Upcoming: Our Town by Thornton Wilder, Gaslight Baker Theatre, Lockhart, July 12 - August 4

presents

 

OUR TOWN

An American Classic

By Thornton Wilder
Directed by Steve Lawson

Performance Dates – 4 Weekends!

EVENINGS - 8pm Fridays and Saturdays, July 13 – Aug. 4, 2012

SNEAK PEEK - 8pm Thursday, July 12, 2012

MATINEES - 2pm Sun July 22 & Sat July 28, 2012

Regular Adult Tickets $12; Senior & Children Tickets $10

Click Here to Buy Tickets

he Stage Manager welcomes the audience into the theater as he introduces the people and places of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. Grover’s Corners is the perfect picture of an American town before urbanization – automobiles are a novelty, everyone is up in each other's business, and milk is still delivered fresh every morning.

After that introduction to the town, the Stage Manager zeroes in on two neighboring families: the Gibbs family and the Webb family. Each household has two children (a boy and a girl). We witness some childish interactions between Emily Webb and George Gibbs. The two are friends. By the second act, three years have passed, and friendship has blossomed into love. George and Emily are about to get married. The third act takes place in the town cemetery. Emily has died in childbirth, and she joins other deceased members of Grover’s Corners. As soon as the funeral is over, Emily realizes that she can relive her life, and decides to return to the morning of her twelfth birthday – despite warnings from her fellow dead that it’s a terrible idea. Emily soon realizes that they’re correct. Death has brought Emily a heightened awareness of life; it is too painful for Emily to watch living people who take their time for granted. Emily returns to the cemetery where George is crying over her grave.

Auditions in Lockhart for Our Town by Thornton Wilder, May 12, 15 and 16

Auditions for Our Town by Thornton Wilder, Saturday, May 12 at 2 p.m., Tuesday, May 15 @ 7 pm and Wed. May 16th @ 7 pm at the Gaslight-Baker Theatre, 216 S Main Street (click for map). Needed are 12 men 16 or older, 5 women 16 or older, 1 boy 8-12 and 1 girl 8-12. No theatre experience necessary. 

Auditions will consist of cold readings from the script. No appointment necessary. For more info, please go to www.mygbt.org

Our Town, Zach Theatre, April 15 - May 23

Our Town is both their town -- Thornton Wilder's Grovers Corners, New Hampshire, 1904 - 1913 -- and our town, Austin in 2010.

Dave Steakley and the large, talented cast at the Zach have a good time with the clever palimpsest of modern Austin that they use to reinvigorate a text that many of us first read in high school. It works, too, at least most of the time. This styling reminds us gently, insistently and with a smile, much like Wilder's Stage Manager narrator and chorus, that the although the play refers to a specific time, place and culture, it's really about the eternally repeating experience of mankind. Those ancients and ancestors, of the Sumerians and other vanished cultures including our immediate forefathers and foremothers, went through these experiences or something very much like them. Family, growing up, courtship and marriage, the end of life and the passage to something eternal.

Wilder's innovation, in a time of earnest realism in the theatre, box sets and meticulously furnished onstage drawing rooms, was to sweep the stage bare. He was unapologetic about that. The Stage Manager describes for us the layout of the town -- the churches, the shops, the livery stable, the Cartwrights' mansion on the hill, the Gibbs house and that of the Webbs. All are invisible. "And here," says he, "is a tree, for those who must have some scenery." He allowed characters and stagehands to carry on some chairs and a table, but the rest of Grover's Corners existed in the mind's eye.

Dave Steakley mostly respects that approach and enjoys the liberty it gives him as a director. Jason Amato's subtle, lustrous and haunting lighting dresses this stage, more than anything else, and every moment at the Kleberg stage is visually memorable.

Read more and view images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Images by Kirk Tuck: Our Town, Zach Theatre, April 15 - May 23

Received directly:

Images by Kirk R. Tuck, courtesy of Zach Theatre, for Our Town by Thornton Wilder, directed by Dave Steakley and featuring Jaston Williams, Michael Amendola, Janelle Buchanan, Barbara Chisholm, Harvey Guion, Billy Harden,Gabriel Luna, Jordan McRae, Marco Perella, and others.

[Right: Jaston Williams: "So, people a thousand years from now: this is how we were."]

Our Town plays Wednesdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Tickets available by phone at 476-0541, ext. 1 or visit the Zach website to purchase on-line.

[Below: The choir, directed by troubled choirmaster Simon Stimson (Billy Hardin)]

Click to view additional images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Our Town, University of Texas, April 2 - 11

Stage Manager:
I've married over two hundred couples in my day. . . .
M . . . marries N . . . . millions of them.
The cottage, the go-cart, the Sunday afternoon drives in the Ford, the first rheumatism, the grandchildren, the second rheumatism, the deathbed, the reading of the will --
Once in a thousand times it's interesting.
[He now looks at the audience for the first time, with a warm smile that removes any sense of cynicism from the next line.]
Well, let's have Mendelssohn's "Wedding March"!

There's a deceptive simplicity to Thornton Wilder's Our Town.

It is, after all, a play about ordinary people in a small town. Nobodies. Or, rather, Everybodies.

I encountered it early in the second half of the twentieth century because it was included in its entirety in the high school English textbook. For eleventh grade. Maybe twelfth grade. No big words. No controversy. In fact, not much drama. Boy and girl meet, court, marry, look back over their lives and the story ends in a quiet graveyard on a high hill under the wild stars.

Staging something this simple and yet this profound takes a lot of insight. Director Marie Brown has done a lot of things right, the chief of which was the decision to entrust Tom Truss with the role of the stage manager.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Senior Citizen Acting Opportunity: Playing Dead in Our Town, Zach Theatre

Received indirectly:

Zachary Scott Theatre is looking for volunteers!

“Dave Steakley, Artistic Director for Our Town, is requesting senior citizen aged folks (primarily men & couples) to be a part of ACT III and play dead people in the graveyard scene at the end of the play each night. What an opportunity to be on stage at ZACH Scott Theatre and star alongside Jaston Williams (star of Greater Tuna)! The volunteers wouldn’t have lines but they would have blocking to follow. Mostly they are sitting in a black folding chair and looking forward off into the distance. At one point in the play they have to stand and move their chairs to the side and be reseated, and then later in the act they put their chair back where it started and sit again and then a couple of pages later they exit with their chair. Each person will need to wear all black—something of their own for this scene. My preference would be to have 5 –10 people who might commit to do it for the whole run. They would just have to be here for the last act of each show. If no one will make a 6 week commitment then I can look at dividing it up into smaller chunks to get this accomplished. The run of Our Town starts April 15^th and runs through May 23^rd, Wednesdays through Sundays.”

If interested in participating, please contact:
Lily Williams
Interim Company Manager
ZACH Theatre
lwilliams@zachtheatre.org

[illustration: Heavenly Eclipse by Scott Wyant, from fineartamerica.com]

Upcoming: Our Town, Zach Theatre, April 15 - May 23

UPDATE: Review by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin at Statesman's Austin360 "Seeing Things" blog, April 19

Received directly:

presents

OUR TOWN

by Thornton Wilder

April 15 - May 23, Wednesdays - Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. , Sundays at 2:30 p.m.

Kleberg Stage , 1421 W. Riverside Dr. (corner of Riverside and South Lamar.)
Tickets range from $20 to $50, with $15 tickets available to students starting 1 hour prior to curtain time. Charge tickets by phone at 476-0541, ext. 1 or visit the Zach website to purchase on-line

Zach Theatre Re-Envisions “Our Town” in Our Town with all-star, all-Austin cast starring “Greater Tuna’s” Jaston Williams as the Stage Manager

Austin’s finest actors join together to tell the intimate, heartfelt story of America’s best loved play. Zach’s contemporary interpretation transports the audience to a chapel of love that will linger in your memory. Our Town audiences will watch the story unfold in several settings, including the wedding scene, which will be fully realized in its setting, costumes, environment with music by Austin area choral choirs. Directed by Dave Steakley, ZACH’s production is more than a play: it’s an experience as unique as Austin!

Jaston Williams, star of ZACH’s The Laramie Project and Austin‘s Greater Tuna will star as the iconic Stage Manager in Grover’s Corners. ZACH’s production also stars well-known, Austin favorites Michael Amendola, Michael Bryce, Janelle Bucahanan, Barbara Chisholm, Lana Dieterich, Christian Guerra, Harvey Guion, Billy Harden, Jordan McRae, Michael Mendoza, Crystal Odom, Don Own, Marco Perella, Scotty Robertson, Donelvan Thigpen, and Evan Underbrink,

ZACH Theatre is sponsored in part by Applied Materials, Austin American-Statesman, Time Warner Cable, Austin News TV 36, The Dell Foundation, Vollmer Public Relations, SOL Marketing Concepts, IKEA, The Shubert Foundation, The City of Austinunder the auspices of the Austin Arts Commission, The Texas Commission on the Arts, and The National Endowment for the Arts.

[Click for information on $5 discount offer]

Upcoming: Our Town, University of Texas, April 2 - 11

Click for ALT review, April 8

UPDATE: Review by Elizabeth Cobbe in the Austin Chronicle, April 8

UPDATE: Sara Pressley's feature in the Daily Texan, April 2

Found on-line:

The University of Texas presents

Our Town

by Thornton Wilder

directed by Marie Brown

April 2 - 11, Oscar G. Brockett Theatre

April 2*, 3, 9, 10 at 8 p.m.; April 7 & 8 at 7 p.m.
Matinees April 3, 10, 11 at 2 p.m.

Tickets: $20 adults, $17 UT faculty & staff, $15 students available online at www.texasperformingarts.org or by phone at 477-6060.

Our Town portrays a town at the turn of the twentieth century. It is a picture of the common things, the moments that fill everyday lives, the rites of passage we all face, the things and words and habits that we pass from one hand to another, day to day, generation to generation, century to century. It is a picture of that which we may touch every day but may never see.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

[image from Scottsdale Community College: www.scottsdalecc.edu]

Upcoming: 2X Our Town in our town discount, Zach Theatre and University of Texas, April - May 2010

Received at the Zach Theatre:

Currently included in Zach Theatre programs is this offer of $5 discounts on tickets to the nearly concurrent productions of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, staged in traditional fashion at UT April 2 - 11 and in a modern adaptation by Zach Theatre April 15- May 23 with Marc Pouhé.

Use the coupon code "stage manager" at either box office.

Click on the image to view a larger version (1 MB in .jpg format)

Upcoming: Our Town, Anderson High School, November 12-15

Found on-line:

Our Town

Directed by Wendy Pratt
Anderson High School Theatre
8403 Mesa Drive Austin
November 12-November 14, 7:30 p.m.

The play centers around the themes of life, love, and death, which are illustrated in the everyday routines of ordinary folk in Grover's Corners, N.H. Wilder mingles the simple and the profound in order for the audience to understand the everyday occurrences in this show are "an allegorical representation of all life." In the current Newsweek, Jeremy McCarter says, “Our Town isn't a nostalgic wallow in small town life. It's a harrowing story about human limitation--all the beauty and value we fail to recognize in our day-to-day lives"
[image © Harper Collins]

Tickets: Tickets are $5 for students and $7 for adults.
For more information please call the Anderson box office at (512) 841-1580 or visit our website at www.andersontheater.org. Info Phone: 512-841-1580

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .