There I Did it Again
A colleague of mine was in town this week for meetings, and after some discussion we decided to go to watch Soulpepper's "Our Town" last night. This is, for those counting, my third time at this production, all in under two weeks. (By comparison, my colleague had seen no professional productions of the play, but had seen three amateur ones, on consecutive nights!)Reflecting on the three, I think the tears were deepest in the middle viewing (which came shortly after I had my cat euthanized).
It is lovely to revisit the texture of Wilder's delicious writing, which gently draws a line from the particularities of the simplest everyday life, to the whole theme of human existence, and more broadly, the development of the whole universe. His set pieces, "This is the way we were, in our living and our dying" (roughly) (to the chorale in the background), the wedding ("Isn't it a lovely wedding" - deeply ironic), and moments in the third act, the beautiful interplay between Mrs Gibbs and Simon Stimpson, and the "Wasn't life awful - and wonderful" line, with the push form the stage manager back to universality in the closing words, set me off emotionally in each viewing.
My wife joked that at my age I should have seen this play three times by now. And I agree - actually think 10-15 is a better number - I hope I have time and opportunity to work on it. Of course I did not expect to get from zero to three in two weeks, but then my colleague likely at some point did not expect to get from zero to three in three days.
The funniest thing in a way is that without my doing anything more, I wound up sitting with my colleague in the same seats my wife and I had been in a few days before.
Labels: Our Town Wilder great plays
posted by Alan Adamson @ 5:53 PM
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