I hope you have been able to tell by now, dear readers, that we here at OJ tell it like it is. We’re not concerned with labels, we don’t worry over what’s “hip,” “dope,” or “stoopid.” All you have here is the trace of writing by passionate people who wish to share their loves of performance. Tweed isn’t even really a pseudonym in this sense: it’s a liberating appellation to free myself from the constraints of “The Man,” much like Malcolm X or The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.
Which is why I feel no shame in revealing the following: I love love love Our Town. I loved the local middle school productions of it growing up, I loved reading it in school, I even loved the star-crammed Broadway production a number of years back. The Stage Manager is the role Paul Newman was born—then aged eighty years—to play. I’ve been teaching U.S. Theatre for a number of years now, and no matter how much my syllabus changes, the first assignment has always remained the same: Our Town.
It’s a brilliant work, not only as dramatic literature, but also as experiment in form, narrative, and construction of values. Despite what many believe of the piece—its rep as über-Americana and potential advocating of xenophobia and anti-intellectuallism—when viewed closely, Thornton Wilder was very careful to reserve judgment; there is no right or wrong to Grover’s Corners. Rather, Our Town is a lyrical meditation on existence, the absurdity of worldly concern, and the search for meaning, for better or worse. Indeed, the first two acts are really mere vehicles for the powerhouse that is the third, removing the veneer from the quotidian.
I’ve seen
surprisingly few pieces that use Our Town
as inspiration, but that’s exactly the platform that the Ordinary Theater
jumps from with The Joys of Fantasy. The pastiche-performance uses the
themes of the here and now, the artifice of the theatre, and even the love
subplot between Emily and George (abandoning the character names for the
actors’s, Teri and Scott). Stir in
texts from Murakami, Calvino, and Goat Island, a new narrative concerning a
pre-destined kidnapping and murder set in New York City, and some solid ambient
music and video work (by Tungsten74 and Jenks Whittenberg, respectively), and
the Ordinary Theater has a contemporary take on theatricality and ephemerality.
The text and its presentation can be quite cumbersome, but perhaps that’s the price to be paid for sincerity in experimental performance (can the experimental be genuine? isn’t sincerity a false sense of value amidst a sea of relativity?). But overall, it is a lovely and manic take on the impossibility of the bucolic life of Grover’s Corners, and the beauty and optimism that can thrive despite that. Just like the characters of Our Town follow their prescribed course of safety and simplicity, the characters in the Joys of Fantasy also play into their city life; both pieces consider the ineffectual nature of communication, and how it can lead to ignorance, loneliness, or out and out psychosis. Scott’s letter to Teri, also printed on the program, reads
I’m afraid that I can’t come home. That I will never see you again. I want to pretend that we are young. That we still have time to escape—to run away. I’m afraid that you hate me and because I left I have to wait a thousand years to see you again. I’m very lonely and my heart is breaking.
Notice that most of Scott’s statements are conditional: he’s afraid, he wants to pretend. None of this is impossible. He is pointing to a semantic flaw in how language communicates desire. He can go home. He can pretend. He can run away. He simply allows his fears and conventions to override his desires and happiness. If life is wasted on the living, pieces like Our Town and The Joys of Fantasy help us, at the very least, appreciate that very idea.
Take that, The Man! You can’t keep Tweed down!
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