Saturday, May 24, 2003
OUR TOWN
Anthea and I just had the very enjoyable experience of seeing a filmed performance of this production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. I had never seen this play performed and haven't read it in 30 years. What an amazing play! Written in 1938, it introduced a whole host of then-new dramatic techniques to American theater that have now become commonplace: minimalist settings, the crossing of boundaries between audience and stage and the mixing of roles between narrator and actor, to name just a few. It's hard to imagine a better production than the particular performance we saw this evening, with Paul Newman in the central role of the narrator. Here's a note from the link reviewing the stage production:
Newman, at the play's literal heart as the Stage Manager, comes to life in a brief scene in which he pretends to be the owner of a drugstore; and by the time we've arrived in the cemetery in the final act, he has found his bearings. Taking us on a tour of the gravestones, he tells us about the Civil War veterans buried beneath them:
"... had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they'd never seen more than fifty miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name, friends--the United States of America. The United States of America. And they went and died about it."
Newman weighs each word as he speaks it, and a concept that we take so much for granted that it's beyond hackneyed suddenly acquires mass, and density, and meaning.
And then just now, refreshing my knowledge about the play with some browsing on the net, I came across this:
Thornton Wilder had firsthand experience of China in the early 1910s when his father was appointed American consul in Shanghai and he was sent to a school run by British missionaries in Chefoo. Drawing on his personal experience of China, Wilder in his unpublished undergraduate writings returned again and again to the setting of "a certain treaty port on the Yang-tze Kiang river." He was inspired in 1930 by a New York performance by Mei Lan-fang, a legendary Chinese actor to transpose the Chinese "property man" into the stage manager and stress the minimalist setting of Chinese theater in Our Town.
Isn't it funny when you find strange connections like this? Reading about Wilder's growing up in China gave me a chill. Small world.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:22 PM
