Thornton Wilder offered at Royal Palm Players
Our Town will be presented by Royal Palm Players at 7 p.m. on January 18, 19 and 20.
By BOOTS TOLSDORF
A New Year. A New Beginning. We look ahead to making positive changes in our lives. We look back at the past year filled with health concerns, sadnesses, grief, and hopefully, equally filled with the joys, love and caring we received from our friends and family.
Our Town, set in a generic small town, is a storytelling theatrical performance, set on an intimate stage with minimal props in order to emphasize the daily lives of two families, and some of the townspeople who form the fabric of the community of Grovers Corners. It really has no plot, like our own lives. We are reminded of how precious our daily life is, no matter how inconsequential, because it represents our reality, our enduring identity. These small, ever present repeated moments, are fundamental to our lives, and yet, do we stop and ponder them as being as significant as the ones that strike us like lightning? We celebrate graduations marriage, birth, which is followed eventually by death. Has it all gone by way too quickly?
The play by Thornton Wilder, takes place within 12 years, 1901 to 1913. The Stage Manager is our storyteller weaving the simple lives of George and Emily as they awkwardly stumble through childhood, adolescence, and growth in their marriage, until the death of Emily in childbirth. Divided into three acts, they are labeled Daily Life, Love and Marriage, and Death and Eternity.
In the beginning, Joe Crowell delivers the papers, Howie Newsome brings the milk, and the hardworking Mrs. Gibbs and her close friend and neighbor Mrs. Webb, feed their children breakfast and send them off to school. We learn that the choirmaster, Simon Stimson has a drinking problem that everyone knows about and that the town gossip, Mrs. Soames eagerly spreads the word. Dr. Gibbs has come home after a night of delivering twins, and Mr. Webb, Editor of the local paper, delivers the social and political report to the interviewing Stage Manager.
Years have passed and in Act 2 we find George and Emily preparing to wed. Not surprisingly the day is filled with stress for the mothers, used to things “normal.” The Stage Manager transports you, the audience, back a year when George and Emily are courting. You are also asked to think back to what it was like when you were very young. Emily explains to George who has asked her why she is mad at him, that he has become “stuck up” because of his fame in baseball and does not bother to talk to “even his own family.” He asks her to have an ice cream soda and over that simple gesture, life plans are made. As Mrs. Gibbs says, “ People were meant to live two-by-two.”
And so Emily and George marry.
Nine years pass. Nothing much has changed in the small town of Grover’s Corners. The sun comes up, the sun sets, the stars appear, the gardens still need tending too. But the newer part of the cemetery shows the tombstones of Simon Stimson, the choirmaster, Mrs. Soames, and Wally Webb, Emily’s brother. Emily’s casket is brought in to the cemetery.
The dead speak, serving as detached witnesses. Death has rendered them rather indifferent to earthly events. There are some living souls, Emily’s cousin Sam Craig, back for the funeral, Howie Newsome, Constable Warren, and Joe Crowell, the paper boy.
Emily quickly realizes that she does not like being among the dead and wishes to return to the living. Despite the warnings she hears from the dead souls, she pleads with the Stage Manager to return. Her mother tells her that she will feel great pain going back not being able to interact with her family. Of course she can go back her mother says but though some have tried, they soon return. That “life” with the dead is to only look ahead. But Emily insists. She is urged to pick an unimportant day- a very ordinary day. She chooses her 12th birthday. She joyfully looks over the town, the Main Street, the regulars of the community, her parents. But her joy quickly turns to pain as she realizes how little people appreciate the simple joys of life. Her interaction with her mother is not what she hoped. She says “we don’t have time to look at one another.”
Turning to the Stage Manager through her tears, she says, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”
Do we? Something to ponder before it disappears, in a blink of an eye.
Come see Jim Cowperthwait, Gary Cross, Jason Curtis, Jerry Edgerton, Ann Fletcher, Jim Grace, William Hahn, Dave Jenkins, Joan Kale, Jeff Lehrian, James Martin, Sarah McDonald, Andrea Neilsen, Boots Tolsdorf and Scott Wise tell these brilliant shards of life that are universal and completely unique to the folks that bear them. “They share a simple human truth, that even when we feel most insignificant, we’re part of something grand and endless.”
Our Director is Brad Wages from the Venice Theatre, and we welcome him to the RPP family. The Sound and Light expert is Mike Hilton. Stage Managers Sally Johnson and Andrea Neilsen ably keep us in order.
And look up Youtube to hear Iris DeMent sing “Our Town”, a familiar melody. Perhaps not so familiar but so lovely is James Taylor’s “Our Town.”
