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Proscenium Circus The Student Theater of Acton-Boxborough Regional High School A-B Friends of Drama www.abdrama.org |
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OUR TOWN
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Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning play CREATIVE TEAMDirector – Maureen Shea SHOW DATESFriday, October 30 - 7:30pm SPECIAL "SITE-SPECIFIC" PERFORMANCESThe matinees of “Our Town” on October 31 and November 1 are sure to be some of the most talked about events of the fall season in Acton and Boxborough. This event is only open to 110 audience-members. The performance will begin in the ABRHS auditorium (36 Charter Road, Acton) at 1:00pm with a pre-show catered reception for ticket-holders before Act I begins. At the conclusion of our Act I (the scene before the wedding), the audience will have 20-30 minutes to transport themselves directly to the Chapel at Woodlawn Cemetery in Acton Center. Carpooling is highly recommended as parking is limited. Emily and George’s wedding ceremony will take place live in the chapel for the beginning of Act II. At that point, the audience will be led by ‘The Stage Manager’ to the old part of the Woodlawn Cemetery, a five-minute walk. There they will enjoy the conclusion of the play. We extend a special thank-you to Bill Klauer and the Acton Cemetery Commission for their unending help and support of this once-in-a-lifetime community event. TICKETSAdvance tickets for Our Town on sale now through cast and crew members only until September 30. When you buy tickets from the cast and crew now, you receive a $2 discount off the $14 ticket price. So buy now and save. Currently, tickets for the special "on site" performances are only available for cast and crew parents and ABFOD-Season Ticket Holders. The price for the special “on site” tickets are $35 and a portion of the revenue will benefit the Household Goods Recycling of Massachusetts, an Acton based charity. On October 1st all tickets go on sale at: MKTix.com, Roche Bros, West Acton Market and at the door. Performances run October 30, 31 and November 1, 6, 7. Cast Ticket Contest Information Ticket Contest Information [PDF] ART EXHIBITThere will be an “Our Town” photo exhibit by the students in the ABRHS Advanced Photography class during all performances. This exiting display will feature photographs from Acton, Boxborough and the surrounding towns. Mr. Nat Martin, the AB photo teacher, and Bill Moore, professional photographer and projection designer, will be working closely with the students on this project. OUR TOWN YouTube Video Commercialhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dZpeKX8vnk THE DIRECTOR’S VISIONOur Town is the American classic by Thornton Wilder. The play tells the story of average citizens living their "ordinary," "extraordinary" lives in an imaginary, small New England town, Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, in the first decades of the twentieth century. I have often thought of this play driving through small towns in Massachusetts, going past houses that look like the Gibbs’ and Webbs’ houses that appear in Wilder’s first act and then the inevitable church and cemetery in the town center that are the settings and locale of his second and third acts. Our production will focus on the similarities between this mythical town to our north and what it was (and is!) like to live in our town, Acton, MA. We will play at least one performance in a "site specific" setting, with the audience actually attending young Emily Webb’s wedding in the Woodlawn Chapel in Acton Center and then her funeral in Woodlawn Cemetery. As we move from "Daily Life" through "Love and Marriage" to "Death and Eternity" we will hopefully learn to appreciate more deeply and fully the meaning of life – the richness of family, the power of community and the reaffirming rituals of our everyday lives. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is, for me, a meditation on gratitude and wonder. —Maureen Shea, Director BRIEF SHOW SYNOPSISIn Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the Stage Manager introduces the town of Grover’s Corners to the audience and sets the scenes while serving as narrator. From his words emerge the Webb Family and the Gibbs Family, along with many other citizens of Grover’s Corners. Act I, which is titled "The Daily Life," is about the simple life of the people in Grover’s Corners. The wedding of Emily Webb and George Gibbs takes place in Act II, which is titled "Love and Marriage," though Emily and George are unsure if they are really ready for marriage, as they are both young. Act III, "Death and Eternity," is several years later, after Emily has died in childbirth. We meet Emily, Mrs. Gibbs, and other people who have died throughout the course of the play and they share their thoughts. When the Stage Manager gives Emily the option of re-living one day back on earth, she chooses her twelfth birthday. Finding it very plain and uninteresting, she realizes that we do not appreciate life as we should when we are alive, and she returns to the land of the dead with the Stage Manager, who gives his final remarks before the curtain falls. It is crucial that everybody reads the play prior to auditions for more insight on the story, plot, and characters. In its history, Our Town has won the Tony Award for Best Play and Best Revival along with the Pulitzer Prize for drama among other awards. A current revival is playing at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York (off-Broadway), directed by and starring David Cromer. MEET THE PRODUCTION TEAMMAUREEN SHEA (Director) Dr. Shea is currently a Professor in the Department of Performing Arts at Emerson College. Professional directing credits include Music Theatre Group and Circle Repertory Company in New York, NY; the Los Angeles Women's Shakespeare Company; the Philadelphia Drama Guild; the Empire State Institute for Performing Arts in Albany, NY; Theatre Three in Dallas, TX; the Porthouse Theatre Company in Kent, OH; the Shreveport Little Theatre; EcoTheater in Hinton, WV; and the Huntington Theatre, Coyote Theatre Company, the Nora Theatre Company, The Theatre Offensive, Next Stage, Inc., New Voices and Word of Mouth in the Boston area. Her production of How I Got That Story was presented at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as a national finalist in the American College Theatre Festival. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Iowa Playwrights Lab, the Toneelacademie in Maastricht, The Netherlands and an Associate Director of the Company of Women, an all female Shakespeare Company led by Carol Gilligan and Kristin Linklater. Dr. Shea is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers. MIRTA TOCCI (Scenic Design) Ms. Tocci is a visual artist, born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, living and working in Boston and Barcelona, Spain. Her work has been shown in individual and collective exhibitions in galleries and museums in Buenos Aires, Paris, Berlin, Köln, Brussels, London, Chicago, New Jersey, Santa Barbara, Hasselt (Belgium), Ferrara (Italy), Humlebaak (Denmark), Girona and Barcelona. In Boston she has created many scenic designs and multimedia works for the theatre: Tongues of Fire, Bel Canto and Last Rites for The Theater Offensive, Last Train to Nibroc for Coyote Theatre Company, Malcolm X, The Seduction Project, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White and Anne & Emmett for Emerson Stage, Body and Sold for Tempest Productions, Queer Theory: A Musical Travesty for Slippage Productions and A Streetcar Named Desire, The Crucible, Brecht Unplugged, The Miracle Worker (2009 IRNE Award Nomination for Best Set Design) and Train Wrecked: A Memoir for Roxbury Repertory Theater at Roxbury Community College. She also created In the Garden, a three-month project based on the life and work of Emily Dickinson with 13 collaborators (artists, scholars, critics, designers, gardeners and chefs) and 150 inmates at the Women’s Prison, Wadras, in Barcelona. She is the recipient of numerous prizes and grants. She is currently Artist-in-Residence at the Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. BILL MOORE (Projection Design) Bill Moore has taught French theatre, world drama and Shakespeare during a teaching career of over 30 years in French and English at Phillips Exeter and then Milton Academy. He has mounted several pocket theater productions in French of Molière and Ionesco, and more recently, Sartre’s Huis clos, and an English translation of Yukio Mishima’s play, The Decline and Fall of the Suzaku. Bill studied ‘Shakespeare in Production’ with Miriam Gilmore at Stratford-upon-Avon on an NEH grant in 1996, and developed a similar Shakespeare course at Milton using the Boston area theater’s Shakespeare productions as a resource. For the last two seasons, he has worked as an assistant director with Maureen Shea, this spring on the sell-out Emerson Stage production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, and in the fall of 2007, on Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls. He is a photographer when he isn’t teaching, with a show of Cambodian images at The Laconia Gallery in Boston in the summer of 2006. Contact James Sheehan, producer and dramaturge, (JFSheehan51@yahoo.com, 508-517-1223) with questions regarding Our Town and to reserve your 5-minute audition slot or to sign up for a crew! Audition slots may be reserved beginning August 3; only one person per audition slot. |