This North Coast Weekend: Our Town

Ferndale Repertory Theatre opens Our Town with a preview on Thursday and opening night Friday.  

A year after Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937, Thornton Wilder won it for Our Town. You Can’t Take It With You ends its run at North Coast Rep this weekend, while Our Town opens at Ferndale Repertory Theatre.

 Both plays emerged from the 1930s, when bad economic times encouraged evaluating life in terms other than dollars.  But if the plays had some ideas in common, the playwrights were very different.  Kaufman and Hart knew Thornton Wilder socially, but his background and life were worlds apart from these Broadway playwrights.

With a classical education (including Latin) and degrees from Yale and Princeton, Wilder was a teacher and successful novelist who felt drawn to the stage. He called theatre “the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being...We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theatre strengthens our faculty to face it.”

 Legendary director Tyrone Guthie described him as a “ceaseless traveler,” “a savant, a notable wit” who has “been everywhere and knows everyone,” sprinkling his conversation with anecdotes that might begin “Ernest Lubitsch leaned over my plate and whispered to His Holiness...”  But he also said Wilder's work expresses “between the lines of story or play, one human soul speaking to another.”

Wilder playing the Stage Manager in Our Town in a
Wellsley, Mass. production

 Wilder’s wanderlust began in childhood, as he rarely lived in one place for more than a year or two. He was born in Wisconsin, lived in China and Europe, but also attended high school down the coast in Berkeley, and during some of the early 20th century years Our Town takes place, he attended the Thatcher School in Ojai, California, which described the surrounding towns as having "the moral and intellectual atmosphere of a New England community." He acted and wrote for the stage in both places. By the time he started college at Oberlin, he had the reputation of being “worldly yet somehow ‘small town.’”

Thornton Wilder had been born a twin, but his brother did not survive the birth.  This other half haunted him and his writing for the rest of his life.

After writing one act plays and translations, Wilder embarked on writing two full length plays.  One would eventually become a comedy that failed until Tyrone Guthrie revived it, though it would become world famous mostly as the basis for the musical Hello Dolly!  The other was a drama, at first titled Our Village and later Our Town.

Inspired partly by the Spoon River Anthology book of poems by Edgar Lee Masters, and partly by Gertrude Stein and her writings about America, Wilder also applied various classical models.  He wanted it to be a play of "recollection" in Plato's sense.  "Our Town is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village; or as a speculation about the conditions of life after death (that element I merely took from Dante's Purgatory)" he wrote. " It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life."

 As his first staged original full-length play, Our Town had a rough beginning. After a well-received tryout at Princeton, it bombed in Boston. By then the director and the playwright were no longer speaking. It went to Broadway for one performance and was saved by enthusiastic reviews, but its 10-month run lost money despite the Pulitzer Prize.

 It quickly got new life in revivals around the country—a number of them featuring Thornton Wilder playing the key role of the narrator, known as the Stage Manager. He did so again in 1946 at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut, where Paul Newman would play that part in 2002.

 Today it’s said that Our Town is performed every day of the year somewhere in the world. Partly because of its simple staging, it’s become a high school staple. But a 2009 off-Broadway production directed by David Cromer became the longest running Our Town in history. Cromer stripped the play of the nostalgia and sentimentality that had upset Wilder in the original production.

Cromer as Stage Manager in his production

 In Cromer’s configuration, the audience was seated on the same level as the actors, almost within the playing area. I saw a professional production at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre in 1991 (directed by Robert Allan Ackerman, now a lauded TV movie director) that also did this. It especially made the key scene of the play (you’ll know it when you see it) very powerful, one of those unforgettable theatrical moments.  (Coincidentally, Pittsburgh Public Theatre is mounting a new production of Our Town this very month.)

 But the play has endured because audiences connect to the words as spoken, whatever the staging. Specific lives are portrayed, governed by the universal truths of life and death. In his Harvard lectures on American Characteristics, Wilder said that poet Emily Dickinson solved the American problem of loneliness “by loving the particular while living in the universal.”

 Audiences can now enter into this unique American classic at Ferndale Repertory Theatre. Directed by Patrick Porter, it features Tina Marie Harris as Stage Manager, with Brandi Lacy, Gino Bloombery, Willi and Bill Welton, Charles Beck, Stephen Avis, Carol Martinez, Scott Monadnoick, Dana Zurasky, Shelley Harris, Laureen Savage, Michael and James Swiker. Sets are by Les Izmore, lights by Liz Uhazy, sound by Peter Zuleger, costumes by Denise Ryles and Rosemary Smith.
   Our Town previews on Thursday October 9 and opens on Oct. 10. It continues Fridays and Saturdays at 8, Sundays at 2 through November 3. Tickets: Ferndalerep.org, 707-786-5483.

She Ruhls

set for 1994 OSF production of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth

The theme of the Sep/Oct issue of The Dramatist (publication of the Dramatist Guild) is a back-to-school gimmick: so a number of playwrights (as well as a musical "book" author and a lyricist) gave their versions of a Master Class. All are pretty interesting and several are especially entertaining, like David Henry Hwang's-- a little play in which he pontificates but is set straight by the ghost of his agent.

But the one I keep thinking about is by Sarah Ruhl, a smart enough playwright to have copped a MacArthur grant. Her contribution is actually 10 provocative paragraphs on different subjects. I'll mention only two, that I had reason to think about in particular.

One is "On the loss of the curtain," bemoaning all the time spent dealing with the technical aspects of marking scene changes, now that the convention of simply dropping and raising the curtain has disappeared. She suggests it be brought back, or at least a single new convention replace it ("Why not lights and no sound? Or sound and no lights? Or a monkey on a pole flipping a flip book with the titles of each scene?") so the rehearsal time lost to tech can be cut, and plays themselves will be better rehearsed.

To which I say, amen. I often wonder if so much time was devoted to technical matters, or even to elaborate staging, that the clarity of presentation has suffered, not to mention the depths explored and expressed by actors inhabiting their parts.

Another graph wonders "How it is that Thornton Wilder who radically challenged form and was an inventor and outlier was transformed by intellectual opinion into a treacly sentimentalist for the masses?" She wonders "How to reclaim the dead and enjoyed-by-many and put them back in their proper place as radicals..."

Good questions, but I also wonder if both of Wilder's reputations--as a has-been sentimentalist and a has-been experimentalist--prevents more theatres from doing his plays. Or is it just the large casts? That shouldn't stop university theatres. Though I hesitate to call for doing plays and playwrights that theatres don't do because they know they'd do them badly, I would like to experience some Wilder (The Skin of Our Teeth might be topical now), Shaw, Ibsen, Arthur Miller again--along with more fashionable plays and playwrights.

Our Town, Our Time

Besides David Cromer (top left) in the current hit Chicago-to-New York production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, the part of the Stage Manager as been played by Paul Newman (bottom left), Hal Holbrook (bottom right)--and Thonrton Wilder himself (top right.) At center is the striking poster image from a Dallas production. More on Our Town and our times in the post below. Click collage to enlarge.

Our Town, Our Country

Frank Rich has led two lives at the New York Times. He's currently a current affairs columnist, and before that he was the chief drama critic. (He's had even more jobs outside that paper--he was a movie critic for Time Magazine, and before that for New Times magazine, where he was also an editor: my editor, in fact.) The two roads that diverged in a country wood also met there, and his two lives also occasionally touch in an overt way.

This Sunday was one of those times, when he wrote about Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and our country. He cites two new productions, in Chicago and New York (there was another up in Ashland last season that unfortunately I didn't get to see), and observes: "You can see why there’s a spike in the “Our Town” market. Once again its astringent distillation of life and death in the fictional early-20th-century town of Grover’s Corners, N.H., is desperately needed to help strip away “layers and layers of nonsense” so Americans can remember who we are — and how lost we got in the boom before our bust."

Given the role that theatre plays in this culture, it may take an ex-drama critic to make the connection between new productions of a classic play and how that play resonates and illuminates the moment in a new way. But given the openness that many people in theatre audiences take to the plays they see, I believe this connection is made pretty often by audiences, if not journalists.

I am also delighted that Wilder's play is being revived. Thonrton Wilder has been too easily dismissed for too long. I'd like to see a new production of The Skin of Our Teeth (his other Pulitzer Prize winner) as well. Wilder wrote plays from the 1920s to 1960. He wrote fiction into the 1970s. That's a lot of American history. It's time to see him again, anew.

Here's are reviews of the Chicago production and the New York production of Our Town.

Hot Towns, Cool Theatres

This is a review from a companion blog (Books In Heat) of a book I mention in my upcoming column...

An American Theatre: The Story of Westport Country Playhouse
by Richard Somerset-Ward
Yale University Press

Cities were hot, the country was cooler. This condition before air-conditioning led to summer theatre in America, beginning early in the twentieth century. Later on there would be other incentives for the tonier summer theatres, especially near enough to New York City: summer reruns meant television stars could headline on the summer stage. It was part Straw Hat Circuit, and part tryout venue for Broadway.

But the Westport Playhouse in the affluent Connecticut town also began with high artistic purpose. Its fascinating founder, Lawrence Langner, had already begun elevating the quality of New York theatre by the example of his Theatre Guild productions. He divided his time between theatre and a very successful patent business, scrupulously keeping them separate, but he did transfer at least one idea from one to the other. "All my [patent] clients have research departments to develop new products," he said. "The summer theatre must serve the same function for new plays and for playwrights, for actors and technicians, for directors and stage designers."

Though this large format book is liberally illustrated and generously sprinkled with celebrity names, the text is substantial. With this informal, almost conversational history of some 75 years of this unique theatre inevitably says a lot about American theatre in general.Readers may absorb insights into the business of theatre, its dependence through changing economics on remarkable individuals (many briefly profiled) and other lovers of theatre, who create shared experiences that include the risk that audiences share with everyone in the production every night.

There are the famous names---early productions and world premieres by Eugene O'Neill, George Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward, appearances by theatrical legends from Eva Le Gallienne, Laurette Taylor, Ethel Barrymore and Paul Robeson to film stars like Dorothy Gish, Gene Kelly, Jean Arthur, Henry Fonda and Joan Fontaine, and famous entertainers like Sid Caesar and Groucho Marx. But what may surprise some readers is the importance of theatre to the actors, directors and others they may know only from the movies and television. At the height of his Hollywood stardom Tyrone Power insisted on a three week run in a now forgotten play, which required some high stakes legal bluffing to keep 20th Century Fox from suddenly recalling him to Hollywood. This phenomenon remains true today.

Westport experimented with various formats and seasons, hit its stride in the 30s and 40s, had great years and not so great through the 50s, 60s and 70s (and the author doesn't pretend the misses were hits), nearly closed in 1989 and stumbled through the 90s, until its latest rebirth began in 2000 when Joanne Woodward became Artistic Director. Westport's 2002 production of "Our Town" with Paul Newman was seen by additional millions on television. Newly renovated, Westport continues to nourish theatre in its many forms with a mix of classics and new plays. Even out there in the country it fulfills a basic element of civilization: to bring live productions together with live audiences in as ancient and as human an experience as we have.