by RICK DANLEY // November 10, 2016
The stage direction for Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play “Our Town” are simple: “No curtain. No scenery.”
Wilder believed that the theater of his day had become too obsessed with spectacle. Directors loaded the stage with period furniture and elaborate costumes and realistic set design — what Wilder called the “obtrusive bric-a-brac” of stagecraft.
This move toward a comprehensive realism irritated Wilder. “In Chinese drama, a character, by straddling a stick, conveys to us that he is on horseback,” Wilder wrote in a preface to “Our Town” some decades after it first premiered. “In almost every Noh play of the Japanese, an actor makes a tour of the stage and we know that he is making a long journey.”
The emphasis on naturalism was not only a superficial distraction, said Wilder. It was, in his words, an “evasion” of the necessary project of art.
“When you emphasize place in the theatre, you drag down and limit and harness time to it,” Wilder continued. “You thrust the action back into past time, whereas it is precisely the glory of the stage that it is always ‘now’ there. Under such production methods the characters are all dead before the action starts.”
Forget all the paraphernalia that comes with historical reenactment, instructed Wilder; in good theater, it is the human predicament that is at stake:
“Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind — not in things, not in ‘scenery.’ Moliere said that for the theatre all he needed was a platform and a passion or two. The climax of [“Our Town”] needs only five square feet of boarding and the passion to know what life means to us.”
IN ITS direction and in its performances, Iola High School’s “Our Town” — opening tonight — is one of the great Bowlus Fine Arts Center events of the year.
For a play which, according to the Thornton Wilder Society, is performed “at least once a day somewhere in the world,” the student-actors at IHS inject this potential museum piece with a newness and a feeling and a pathos in excess of their years.
In a uniformly strong cast that includes more than 20 actors, it doesn’t work to name-check everyone. Any production of “Our Town,” though, is bound to rise or fall on the success of the Stage Manager character, who, leaning out toward the audience at the start of the play, abolishes the fourth wall in his very first line: “This play is called ‘Our Town,’” he announces. “It was written by Thornton Wilder…”
Honest-faced junior Quentin Mallette, who unspools miles of remembered monologue over the course of the three-act classic, is a perfect tour guide through the microcosmic hamlet of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. A plain-spoken sage, Mallette, as stage manager, presides over the human drama of the townspeople and, in this mostly plotless play, provides the audience with a sort of narrative glue.
It’s on the basis of Mallette’s easy talents that the audience member can relax into the arms of what is, overall, an extremely confident production.
The precocious and multi-faceted Zach Cokely and Karly McGuffin, as lovebirds George Gibbs and Emily Webb, sketch for the audience the various phases of love and grief. Given that the show is essentially without props — a table here, a chair there, a bench — the plausibility of the romance and heartbreak that they enact over the course of the play are borne almost purely on the strength and nuance of their acting.
George and Emily’s parents — played by Abby Valentine, Jerrica Adams, Aaron Terhune and Isaiah Wicoff — provide a moving glimpse of the American family not as it actually is but as, in an ideal world, it should be.
YOU DON’T go to “Our Town” for the yuks, of course. It’s an elegiac, sometimes melancholy, play; a play that wears its message — life passes too quickly — on the outside of its clothes.
“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?” Emily begs the Stage Manager.
Later, a voice speaks out from beyond the grave. It’s that of Simon Stimson (Levi Seilonen), the town’s choir director and a bitter drunk: “Yes, now you know. Now you know! That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those…of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know….”
But like any piece of memento mori, the true subject of the play is not death. It’s life. It’s the richness of family and community and romantic love, those things whose value can only be derived by the truth of their impending loss, the fact that in due time they’ll be gone.
“Death,” the novelist Saul Bellow once wrote, “is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything.”
Wilder’s skill, then, was to take a sentimental cliché — life is short, pay attention to its fleeting glories — and invest it with a new beauty.
And Iola High School’s talent is for reminding us that it’s still true.
RG danley 