'Our Town' could be Iola

By ANNE KAZMIERCZAK Register Reporter

In honor of Iola’s sesquicentennial, Allen County Community College theater director Tony Piazza chose to stage Thornton Wilder’s classic “Our Town.”
Set in 1901-1914, the play easily jumps the hundred year gap to today in its concerns.
Townspeople complain about their neighbors’ driving. They gossip about the local drunk, “although no one is supposed to know about that.” Mothers cajole their children to “Get up, you’ll be late for school!” and husbands ignore their wives’ dreams of travel, lost in their own worlds of business and fishing. Girls fret over clothes and boys weigh the worth of playing baseball against doing chores. In substance, human life hasn’t changed much at all.
The play was written with an odd device. A character, called the stage manager, narrates the action, sometimes interrupting, sometimes prefacing, the scene. While such assistance might be necessary in complex TV dramas (think annotated episodes of “Lost”), it proves a bit distracting to the play. The narrator’s role, in this ACCC production, has been broken up between four actors. A couple characters address the audience directly as well.
We are told, as one character walks on, “This is Mrs. Gibbs, she dies ...” And the paper boy tossing the morning news will die “in the war.” Yet here it is 1901 and we haven’t been given time to know, or care, about these characters yet.
Wilder felt the device would allow him to use minimal staging for the play.
Indeed, scenery is spare — some tables, a trellis, some ladders.
True buy-in from the audience occurs as personalities begin to evolve on stage.
Mrs. Gibbs adores her husband, the hard working town doctor. Her one dream is to see Paris, and though she prods her husband to go, he’ll have none of it.
Their son, George, wishes to be a farmer. Daughter Rebecca inherited her mother’s dreams, remarking on an envelope sent to a friend, addressed to “Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, U.S.A., North America, Western Hemisphere, the earth, the universe, the mind of God.
“And the mailman delivered it all the same,” she tells her more locally-minded brother.
Their neighbors are the Webbs, the local newspaper editor, his wife and brood. They are polite people, and the father has a fond relationship with his teenage daughter, Emily.
Emily is smart and ambitious, though her mother is more practical in nature. When Emily wonders if she is pretty, her mother tells her, “You are pretty enough for all normal purposes.” And, by the way, snap the beans into slightly longer pieces. It is not, of course, what she wants to hear.
The town could easily be Iola: Old stately houses, poor working families and gardens kempt and un-. It is a rural ensconced community, where lights come on before dawn, but are out by 9:30 p.m.
People, for the most part, are content with their small circle, and “most of our young people jump up and get married right after high school graduation,” a narrator says.
This is the role of George and Emily.
The play surrounds them, as young adults, as affianced, then later, after they have established their farm.
Act II is a rumination on marriage.
George’s parents married sight-unseen, a common practice then. Thorough their 20 years they have been happy.
Dr. Gibbs admits to his wife he feared the two would run out of things to say. The smiling couple acknowledges the fear was unfounded.
The Webbs relationship, instead, is hinted to have begun as a fling.
While the parents reflect on their past and George and Emily prepare for their wedding, the narrator interrupts to ask “How does this begin?”
We are taken to a scene with George and Emily, talking after school. They begin a dialogue on male perfection.
Emily forthrightly tells George she is disappointed in his character; that since becoming captain of the base ball team he has gotten arrogant.
Emily and George are life long friends. Instead of storming off, George takes the rebuke to heart. He treats Emily to an ice cream soda, and tells her, “when you find someone who cares about your character, that’s the most important thing.” He asks, without specific words, if she will marry him, providing he change his ways. She consents.
After the wedding, the audience is invited to join in the reception.

PIAZZA IS serving white sheet cake and punch during the second intermission to bring the audience into the play.
“I thought it was wonderful tie-in,” Piazza said of the idea.
The cake is provided by the Fine Arts Booster Club, which helps fund the music, theater and art departments at the college. The club helps support scholarships, the mobile summer stage and other added activities in the arts.
“Anyone can join, for as little as $5,” Piazza said. He hopes the special intermission will give more visibility to their efforts.
During the first intermission, patrons can stroll the halls outside the theater, where Piazza has arrayed numerous old photographs of Iola.
The town square in its early glory, citizens of bi-racial Iola and charming snapshots of every day life line the walls.
Gazing at pictures of bathers in the river, or a family on a summer picnic, help further draw the viewer into the play.
When we return from the second intermission, the stage lighting is dim.
A number of citizens we’ve seen before sit quietly in folding chairs stage left. Soon, though, we discover why they are set aside.
Characters we last left laughing at a wedding are now seated, representing their graves.
Mrs. Gibbs is among them; she never got to Paris. Emily’s little brother is there, as well as the town drunk.
These characters now remark on how the living fail to appreciate life.
Indeed, the strain of living is so great, a narrator tells us, “that every 16 hours everyone lies down to get a rest.”
Emily arrives, all chatty and talking of the farm she and George have built up. She tells Mrs. Gibbs they used her Paris money to buy a fancy watering system.
“We have a Ford,” she gushes, “Our farm is lovely.” She tells another woman how her son loves to visit her house.
Soon, though, she realizes why she is there. She rebels against her inability to return to the living, but after watching a scene from her past, then criticizing it, she gives in.
She says “goodbye to new-ironed dresses, goodbye to hot baths, goodbye to sleeping and waking up.”
She returns to her seat, as the departed speak of sunrises over the mountain, and the passing of the stars.
If life in Grover’s Corners was quiet, Emily’s new role will be quieter still.



04/17/09