Touring Programs
Our Town
"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
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 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."