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Pontine On Tour
OUR TOWN
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For a while in Rome I lived among
archeologists, and ever since I find myself occasionally looking
at the things about me as an archeologist will look at them a
thousand years hence. An archeologist's eyes combine the view of
the telescope with the view of the microscope. He reconstructs
the distant with the help of the very small. It was something of
this method that I brought to a New Hampshire village."
Thornton Wilder, A Preface for OUR TOWN
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OUR TOWN is Thornton Wilder's classic portrait of small town, New
Hampshire life. Through a loving examination of the minutiae of
daily routine, Wilder provides his audience a perspective on the
the great issues of life: time and social history, memory and
identity, family and community, spirituality and death. Brooks
Atkinson, in his review of OUR TOWN's first performance, wrote:
"Mr. Wilder has transmuted the simple events of human life
into universal reverie. He has given familiar facts a deeply
moving, philosophical perspective." First produced and
published in 1938, at which time it won the Pulitzer Prize, this
drama of life in the small village of Grover's Corners has become
an American classic and is Thornton Wilder's most reknowned and
most frequently performed play.
Pontine Movement Theatre departs from the movement-based,
original works of past seasons in presenting a two-person
adaptation of OUR TOWN. The familiarity of the play, after
generations of amateur and high school productions, affords
Pontine's artistic directors, M. Marguerite Mathews and Gregory
Gathers, broad scope for invention and reinterpretation. In order
to portray the dozen characters, the actors make use of a cast of
three-foot-tall, Bunraku-style puppets, and Commedia
Dell'Arte-style masks. The constant shift between live action,
puppetry, and masked theatre underscores the "universality
of the ordinary" which is at the heart of the play.
Qunicy Whitney, writing for the BOSTON GLOBE, said of Pontine's
OUR TOWN, "This convention of puppet and mask and people is
so carefully constructed with Shaker-style simplicity and
reverence, so well choreogrphed that the viewer never leaves the
world. The simple design of the puppets, and the set is also not
what it seems as this moving tableau is actually intricately
complicated, made to look simple through impeccable timing and
peerless performance."
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