Word: wilder
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...serves besides as Wilder's mouthpiece; and, in fact. Wilder himself played the part for a fortnight on Broadway and occasionally there after in summer stock. In a way. Our Town is almost as much an illustrated lecture as a play...
...Town struck its early audiences as highly unorthodox (partly because it lacked the normal theatrical suspense and conflict), but it was welcomed across the country in every city except Boston, where its chilly reception caused the run to be halved. Actually, Wilder's technique here evolved out of his own one-act plays of 1931, especially Pullman Car Hiawatha, where we find no scenery, minimal props, the versatile Stage Manager, and even the very name of Grover's Corners (located in Ohio this time, however), not to mention the prototype of Emily's valedictory apostrophe to the world...
...Even so, Wilder claimed no credit for invention. In the preface to an edition of three of his plays, he says, "I am not an innovator but a rediscoverer of forgotten goods and I hope a remover of obtrusive bric-a-brac." In Elizabethan times, after all, Shakespeare's plays were performed with few trappings. One need only read the Prologue to Henry V. which is an eloquent apologia for this manner of staging...
...Wilder acknowledges a more important influence, namely, certain traditional types of Oriental theater. As a youngster Wilder lived and went to school in Shanghai and Hong Kong for a time. In the abovementioned preface he notes that in Chinese drama an actor may straddle a stick to suggest horseback riding, and that in the Japanese Noh theater a circling of the stage may stand for a long journey. He might have added that the centuries-old Noh drama uses no curtain and no change of lighting. The plays are acted with few or no props beyond a fan, which...
...Wilder has himself carefully prescribed in the text the myriad details of staging, so that, at a basic level, there is not much a director need do. Thus it is a hard play to ruin, which explains part of its appeal to high-school and other amateur groups with their often untrained directors. Nonetheless, a skilled director and gifted players can raise Our Town to an exalting experience, and that is exactly what Michael Kahn and his charges have achieved here...