Where to see it

Like the Ford Mustang or the Rolling Stones, "Our Town" goes on forever. Growing up in America, one expects to see Thornton Wilder’s drama about life and death in a small New England town.

The play has been so popular for so long that when Oregon Stage Works launched a new Ashland production this month, it announced that anybody bringing proof of having been in the play would be admitted for half price.

The Rogue Valley, with its Oregon Shakespeare Festival actors and its various little theaters, may be rich enough in "Our Town" veterans to cast several productions of the play. Or maybe even to people a town like Grover’s Corners.

" ‘Our Town’ is like apple pie," Scott Hall says.

A retired banker and theater buff now living in Ashland, Hall directed a successful production of "Our Town" 20 years ago at the Stockton (Calif.) Civic Theatre.

Advertisement

"The play holds up quite well, I think," he says. "Without a big set, if you have interesting people, it plays well."

Penny Metropulos, an associate artistic director at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, has a personal link to the play.

"A production of ‘Our Town’ is where I met the love of my life," she says.

That would be OSF actor Richard Howard, who was in the same production.

Creighton Barnes probably goes back with the play about as far as anybody.

"I was 21 or 22," says Barnes, of Ashland. "I was going out with a minister’s daughter, and she got the part of Emily (the minister’s daughter in the play). It was love on the stage."

It was at the Fairhaven Summer Theater in Fairhaven, Mass., in 1947. Barnes played George, the other half of the play’s young lovers. It was heady stuff for the actors.

"We had no sets, and we thought, ‘Oh man, the acting will make it or break it,’ " Barnes says.

The play broke ground in being set on a bare stage.

"The total idea was staggering," Barnes says, "going from kids in high school to Emily’s death."

The house sold out night after night. It was just a decade after the play debuted, and it was still fresh. Barnes became a Hollywood writer of animated films and later retired to the Rogue Valley.

Doug Rowe might be the local "Our Town" champ. He is directing the Oregon Stage Works’ production opening Thursday on OSW’s Ashland stage. He also plays the Stage Manager. It’s his fourth time directing, his third as Stage Manager.

The former artistic director of the Laguna Playhouse in Southern California first played Stage Manager a decade ago. He directed and played the Stage Manager most recently four years ago at Ashland High School.

"Do you want to act, or direct?" OSW artistic director Peter Alzado asked.

"Both," Rowe said.

"Our Town" focuses on the everyday life of everyday people in 1905. Some critics said it was not only a town that no longer existed in the 1930s but one that never existed. It combines startling simplicity and a powerful message, urging us to savor every moment of life. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1938.

"Some were saying it would never work," Barnes says. "What the stage manager does when he steps out and talks to the audience is to break the fourth wall (the imaginary barrier through which the audience looks into the realistic theater)."

Barnes directed the play at the Garden Grove Theater in 1954 using a different approach.

"Wilder divided the lifetime of a village into three sections, birth, marriage, death — boom, boom, boom.

"The point I pushed with the actors was, this is a bite of time out of that time."

Metropulos was living in San Francisco in 1984 when she got a call from acting pal Dee Maaske at the Arizona Theatre Company telling her that an actor in the play had been fired and the opening was looming.

"There’s this wonderful young actor here from the Guthrie (Theater, in Minneapolis, Minn.) playing George Gibbs," Maaske added.

Metropulos went. At a rehearsal she met Howard.

"He reached up to shake hands," Metropulos says, "and I looked in his eyes and thought, ‘I’m going to know you for the rest of my life.’ "

They’ve been together since 1987.

The play no longer has a novelty quotient but still seems to have a certain power.

"The bare stage puts the focus on the words," Rowe says. "It can be life-altering. Even kids come up afterwards just emotionally wrought.

"People say after seeing it they stop and look at the sun hit the mountains."

Rowe’s take is that the play’s deceptively simple script and plain set gets its priorities right.

"I look at setting as secondary," Rowe says. "The word is the rule of law. ‘Our Town’ enables you to focus on what‘s primary."

But there are signs "Our Town" may not be the universal experience it’s long been.

"It used to be that everybody had seen it," Rowe says. "Lately people say, ‘I’ve heard about it, but I’ve never seen it.’ "

Bill Horton teaches theater arts at Phoenix High School. He tends to agree with Rowe. He says Phoenix High’s last "Our Town" was 15 years ago.

One reason may be the large cast, more than 20 roles. Many new plays have two or three characters, or maybe a half-dozen.

According to a study by the International Thespian Society, a high school honors group for theater arts students, the play was the fifth most produced last year in schools around the nation, trailing "You Can’t Take With You," "A Midsummer Night’s Dream," "Rumors" and "The Crucible." Fifth is not chopped liver, but it’s not first, either.

Horton says he’s been toying with the idea of bringing the play back to Phoenix. The last time his students did it, the production filled the Minshall Theater (now Camelot Theatre in Talent) with about 160 people a night.

"People really do like it a lot," he says.

Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail bvarble@mailtribune.com