Our Town

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?

That famous question lies at the heart of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1938 play, “Our Town.” One of the most performed American plays in history, it is beloved for its powerfully human messages about love, mortality and fully living every moment.

In September, the University of Colorado Department of Theatre & Dance will stage the classic drama for the first time in nearly a half century.

“‘Our Town’ has a lot of history behind it and many people have seen it in community theater or read it in high school,” says Wesley Longacre, who will co-direct with Lindsay Weitkamp. “It just speaks to people, no matter where they come from, no matter where they are.”

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival staged the play in 2009 and CU Opera performed a musical version in 2010. But the department, which first produced it in 1948, last performed it in 1966.

The play follows the lives of characters in the small, fictional town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire as they experience birth, marriage, death and even afterlife over the course of many years.

Wilder adopted an innovative “meta” approach in portraying love, loss and joy and featuring a Narrator who addresses the audience directly. CU’s production will extend the invitation to inhabit the play still further with onstage seating available.

“We want people to experience the ‘Our Town’ environment,” Longacre says. “Not just that we are an audience watching a play being performed, but entering into the story being told onstage. We are in a sense telling the story together, with even the audience playing their part.”