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By Kirby Neumann-Rea
News Editor
September 27, 2006
“Bravery and duty overcame winter’s
bitter cutting grip Saturday night as Constable Bill Warren saved an
inebriated Polishtown man from certain death in the snow drifts.”
— Grover’s Corners Sentinel, Feb. 13, 1899
As Editor Charles Webb, that is the type of lead I might write for a
story in the town paper of Grover’s Corners, N.H. Constable Warren is
just one individual in this fictional, but very realistic, town that
is home to the play “Our Town.”
“Our Town,” presented by CAST the next two weekends, is a humor-tinged
drama that encourages us to connect ourselves emotionally to the
people around us and to strive to actively appreciate our lives as
they happen. (See the end of this story for ticket information.)
“Our Town” is a world that crosses between comedy and tragedy,
sentiment and sardonicism, and even the past and the present.
Town Gossip Louella Soames (center, Jan
Axford) finds skeptical ears in Julia Gibbs, left, and Myrtle Webb
(right, Lorre Chester-Rea).
In the opening scene, in 1901, Doc Frank
Gibbs comes home from an all-nighter delivering Mrs. Goruslawski’s
twins. This mother never makes an appearance, but I haven’t forgotten
about Mrs. Goruslawski.
In 1916 editor Webb might write:
“Mike and Carl Goruslawski, identical twins, have turned into the best
one-two batting threat ever known in Grover’s Corners baseball.”
Or:
“Miss (Irma) Corcoran and Tom Huckins, hardware delivery driver, have
announced their engagement.”
You hear about these characters but never see them. Yet they are part
of the community of this play.
Lives examined
As an actor in the Hood River production of “Our Town,” I’ve taken the
liberty of imagining these and other stories based on events or
characters seen or mentioned in this moving drama.
But my words can hardly surpass the vivid world Thornton Wilder
created in Grover’s Corners. It seems to me that “Our Town” reminds us
of the deep value of each person’s life. This leads me to think about
what might have become of the Polish twins, and Tom the delivery
driver with a bad reputation and the ubiquitous teacher Miss Corcoran.
Stage manager (Tom Penchoen) guides
Emily through
an emotional decision.
As Editor Webb, I am one of the
characters you do see and hear on stage. And there is real richness in
what my wife, Myrtle, and our neighbors, Frank and Julia Gibbs, have
to say, and in the discoveries made by our daughter, Emily, and her
friend and husband-to-be, George Gibbs.
More than sentiment
“Our Town” is about “the way we were in our growin’ up and in our
marryin’, and our livin’, and in our dyin’,” as the pivotal Stage
Manager so succinctly states in the second act. This huge role is
played alternately by CAST veteran (and board member) Tom Pencheon and
by newcomer Gary Johnson. They are age 70 and age 40 versions of each
other, and both actors bring decidedly different approaches to the
challenging role:
Tom’s Stage Manager understands the universal truths he conveys, and
he firmly yet warmly points them out to us, while Gary’s Stage Manager
invites us to consider these concepts as someone whose own
appreciation for them is on a fresher plane.
The Stage Manager gets to say things like, “It’s like one of them
Middle West poets said: “You got to love life to have life and you got
to have life to love life.’ It’s what you call a vicious circle.”
Sentiment and sardonicism share space in that statement. And that is a
common theme in “Our Town.” Says the Stage Manager, on weddings and
the life partnerships they result in, “Once in a thousand times, it’s
interesting.”
George and Emily are that one in a thousand.
Lynda Dallman
Parents in the audience will relate to
the heart-to-heart talks Myrtle Webb has with Emily Webb, and her
timeless admonitions to her children: “Now I won’t have it. Breakfast
is as good as any other meal and I won’t have you gobblin’ like
wolves.” What parent will not enjoy the following exchange between Doc
and Mrs. Gibbs:
“I tell you, Julia, there’s nothing so terrifying in the world as a
son. The relation of a father and a son is the darnedest, awkwardest
—”
“Well, mother and daughter’s no picnic, either,” Julia cuts in.
In the same conversation, the Gibbses agree both that “Everyone’s
entitled to their own troubles” and that “People are meant to live
two-by-two in this world.”
The people in Grover’s Corners move between two worlds at times, but
they are true to life in any period of humanity — including their
inconsistencies.
‘Chalk — and fire’
The Stage Manager gives expression to humans’ connection to the
firmament, but he brings it right down to earth.
“There are the stars — doing their old, old crisscross in the skies.
Scholars haven’t settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there
are no living things up there. Just chalk — and fire.”
Gary Johnson shares the Stage Manager
role
with Tom Penchoen.
Awe, yet familiarity. That is what “Our
Town” mixes in its regard for the heavens, and for matters on earth.
Says one character, “And my boy, Joel, who knew the stars — he used to
say it took millions of years for the little speck o’ light to get
down to earth. Don’t seem like a body could believe it, but that’s he
used to say — millions of years.”
But another man in Grover’s Corners says, “The stars are mighty good
company.”
In the constellation of feelings and insights that so fill this play,
Wilder weaves the earthly and the universal, connecting both via the
timeless sinew of the people of Grover’s Corners, in particular two
families: George and Julia Gibbs and their son, George, and daughter,
Rebecca, and Editor Charles Webb and his wife, Myrtle, and children
Wally and Emily. At the play’s heart you will find Emily, but to avoid
spoiling the powerful third act, I will not try to describe the full
power of Emily’s role.
I have the pleasure of performing over the next two weekends in this
play as Editor Webb, in scenes with others, like myself, who portray
the roles they live in Hood River. My wife, Lorre, is my wife, Myrtle,
and our son, Delaney, 10, is our son, Wally (along with two other
roles as paperboy brothers, three years apart).
Emily is played by Jessica Metta, who works as a Gorge Commission
planner, and George Gibbs, whom she marries, is portrayed by Jeff
Dellis, who works in construction. Both are 25 but move well between
stage ages of 15 and 22. Both are new to CAST, yet they have developed
a real chemistry that makes them believable as teenaged friends who
realize they are meant for each other. George and Emily don’t fall in
love; they have always been in love.
Jack Trumbull of Anderson’s Tribute Center
plays the same role in “Our Town.”
In a pivotal scene, George takes a shy,
but huge step, in telling Emily that he knows when he has found “a
person you’re very fond of — I mean, a person who’s fond enough of you
to care about your character.”
People of this town
The universal truths of the play supersede any specific application of
the role of the Editor or the Constable or the Doctor to the lives of
the actors who play them. I noticed that Police Chief Bruce Ludwig and
Capt. David Thompson, as police officers, both grimace at a scene
where the Constable and milkman Howie Newsome (Dick Arnold, a Hood
River resident since 1955), find humor in the misfortune of the Polish
man falling in the snow. For all three men, it took quite a few
rehearsals to work up a convincing laugh.
And so far, audiences have laughed far less than expected at my “Paper
have any mistakes in it?” line. I get a real feel for the editor
Charles Webb — his newspaper even comes out twice a week, like this
one — but I like that Charles is father first, editor second. Smelling
the heliotrope in late-evening with Emily, he asks her, “Haven’t any
troubles on your mind, have you?”
Same with Frank Gibbs; though he refers in several scenes to the
delivering twins and helping a woman with a stomach ailment, his
attention is focused on George’s emergence from adolescence to
adulthood (“that great gangling thing,” he says of George on the
wedding day).
As mothers, Myrtle and Julia dispense French toast, coffee, biscuits,
and string beans as instruments of comfort and wisdom. The two share a
funny, but revealing scene that makes clear they are hard-working
wives and mothers who still harbor their own dreams.
In his brief but poignant role, Jack Trumbull of Anderson’s Tribute
Center says words that come very close to home. “Very sad, our journey
today, Samuel,” he says to a Sam Craig (Jeff Cook), a Grover’s Corners
native son who has come home for a funeral.
Typecasting Jack as Undertaker Joe Stoddard, the policemen as the
Constable, and myself as editor was director Lynda Dallman’s idea, as
a way to bring a parallel senses to the roles and the people who play
them. Jack has quietly acknowledged that, in the time we have
rehearsed and performed “Our Town,” the emotions and words in his
cemetery scenes are remarkably similar to what he experiences in his
working life.
“I always say, I hate to supervise when a young person is taken,” Joe
Stoddard says, speaking for Jack Trumbull.
Jan Veldhuisen Virk is Julia Gibbs, wife of Doc Gibbs, who is played
by Mike Doke. Desiree Amyx-MacIntosh shares the Julia Gibbs role with
Jan. Meanwhile, Jan Axford shares the Mrs. Louella Soames role with
Amyx-MacIntosh.
Another small, but key, role is that of church choir director Simon
Stimson, played by Richard Parker, theater professor at Columbia Gorge
Community College. He gives previously-unknown force to the single
word, “Softer!”
Work conflicts constrained Dr. Dick Virk, Jan’s husband, from taking
on the large role of Doc Gibbs, but the “typecasting” is still in
place, and Dick does play a small role in the third act. Meanwhile,
Anneke Virk, 9, plays Julia’s daughter, Rebecca, who posts one of the
play’s biggest thoughts (and one that bridges nicely to Wilder’s
thoughts about the stars, and to the Stage Manager’s later reference
to the cemetery as a place with no post office).
In one scene, I ask Constable Warren, “If you see my boy smokin’
cigarettes, just give him a word, will you?” In Grover’s Corners, a
man could ask the local constable to keep an eye on his son’s
goings-on.
Art imitates life: Just last week, I was talking at an accident scene
with another local constable, State Police Sgt. Julie Wilcox. “How are
your boys doing? You have one in high school now, right?” she said,
asking of Delaney’s big brother, Connal. I told Julie I was surprised
she knew that, but she laughed and said, “Hey, I just know these
things.”
Just give him a word, will you, constable?
Perhaps Grover’s Corners is not so far away.
*****
There are other stories Charles Webb might have written.
1921: “Billy Gibbs, son of farmer George Gibbs, is off to State
Agricultural School this fall.”
The Stage Manager tells in the first act of the Cartwright Bank’s time
capsule: the U.S. Constitution, the Bible, Shakespeare’s plays, and a
copy of the play itself would go into it.
Editor Webb might report on the time capsule:
“Progress embarks on shining parallel rails in these parts. The
expanded rail station must come right through the downtown section
where rests Mr. Cartwright’s fine marble edifice. With dismantling
comes the opening of this trove, sealed 25 years ago.”
(The Stage Manager at that point utters one of my favorite lines of
the play, an astute observation on the human condition, one that links
past to present in terms we in 2006 can understand: “What do you say,
folks?” he asks of what else might go into the time capsule. “What do
you think? Y’know, Babylon once had two million people in it, and all
we know about’m is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat
contracts and — the sales of slaves. Yet, every night all of those
families sat down to supper and the father came home from his work and
the smoke went up the chimney — same as here.”)
In another, “Lois and Ernestine,” who are unseen friends Emily Webb
hails on the way home from school, might have their own story.
“These Daughters of New Hampshire this week boarded the train out to
the Wild West to work at Yellowstone National Park.”
My own grandmother, Bertha Wagner, did just that at age 22, traveling
from Pennsylvania in 1911.
Past meets the future in Our Town, and it is a story that challenges
us all to look at our lives now, and relish the people and events
around us.
As Emily asks, “Do any human beings ever realize life — every, every
minute?”
Ticket Information
“Our Town,” directed by Lynda Dallman, runs Sept. 29-30 and Oct. 6-7
at 8 p.m.
Tickets are $10 in advance, $12 at the door. Tickets are now on sale
at Columbia Center for the Arts in Hood River and the Collage of the
Gorge in White Salmon. Reserve tickets by calling 387-8877; group
rates are available. Columbia Center for the Arts is located at 215
Cascade Ave.
Pulitzer Prize-winning “Our Town” was first produced in 1938 and
remains a staple of the American stage.
The production crew includes Mark Worth, lighting design; Alice
Pearson and Dorris Greenough, hair and wigs; Jan Axford, costumes;
Judie Hanel, house manager. Jeff Cook is overall production director,
Peter Dallman is the sound manager and Liz Siller is the lighting
technician. |
