that one of the things I want to talk about today is will somebody please do Our Town properly?

Jo Reed: And what would that mean?

Edward Albee: It is not a Christmas card. It is not a cute play. And most of the people who produce that play think it's afternoon television. It's one of the toughest, saddest, most brutal plays that I've ever come across. And it is so beautiful, and when it is funny, it's gloriously funny. There are scenes in Our Town that it's hard for me to think about without wanting to cry. It's that beautiful a play.

Jo Reed: Why do you think "Our Town" is seen as this nostalgic look at small town America at the turn of the century?

Edward Albee: Well, I guess that Thornton should have written something or said something about how the play is meant to be done. A lot of times, if there's something there that can be seen as something less than it is, which would be less troubling to people, that's the way they'll want to see it. You can't stop. No two people see the same play, and you can't stop people from seeing what they want to see in spite of what the play is all about. And Thornton Wilder knew his Kierkegaard. He knew his Camus. He knew his Sartre. He knew all of the existentialists, even though the play was written before existentialism. But it's a highly existentialist play, coming back from Kierkegaard.

Jo Reed: I'm thinking about the lack of staging of the play, and how Thornton Wilder really calls the audience to imagine the play as much as the play is being performed, and what that contributes to the play, which I think is a great deal. But also do you think that can account for sort of the misplaying of it?

Edward Albee: I suppose if you give directors and actors the opportunity to do something wrong, they're likely to take it. I can't imagine any other justification for so many terrible productions of Our Town. It is a highly avant-garde play in the sense of its construction, and its methodology. Maybe that gets in the way of people understanding. I don't know.

Jo Reed: And we also have a stage manager who throughout the play keeps telling the audience that they're seeing a play.

Edward Albee: Yes. He's trying to keep them intellectually on their feet. Yes. Maybe Thornton should have done something, made a couple of notes. Say, "This is a tough play, you know. Stop sitting around pretending it's a Christmas card."

Jo Reed: He, of course, had won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Do you have any idea why he turned to the theater?

Edward Albee: To broaden his perspective, to broaden himself probably. Well, he was so knowledgeable in plays going back to the Greeks. He knew his theatrical history as well as anybody. In fact, sometimes it was dangerous to talk to Thornton because you made so many mistakes, and he kept correcting you. "Escalus did not write that one, Edward." "Hey, you're right, Thornton." I guess he saw things that he could do on stage that he couldn't do on the page, and he certainly found them. You know, he wrote a lot of plays, and I think Our Town is a masterpiece. I think Our Town is probably the finest American play every written so far. I think The Skin of Our Teeth is a damn good play. The others I find somewhat lesser and don't matter much. But Our Town is so extraordinary and spectacular.

Jo Reed: What do you think it is about Our Town specifically that makes it the greatest American play?

Edward Albee: The fact that when it is done properly it makes us understand that if we don't live our lives fully and completely, we've wasted everything we have.

Jo Reed: But doesn't it also say it's impossible to do that?

Edward Albee: Yeah. But you got to try hard.

Jo Reed: That I agree with. You know, what strikes me about Thornton Wilder is he's certainly interested in the big questions, and yet the specificity of both the way Our Town begins.

Edward Albee: Yeah. But it's so nice that Our Town just doesn't say, hey, this is a play about the big questions.

Jo Reed: Exactly.

Edward Albee: The fact that he makes it seem other than it is makes it seem, well, it is about these people in this small town, and their lives, which are not spectacular, and that they live their lives and then they die. And that's it. You know, for me, the scene I can hardly even talk about without crying, is when Emily's dead, and she comes back and they warn her, "Just take the most normal day of your life. Don't take anything spectacular. Don't take your wedding or when you went to the soda fountain and he asked you to marry him. Don't do anything like that. Just take a normal day." Happened to be her sixteenth birthday, fifteenth or sixteenth birthday.

Jo Reed: Twelfth.

Edward Albee: Twelfth?

Jo Reed: Yeah.

Edward Albee: That young.

Jo Reed: Yeah.

Edward Albee: Gee, because I've gotten so old I think everybody's older. And she comes back home and, of course, they can't see her or hear her. And she watches their life going on, and all of a sudden from off stage, we hear her father say, "Where's my girl? Where's my birthday girl?" And she breaks up, as I almost did telling you about it. And she has to leave. It's too beautiful, too sad. A writer who can do things like that breathtaking moment, something that Wilder had in almost all of his plays, something that catches us up and makes us understand that we're seeing something maybe far different than we thought we were. So that's the moment for me in Our Town, where she realizes that she can't relive it, it's all gone.

Jo Reed: There's something about the dead sitting in chairs facing the audience that seems to me such a mirror, such a reflection of the audience.

Edward Albee: Well, I'm sure he intended that, of course, yes, certainly. One of the things that Wilder accomplished was by taking people who were not spectacular except in the fact that they were human beings, most normal people you can possibly imagine. No greatness there. No terrible things, you know. One guy was a drunk, and this and that, but absolutely normal people, and that they're all so extraordinary, and their lives are so extraordinary.

Jo Reed: He seems to be both a very honest observer of people, but also an immensely generous one.

Edward Albee: Yes. But can you be an accurate observer of people without being both generous and objective? I don't think you can. There has to be some generosity or you're writing an act of aggression, and that's not enough.

Jo Reed: How has your viewing or reading of Our Town changed throughout the years?

Edward Albee: I don't think it has. Because, as I say, I keep running into these awful productions of it, and I keep wanting to stand up and say, "That's not the way to do it. You're making a terrible mistake. You're misinforming your audiences as to what this play is about." Now, I'm making the assumption that I'm correct about Our Town. Everybody else is wrong. Except I've talked to a lot of people who actually really, really know what the play is about. And they realize it's a tough play.

Jo Reed: Can you talk just briefly about the difference between sentiment or emotion, which Our Town certainly has, and sentimentality, which productions often drift into.

Edward Albee: The fact that Wilder keeps us at a kind of Brechtian distance in this play doesn't permit us to slop over into sentimentality, that we are objectively watching that which moves us, and that which affects the people in the play. The fact that there's the double image going there.

Jo Reed: Let's say you had to persuade somebody to go and see Our Town. What would you say to them?

Edward Albee: I would say what I say to most people, especially my students, every time you go to see a play, see the first play you've ever seen. Make sure you bring no expectation or no limitation of what theater should be into the theater. Have your first theatrical experience every time you go.

Jo Reed: Edward Albee, thank you so much.

Edward Albee: My pleasure.

Our Town was staged from January 13 to 29, 2011, at The New National Theatre, Tokyo, Japan. New artistic director of the theatre, Ms. Miyata Keiko, selected four European and American plays-- Hedda Gabler, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Our Town and Waiting for Godot--for her first season, plays which have deeply influenced modern Japanese theatre. Our Town was favorably received and attracted about 10,000 audience members. The music was composed by Inamoto Hibiki who played it live for each performance on a single Steinway made in 1912.

Click on individual images for details.

Translator Hachiya Mizutani sent the follow report in response to questions from the Thornton Wilder Estate.

What aspects of Our Town do you think Japanese audiences will most identify with?

I suppose the most crucial aspect of Our Town for Japanese audiences is the complex emotions which are aroused in the last scene where Wilder shows that human beings cannot escape from the inherent contradiction; we cannot appreciate the meaning of life while we are living it. The audiences are invited to experience what dead Emily did on the stage. Wilder arouses indescribable emotions in the audiences there: nostalgia for the past, poignant pleasure to realize the human reality, repentance, and a slight hope or expectation of a serene life after death which may rouse religious sentiment in us. These emotions cannot be integrated to one but we are to be exposed to them as they are. The audience may feel how "wonderful and terrible" human life is, and they may see "in the selfsame hour the trivial and the divine."

These complex emotions aren't aroused until the audience becomes aware of the impermanence of life through a kind of simulated experience of Emily's death. This is the same effect we have in Noh plays which developed in the 14th century and survive in their original forms even in the 21st century. Even after 1868 when Japan opened up the country and proceeded to full modernization, the Japanese have continued to have a pre-modern sensibility through some traditional art forms such as Noh drama, flower arrangement, tea ceremony and Suibokuga or ink painting which were under the profound influence of Zen Buddism.

The key concept of the sensibility is Japanese comprehensive world-view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience. The aesthetic is based upon the concept that "imperfection, impermanence and incompletion" are the essential elements of beauty. Modern Japanese do not necessarily have these traditional aesthetic, but basically or unconsciously they tend to be sensitive to such beauty. It is well known that Japanese love cherry blossoms because of the way the petals fall while still at the height of their beauty.

Our Town always appeals to such sensitivity in the Japanese people.

How well are Our Town and Thornton Wilder known in Japan?

The first introduction of Thornton Wilder into Japan was through Our Town, which was translated by Kaoru Morimoto, a Japanese prominent playwright, in 1939 just after the play was first staged on Broadway. The first performance of it in Japan was by the Bungaku-za theatre company in July, 1941 under the direction of Teruko Nagaoka. This trial performance was favorably received and the Bungaku-za decided to revive the production in September and November in Tokyo and Osaka, respectively. During this time, the relation between the United States and Japan was severely strained, but one of the representative American dramas was staged in two major Japanese cities as planned. Moreover the Bungaku-za performed it at the school festival of the Tokyo College of Commerce on November 17, 1941. The typical American play evoked strong emotions among the students and faculty members. It was just three weeks after the performance that the Japanese Navy launched its attack on Pearl Harbor.

From August 1941, anti-U.S. sentiment began to spread throughout Japan and Japanese newspapers carried inflammatory articles every day, inspiring fanatical patriotism. Though the audience of the college, most of whom were young students, must have anticipated war against the United States as unavoidable and some among them must have been prepared to be drafted as soldiers, they received a strong impression from Our Town .

But since World War II, Our Town has been produced by many training schools and not often by professional theatre companies. Certainly the play provides good educational material for acting students and it is an easy play to be performed without settings and props. At the same time, many amateur performances have given the impression that Our Town is immature as a play and that it is not worth studying seriously. Such situations may be the same in the U.S..

But recently, some younger Japanese playwrights or directors show intense interest in the plays of Thornton Wilder. They genuinely express their sympathy with Wilder's view of theatre, especially with bare stage, repetition, some super-natural elements, timelessness, and his idea of "acting." Generally they did not know anything about Thornton Wilder when they started their theatrical career. But when they accumulate their theatrical experience and carry on some theatrical experiments "in finding the new ways to express how men and women think and feel in our time," they suddenly realize they do the same thing as Wilder did.

Thornton Wilder and his plays inspire some young theatrical people in Japan. I hope Our Town by New National Theatre, Tokyo, in 2011 will be a good opportunity for Japanese playwrights, directors and researchers in drama to study Wilder's works further.

What do you personally find most compelling about Wilder's work?

The compelling and fascinating parts of Wilder's plays are in his creativity which finds the root in the pre-modern culture, and in his theatrical experiments offering a different perspective from the modern one on the reality of human beings. Personally I am fascinated by Wilder's consistency in swimming against the theatrical main stream in the 20th century. I am also captivated by his decisive theo-centric world-view.

MIZUTANI Hachiya is a professor of drama, in School of Culture, Media and Society at Waseda University in Tokyo. He translated and published Thornton Wilder's Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth and The Matchmaker. Other than Wilder's plays, he translated Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, Widows, and The Other Side for performance as well as his essay Desert Memories. He is a member of Thornton Wilder Society.