Wm. Kritzberg

Seekers of truth have often found that you must transcend life's trivialities if you are to discover its irreducible essence. For even though all of us are necessarily immersed within the trivial, there is also a part that is enduring, is pure, and is . . . true.

Such is the case with Thornton Wilder's immortal drama Our Town. In a delicious paradox, the playwright has managed to transform the trivial into the universal, and to convert that which is purely everyday into something else, something eternal. The play represents, in the author's own words, "an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life." On a bare, unadorned stage, the early 20th century comes alive, as represented by the people of the town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire.

This unadorned stage is no accident. Wilder wanted his audience to be quite clear that ornate trappings were not required to bring Grover's Corners to life -- only actors, light, and imagination. Our play uses very few properties: most are pantomimed. Our sound effects are not recorded, but rather produced by members of the cast. And many of the actors are double- and triple-cast, just as we ourselves fill many roles in our lives.

In one sense, Our Town is Everytown, for its inhabitants are struggling with exactly the same challenges that people everywhere are struggling with: daily life, love and marriage, and death. The people of Our Town are not overly impressed with the fact that they must struggle, but instead accept it as a fact and get on with the job. Along the way, they experience all the exaltation and despair, tedium and heart-racing excitement, that is humankind's lot.

But on balance, the joy outweighs the sorrow, and even inevitable death has something to offer us -- the final surrender of worldly concerns so we may embrace the cosmos of which we are a part.

Join us tonight as we do our best to breathe life into this town, described by one of our characters as being "Grover's Corners, Sutton County, New Hampshire, United States of America, Continent of North America, Western Hemisphere, the Earth, the Solar System, the Universe, The Mind of God."