“Our Town” is a classic play written by Thornton Wilder that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for best playwright in fiction and drama. It was first performed on January 22, 1938, at McCarter Theatre in Princeton.
Eighty-four years later the show is again being performed in Central New Jersey but this time eight miles down the road from McCarter at Kelsey Theatre on the MCCC West Windsor campus. The production company is Shakespeare 70.
The play is in three acts and follows the life events of inhabitants of Grover’s Corners in New Hampshire that happened between 1901 and 1913. The two main characters of it are the couple Emily Webb and George Gibbs. They are neighbors, close in age and they grew up together as friends until they fell in love and got married.
One of the most impactful moments in the play was after the couple get married at the end of the second act and then Emily passes away when she is giving birth at the beginning of the third act. In this second dimension world’s afterlife, she decides to go back to live for one day, the happiest day of her life.
Kate Augustin, who portrayed Emily said this was the most challenging scene in the play because she needed to live the experience of death that she never lived, “Having to convey that emotion was tricky”.
According to Bud Kliment, a reporter and Deputy Administrator for the Pulitzer Prize, the three-act American classic drama had a long journey starting in Rome in 1920 when Wilder was only 23 years old and was studying at the American Academy. He finally finished it in 1937, with the support of a producer Jed Harris who had to sequester him away at his home on Long Island in New York so Wilder could finish the third act.
The heart of the play focuses on life, love, and death, experiences that are universal.
Wilder lost his twin brother at birth, and Penelope Niven who wrote his biography, says, “Like many twinless twins, this was a death event which haunted him for most of his life.”
During the time Wilder was in Rome he had the chance to go on an archeological dig where he saw a tomb that was over one hundred years old. He found himself thinking about how the people in the tomb were not that different from the people living at the time.
The Kelsey Theatre production that ran from January 21 to 29 was produced by the company Shakespeare 70 and directed by Jake Burbage and Frank Falisi, and produced by Janet Quartarone.
Burbage started his career in theater when he was still a child, as he says, “I was six years old when I got into acting.”
In 2014 he got involved in Shakespeare 70, and in 2019 he joined the executive board of the company, from there he explains how they make decisions related to the shows they choose. Burbage says “We pick our plays first based on what we want to do, but also the primary consideration is how they’re going to serve the community.”
The decision of playing “Our Town” goes back to the spring of 2021. When asked about the greatest challenges directing the show he said, “When we did this show at TCNJ, for further safety and health we had to perform in masks.” The second challenge was that they lost a lead actor and he had to step in to play the role of George Gibbs in the Kelsey performance
Kliment says original audiences for the play were disconcerted by how spare it was. He writes, “For some audience members, the show’s lack of scenery and episodic narrative may have seemed odd or puzzling.” The simplistic scenery includes just wooden chairs, and it would be easy to think the producers had simply run out of time to put it together.
In the beginning, the Stage Manager played by Curt Foxworth links his announcements to the play. In a moment he is an “announcer” and a minute later he is the “storyteller” but we barely realized that he was running a play within a play. He made the audience connect right at the beginning of the story just like we were part of the humble Grover’s Corners in New- Hampshire.
It’s impossible not to get invested watching George and Emily growing together, building a relationship, imagining a happily ever after. When instead she dies young and that she realizes how people don’t appreciate the simple things in life, the simple moments, it is heartbreaking.
Emily says at the end “Goodbye, to clocks ticking… and my butternut tree! And Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths… and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you! Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?”
Looking around in the theater after the final monologue, people were sniffling and wiping away tears.
