Our Town

A few years ago, we staged a full-scale production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in our church. It was the first full-length play that had been attempted, as part of St. John’s new initiative to revive the life of our local community through the arts. Our production had been a great success on many levels: it sold out for its four performances, drawing many people from far and wide to share in the life of the church; the cast and production-team, largely drawn from the congregation, grew much closer together in that time as we worked shoulder to shoulder over virtually half a year on the play; and we discovered, perhaps more than ever before, how great art, just like the great religions of the world, illuminates what it means to be human in any and every age. The young lover’s and the rude mechanical’s journey through the dark and magical woods near Athens, in Shakespeare’s comedy, is as good a metaphor as you will find in drama, for the process of spiritual awakening. Two or three years on from this triumph, I decided it was time to attempt another great mystical play, with actors drawn from our church and the wider community. Browsing through the bookshop at the National Theatre one morning, I found a new Penguin edition of Our Town, by the American playwright, Thornton Wilder. On the back cover it read:

Finding the theatre of the 1920’s lacking bite and conviction, Thornton Wilder set out to bring back realism and to celebrate the innocent, simple and religious… to endow individual experience with cosmic significance.

As I sat down to re-read the play in the foyer of the National, dotted with actors reading aloud their latest scripts, and ‘techies’ discussing lighting-rigs over coffee, I knew I’d found the latest project for The Space Drama Company.
The play tells the story of a small New Hampshire community, living in the decade before the First World-War. It charts the fortunes of two neighbouring families as their children pass through school, get married, and cope with the inevitable loss which comes through time. It is written to be staged with just a couple of tables and a few chairs, representing the adjacent family kitchens, and uses a narrator to sketch in the rest of the details of the town. It has been revived in New-York recently, to great acclaim, with particular praise for the stark, unsentimental presentation of the play in a small studio theatre off Broadway.
In November my own cast gathered for their first rehearsal in our new church hall. It is this forming of a family, a small creative community, which is one of the many delights of embarking on a new production. As a director, you know that even though there is an inevitable awkward tension to begin with, providing you’ve handled the company well, they’ll be living in each other’s pockets by first night. Finding the right blend of characters is vital to the whole project, rather like hosting a successful dinner party or, more seriously, forming a team for an expedition. There are a few notable additions to the usual core members of the company, which makes this a particularly exciting project. Two students from the sixth-form college where I teach in Surrey have been drafted in to play the teenage lovers, Emily and George. This has given them a welcome relief from the claustrophobic boarding-house existence, and relentless programme of their A’ Levels. As I drove them back to school after that first rehearsal, one of them said: “How wonderful to be part of the real world for a change”! There’s an interesting irony about such a positive appraisal of a Christian community, coming from eighteen years olds today! It has to be said, that it’s also a breath of fresh air for St. John’s, to have such talented and vital young adults as Betsy and George, making such a significant contribution to the life of our church.
Wilder wrote in his preface to the play that he wanted ‘to find a value beyond all price for the smallest events in our daily life’. So, the action of the drama involves just that: the delivery of the milk, two women stringing beans, the kids doing their home-work. Yet, he presents such apparent mundane events within an overall dramatic structure that causes us to exclaim, like one of the characters looking back on her life in Act Three: “so all that was going on and we never noticed”. As the character of Emily revisits her life from beyond the grave, towards the end of the play, she is pained by how even her family scarcely engages with her and meets her eye. This makes her final farewell to life all the more poignant, as she savours the sheer sensuality of being alive, one last time. It is in this sense that the play is deeply religious, without being didactic. True religion affirms that the whole of life is sacred, not just choir-practice or weddings and funerals (though the play includes all this too).
Much of the drama of the twentieth century from great writers like Chekhov and Tennessee Williams, gives us an opportunity to experience the profound significance of the minutiae of life, and thus trains us to engage more fully with the numinous behind the simple activities of every moment of our existence. A Russian family’s arrival and subsequent final departure from the old nursery of their beloved home in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, for example, is presented on stage with such graphic intensity that we are made to realize the profound significance of such fleeting moments. The sounds of the heavy bolts closing up the estate for winter at the end of the play, the fading noise of the carriages pulling away, and the brutal thud of the axe against the Cherry trees helps us to contemplate the ephemera of so much of what we cling to. This brings us to one of the many paradoxes of the Christian faith. On the one hand we must strive to relish the beauty of nature made sacred through the incarnation, on the other we must learn to detach ourselves from all which consumes our hearts and prevents us from moving forward into a deeper communion with the otherness of God. Emily, and through her the audience, are made tangibly aware of that paradox at the end of Our Town and this is why it is one of the great spiritual, if not Christian dramas, of the twentieth century.