This spring Marcus Stern directs the graduating actors of the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theater Training in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Stern spoke with production dramaturg Annabeth Lucas about how experimenting in form might introduce additional perspectives on the content in Wilder’s classic work.
Why Our Town?
In the last five to ten years, I’ve been in search of plays that have some spiritual element, without that aspect being blatant. As I started reading Our Town, I thought it seemed to be gently playing with a variety of spiritual ideas. The various lives in the town seem guided by a larger order, and the Stage Manager seems cognizant of this, so it felt like the play was trying to touch on a larger perspective of life.
But what impacted my decision to work on Our Town the most was reading Donald Margulies’ introduction to the play, in which he called Wilder an incredibly progressive and innovative playwright—which isn’t the normal assumption about either Wilder or this play. He writes about how Wilder was more of an experimental writer, one who was playing with Cubism in dramatic writing in a way that was similar to what Picasso was doing in painting, and using innovative structure, like fractional pieces that add up to a whole in a non-linear fashion. The idea that the play could be considered a Cubist work opened up the possibilities of that world and repositioned the play for me.
Our Town is set in early 1900s small-town America, and productions are often infused with nostalgia. What made the play relevant to you?
I never viewed it as a nostalgic piece. I viewed it as occurring only in real time without needing to be set in a specific time period. I also understood the small-town setting as a context that o ered Wilder an opportunity to use the “simplicity” of pedestrian moments as a gateway towards a kind of clarity, stillness, or wisdom that is larger than our conscious thinking.
Your productions are often non-naturalistic, featuring precise, even choreographic, movements. What does this approach bring to this play?
Like many people working in various fields, I’m interested in finding alternative shapes for content that we’re familiar with. As a kid, my mom used to say, “how do you know you’re seeing this spoon in the exact same way that I’m seeing this spoon?” That was fascinating. Suddenly the spoon had more resonance because it existed as an object of its own integrity that could be appearing in different forms to different people, as if the relationship between form and content were malleable. For artwork in general, when we play with form, we’re often trying to give people additional side-doors for entering content— opportunities to consider ideas, people, and moments in our lives from a different perspective.
The non-naturalistic staging is that same idea of a side-door. As a concrete example, when we first see the alcoholic choir master, he drunkenly buries his head into a wall while talking to his singers during a choir practice. The singers are spread out far away from him on stage. He never looks at them, and they never look at him, yet he talks to them as if he’s right in front of them. By creating distance between him and the singers, and seeing him talk to and lean against the wall, we might bring out additional ways of understanding his isolation, emotional pain, and refuge in alcohol. That said, I want to add that I’m hoping the production will be a warm and entertaining piece. We’re aiming to make a version that feels sweet, sad, humorous, and resonant in some way.
What served as inspiration for this production?
I’m usually first guided by music, which I collect for each show. I divide the songs into scenes to see if any naturally suggest alternative forms of staging. I also find contemporary visual art another helpful guide. I don’t know if this is true, but contemporary visual art seems to have the largest number of successful examples of experimentation in the relationship between form and content. I was in a museum last summer and saw this piece which was a regular wooden door frame, in a wall, with the door open, and inside the frame were hundreds of flowers pressed against the opening—like there was a world of tightly compressed flowers just beyond that door. I sent a picture of it to the set designer, and it guided us to the idea of “what’s magical behind the regular door.”
Interview by Annabeth Lucas, a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.
