What: Our Town
Where: Roxy Theatre, 2657 Quadra St.
When: Until July 16
Tickets: $20-$42
Reservations: 250-385-4462 or at bluebridgetheatre.ca
When you consider the hoops Brian Richmond has had to leap through to keep Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre afloat, it’s no wonder he has developed a reputation for being fearless.
It comes as something of a surprise, then, to hear the professional theatre company’s artistic director use words like “scary” to describe the experience of directing Our Town, its revival of the Thornton Wilder classic.
“Of the 150 productions that I have directed, this is definitely one of the most terrifying I’ve ever done,” he says.
Yet Richmond is no stranger to the play, which is set in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, and explores love, loss, hope and disappointment in small-town America from 1901-1913.
Back in the 1960s, at age 16, Richmond played George Gibbs in a New Westminster community theatre production of Our Town.
“It’s one of the first plays I ever did,” Richmond said. “There is an echo of this play in me.”
Richmond has become intimately familiar with the text and seen several productions over the years, including a recent Canadian College of Performing Arts student production he enjoyed.
Still, it’s a huge theatrical challenge.
“It’s such a complex mix of the simple and profound that it’s very hard to get the right balance,” he said.
Part of the reason, he said, is that audiences have become so familiar with Wilder’s frequently produced classic.
Also heightening expectations is the fact Our Town was selected by theatregoers who voted on potential productions for the 2017 “People’s Choice” season.
For the production, Richmond assembled a cast of 19 actors and musicians, headlined by First Nations stage and screen actor Gary Farmer as the Stage Manager. Farmer, best known to filmgoers for his role as Nobody opposite Johnny Depp in the Jim Jarmusch classic Dead Man, was a natural choice to play the character who narrates the play’s action, Richmond said.
“Gary has incredible emotional power and a stillness that I’m thrilled to hear applied to the great words of Wilder,” said Richmond, who also directed Farmer when he played Lenny in Blue Bridge’s 2012 production of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
The Our Town cast pairs some of the capital region’s most seasoned artists with emerging newcomers, including Grace Vukovic as Emily Webb and Julien Bruce as her soulmate, George Gibbs.
Their co-stars include Brian Linds and Cyllene Richmond as Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs, and Michael Armstrong and Shauna Baird as Mr. and Mrs. Webb. Rounding out the large cast are Jack Harris Bruce, Julian Cervello, who played Wally Webb in a production 17 years ago, Ellis Frank, Sheldon Graham, Malcolm Harvey, Chase Hiebert, Dean Ifill, Jana Morrison, RJ Peters, Jacob Richmond and Lucy Sharples.
As well as deciding to cast 19 speaking roles, Richmond opted to shift the play’s soundscape from Congregational organ and choral-based orchestrations to a northern Appalachian musical approach.
“We’re very fortunate to have Sarah Tradewell, an enormously talented violin, fiddle and viola player, as our music director and we’ve created a bit of an Appalachian band onstage,” he said.
The music and drama will be complemented by movement and choreography by Treena Stubel, who has choreographed Our Town in the past.
Technical contributions include sets and costumes by Patricia Reilly, lighting by Giles Hogya, sound and projections by Jason King and dialect coaching by Iris MacGregor Bannerman.
Richmond says it doesn’t surprise him that Our Town has had so many revivals, including recent productions in London, New York and Toronto, and a Shaw Festival reboot. “It truly is an extraordinary, beautifully written play,” he said. “I think it’s one of the top American plays of the 20th century. It’s right up there with Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire.”
Play was Wilder’s personal favourite
The history of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town helps explain why this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic remains so popular. Here are some facts:
• The metatheatrical 1938 play was written as Wilder’s response to the staid theatre of the time. “I felt something had gone wrong,” he wrote. “I began to feel that the theatre was not only inadequate, it was evasive.” It was a problem Wilder confronted with his use of the Stage Manager as narrator, audience and symbol.
• Wilder claimed Our Town was his favourite of all his works.
• In 1946, the Soviet Union shut down a production of Our Town in the Russian sector of occupied Berlin “on the grounds that the drama is too depressing and could inspire a German suicide wave.”
• The first radio play version, in 1939, starred Orson Welles as the Stage Manager.
• The 1940 film version changed the story so that the third act was all a dream of Emily’s.
• Thornton Wilder is the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and drama. He won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for The Bridge of San Luis Rey, as well as the 1938 and 1943 awards in drama for Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, respectively.
• There has been one operatic version (by Ned Rorem) and two musical versions — the first of which starred Frank Sinatra as the Stage Manager, Paul Newman as George and Eva Marie Saint as Emily.
• The longest-running production of the play ran for 644 performances at the off-Broadway Barrow Street Theatre in 2009. Several actors (and director David Cromer) played the Stage Manager over the course of the run, including Michael Shannon and Helen Hunt.
• In 1994, Philip Jerry choreographed a ballet version, set to Aaron Copeland’s score for the original film, which has been performed by the American Repertory Ballet several times over the past several years.
• Thornton Wilder served in both world wars, rose to the rank of corporal and was awarded the Legion of Merit Bronze Star and the Order of the British Empire for his service to the Army Air Force Intelligence.
He also had an MA in French from Princeton.
