“So friends, this is the way we were in our growing up and in our marrying and in our doctoring and in our living and in our dying.”

Pull out a copy of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and, depending upon the vintage of the edition, if it’s old enough, you can find that line. That’s how it read in the 1938 hardback edition, which was drawn from the original rehearsal manuscript. But at this moment, with theatres dark, with people fearing illness and falling ill, the ultimately excised “doctoring” as a key element in our lives holds unfortunate resonance.

While we cannot presently take refuge in theatres, people have done so for countless years, and in America, since 1938, Our Town has proven to be one of the most enduring of works. Contrary to many people’s misapprehension of it as a valentine to a bygone era, the play is a deep meditation on mortality. It starts dropping hints about its true concerns, beyond baseball games and ice cream soda-fueled romance, virtually from the start, when we’re introduced to one character by immediately learning about when he will die. 

That character happens to be Doc Gibbs, who so far as the play tells us, is the only medical professional in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, where the story is set. He practiced in an era before personal protective equipment was standard issue, before private health insurance and Obamacare – and he ministered to everyone equally. The play begins with him having just delivered twins in the less affluent part of Grover’s Corners that the audience never sees.

The mundane, commonplace events of the play’s first two acts give way in the third to a metatheatrical and metaphysical exploration of what comes after earthly life. However, it is explicitly non-denominational and non-religious, ultimately designed not to have us contemplate what comes next, but rather how much we must appreciate what we have in life, even if it seems inconsequential, and perhaps at this moment, frightening.

For those who have never encountered the play, Emily, the play’s female lead, is lost to a medical crisis. She realizes only when it is too late what she has been forced to leave behind. As we shelter in place, as we quarantine, as our medical professionals work tirelessly and selflessly without all of the resources they need, it’s hard not to think about Our Town, which speaks so directly to the futility of regret and the value and interconnectedness of every aspect of life.

It also speaks to community, with the lives of the people of a small town inextricably interwoven, through education, through prayer, through dining, through sports, through singing. There’s not, we’re told, much culture in the town, but there’s great appreciation for the natural world, for the weather, for that which we often take for granted. Wilder constantly has his characters looking to the skies. Even children contemplate their place in the universe.

For those already chafing at the strictures of an invisible scourge, we long to return to our daily lives as they have been, consumed with getting back to work, to school, to income, to not fearing the proximity of others. When we do, and we will, but not without pain and loss, perhaps we will have a newfound pleasure in clocks ticking, food, coffee, sunflowers, and new ironed dresses, to recount Emily’s memories, as well as in live performance and greeting friends and strangers alike. Wilder had to imagine passings and an afterlife to get us to contemplate these things.

Now, more than ever, we are all Emily Webb. Biology is writing the story from which we must learn. As a character says in Our Town, “My, wasn’t life awful – and wonderful.”

My book, “Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21^st Century,” will be published in February 2021 by Methuen Drama.

As the cab pulled into the driveway, I got a glimpse of a sign propped against a telephone pole, starkly gray, black and white. On it were the typical details of any theatre production: the company, the dates and times, the title of the show, the website. Depicted was a single leafless tree, suggesting perhaps Waiting For Godot, or Spoon River Anthology, or maybe even a spooky Halloween attraction. I knew the show I was headed to was going to be a heavy one, so the foreboding promised by the sign wasn’t inappropriate; it followed a dictum I believe in strongly, which is truth in advertising. I just didn’t expect this for a high school play.

The play in question, about which I knew next to nothing beyond a website marketing synopsis, was Infinite Black Suitcase by EM Lewis, a playwright new to me. It was being done as a “major black box production” at Staples High School in Westport CT, a school whose theatre program I have heard about for literally decades, knowing kids and parents of kids who had at one time or another been connected with the school. While challenges to other high school plays have taken me to other towns in Connecticut – Waterbury, Woodbridge, Trumbull, Milford – I happened to meet the head of the Staples drama program when we served together for one year (two meetings) on an advisory committee for Samuel French, the theatrical licensing company. So I’d been keeping an eye on what he was up to, even as more pressing issues in high school theatre took me elsewhere.

Had I visited the Staples Players website and found they were doing Twelve Angry Men/Women/People/Jurors or To Kill A Mockingbird, I might not have been so quick to head to Westport along with the commuter crowd on their way home on Thursday night. But the online description of the play, not out of character with the school’s past repertoire, about various residents of an Oregon town dealing both with impending death and the aftermath of prior losses seemed so incongruous in a high school setting – even a high school with a 200 seat black box in addition to a spacious main auditorium – that I had to go up and see for myself.

Jacob Leaf, Claire Smith & Jack Baylis in Infinite Black Suitcase at Staples High (photo by Kerry Long)

Before going, I looked up the playwright, wondering whether the author wrote specifically for high school productions, and discovered that she has a number of professionally produced works to her credit (the play premiered in Los Angeles in 2005) and that Infinite Black Suitcase was in fact receiving its high school premiere. This prompted me to ask Roth, who was directing the play with his wife Kerry Long, how he came to the play. He responded that the folks at French had put him on to it, as he had been looking for a relatively large cast contemporary play.

I attended the first of four performances, and until 10 minutes or so before curtain time, I wondered if anyone would be there, so empty was the parking lot and theatre entrance – as did some students who seemed connected with the show, milling in the hallway near the theatre. An audience did arrive, a bit tardy, filling the small theatre to perhaps a bit more than half of capacity. Once inside, the trappings of the school fell away and the environment resembled many an Off-Broadway house. Indeed, the fact that the theatre wasn’t completely full showed that challenging work is always a hard sell, regardless of whether it’s professional or academic. Of course, it was a school night.

Jack Bowman & Joe Badion in Infinite Black Suitcase at Staples High (photo: Kerry Long)

Obviously my intent is not to review the play or production, but I can say that it met one criteria I declared important when I first started writing about high school theatre, namely that the work challenged the students performing in it. Playing (mostly) grief stricken adults mourning or anticipating death in a series of short, intertwined scenes, the students were “punching above their weight,” rather than merely romping through an entertainment that catered to their natural, youthful exuberance. The play also fulfilled what Roth had told me led to its selection, in that the 16 actors were a genuine ensemble, each afforded at least one “moment” in the 80 minutes to showcase their abilities.

Contemporary drama is hardly unknown in high school theatre, although it was outside of my own experience years ago. A quick glance at the Staples repertoire over many years shows that, as did the most compelling portion of Michael Sokolove’s book Drama High, in which high school students performed Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s Good Boys and True. That said, in the Educational Theatre Association’s survey of the most produced high school plays, only one contemporary play makes the top ten: John Cariani’s Almost Maine (at number one). Surely Cariani’s play stands atop the list because while originally produced with four actors and lots of doubling, it easily affords the opportunity for a larger cast to play its many roles without repetition, expanding to meet the interest and needs of high school drama, where musicals with casts of 50 are far from rare. Cariani’s new play, Love/Sick, might well appear on the list soon.

The rest of the EdTA list is decidedly older plays, from public domain works like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Importance of Being Earnest to American classics like Our Town, Harvey and You Can’t Take It With You. While I have affection for all of the plays which are most frequently seen, with a particular and deep admiration for Our Town, a play often mistaken for pablum when it is really a profound meditation on death, I do worry, as with musicals, that even as the canon of theatre literature grows, the majority of our high schools produce the same standards year after year, the experience at Staples, the popularity of The Laramie Project and Sokolove’s story of Levittown PA notwithstanding.

This may well be a byproduct of the downsizing of the American play. Ask any playwright and they’ll tell you how they have to craft their works for casts of four to six, preferably with a single set, in order to get them done; look at the most produced plays in America and you’ll find those small casts: Venus in Fur (two), Red (two), God of Carnage (four), Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (six), and so on. So when high schools seek to involve as many students as possible in theatre outside of musicals, they’re forced back to the days when larger casts were de rigeur. On the one hand, we can say that this only reflects modern trends in professional theatre, and students should work with the same expectations, but in practice small cast plays either deny students the chance to learn about dramatic ensembles or the chance to tackle new work.

I have to hand it to Roth for putting his students up to the challenge of Infinite Black Suitcase, although I suspect it’s unlikely to be come a standard work in the high school repertory. But I’m also pleased to know that it’s not the only option out there. Student-written plays, although typically one-acts, afford high schoolers the opportunity to take on work by and about their peers, although that’s not without its challenges, as cases in Everett MA and Wilton CT have shown. Lend Me A Tenor author Ken Ludwig premiered one of his plays, a holiday show, at a high school near his home. There is also a thriving subset of writing targeting the academic market, though it is wholly unfamiliar to me.

One model that I wish were better-known or, better still, duplicated in the U.S., is the one forged by NT Connections in England, in which the National Theatre commissions new works by major contemporary playwrights specifically for secondary schools to perform. This may give the writers a chance to work on a larger canvas than they can with works seeking professional production, while letting the students take on modern plays crafted specifically for them that aren’t necessarily simplified for them or condescending to them, by writers they well might be reading about in the culture pages. Though I admire the concept, I regret knowing very few of these plays; I can, however, heartily recommend Mark Ravenhill’s Moliere riff Totally Over You.

I must come back to one last aspect of the experience of seeing Infinite Black Suitcase at Staples High. In my experience as an audience member seeing high school theatre, plays or musicals, I am always in the position of watching a show I’ve seen before, in many cases more than once, its words and music well known to me. With Suitcase, my experience was perhaps closer to the majority of my regular theatergoing precisely because I didn’t know it. I wasn’t spending the evening just seeing how well the kids managed to perform a familiar tale, I was actively engaged in watching the play itself, since I had no idea what would happen next and, for me, the Staples cast – of students I’ve never met, and so have no reason to respond to with indulgence or affection – is forever linked with the play, as with any show when one sees it for the first time. For Infinite Black Suitcase, they are my original cast.

P.S. I continue to learn a great deal about high school theatre as I see more and write more and as readers respond to what I write. If you have other examples of high school theatre giving students the opportunity to take on challenging contemporary or even new work, I hope you’ll share it in the comments section below. Teach me, and share so that other students and teachers can learn as well.

Is there no one in town aware of social injustice?

Part of the compact we make when we go to the theatre is to shut out the outside world and completely immerse ourselves in the world displayed before us by artists, by actors. We can’t shut out our own thoughts of course, our memories and associations, but our gaze is directed, what we see and hear is planned to evoke a desired response.

It is impossible to achieve that focus when your theatre is the visitors room at Sing Sing Prison on a hot spring evening, which is where I was on Friday night, seeing Thornton Wilder’s Our Town performed by a cast of inmates of the maximum security facility, under the aegis of the not-for-profit Rehabilitation Through the Arts. I was one of a couple of hundred outsiders invited to see the production, which had already been performed twice for the general prison population, and my anticipation was as great as any I’ve had before going to the theatre.

Every child born into this world is nature’s
attempt to make
a perfect human being.

It is impossible to contemplate a visit to Sing Sing without riffling through all of the associations it brings to mind. Coming from a upper middle class family, I don’t know people who’ve gone to prison; serious crime has never touched my life or the lives of my immediate community. Crime and prison are something I read about in the newspaper, or see served up as entertainment. Dragnet. Law and Order. “Book him, Danno.” The Birdman of Alcatraz. Our Country’s Good. The Shawshank Redemption. Oz. “Anything you can say will be used against you.” Escape From Alcatraz. Short Eyes. Cool Hand Luke. The Green Mile. Not About Nightingales. Dead Man Walking. Helter Skelter. The Executioner’s Song. Even Nick Nolte in Weeds, a fictionalized account of the San Quentin Drama Workshop.

From the moment I passed the first chain link fence and a complacent guard who merely said, “Here for the play?,” I was relatively at ease. As I waited in an under-air-conditioned visitor’s trailer packed with attendees, I marveled as others in the awaiting audience, attired as if for a Sunday matinee at any theatre, grumbled about the heat, while I was wondering what the prisoners might be experiencing on that 90+ degree afternoon.  I was sweating profusely, but silently.

Live people don’t understand, do they? They’re sort of shut up
in little boxes, aren’t they?

We began to be taken into the security area in groups of about 25. We emptied our pockets, took off shoes and belts, just as at the airport, although there was but a single line moving slowly through a dingy room adorned with signs and memos of assorted warning that may have been up for 30 years or more (one cautioned against bringing in “alcholic” beverages, a typo of indeterminate age). Then, in groups of six, we passed through one true prison gate – on which stood, incongruously, more than a dozen two-inch Muppet figures. As that gate closed, another heavy door, only six or seven feet beyond it, was opened, and we entered the visitors room, our theatre.

*   *   *

Save for signs about proper behavior, vastly less than in the security area, it felt as if I was entering the cafeteria of a particularly large junior high school. There were guards, some on platforms, some on the floor, but I saw only a few. Having entered on the narrow, northern side of a long rectangle, the room seemed vast, but it was filling with people and it had been set up as a makeshift theatre. Chairs (all numbered for some purpose other than theatre seating) were arranged in a shallow three-quarter thrust, facing the eastern wall, where two levels of risers had been installed. Behind the risers, dark green fabric obscured what I assumed were more signs about proper decorum in the visitors room; the same fabric draped a collection of vending machines on the south wall. Were these standard issue, I wondered, or were they scenery, evoking the green hills of Grover’s Corners?  A collection of inmate art (another initiative of Rehabilitation Through the Arts) was on display, and refreshments were being served. Only by looking west was there a clear reminder of where we were: windows revealed spools of razor wire and fencing, beyond which was “the yard” flanked by what were presumably cell blocks. Beyond that were the tracks for the train lines that had brought me to Ossining, and beyond them, the Hudson River.

The ceiling was low, hung with fluorescent strips. There were no theatrical lights, but a small sound area sat in what might have been, in other circumstances, the stage right wings; there was a mixing board and an electric keyboard and familiar cabling ran out from there into the playing space. A pre-show announcement told us that these productions are usually done in the prison auditorium, which was under renovation this year; it was the first time since the theatre initiative began in 1996 that it hadn’t been available, and the setting was the simplest ever used (although perfectly appropriate for the famously spare Our Town).

There isn’t much culture; but maybe this is the kind of place to tell you
that we’ve got a lot of pleasure of a kind here: we like the sun comin’ up
over the mountain in the morning, and we notice a good deal about the birds.
We pay a lot of attention to them. And we watch the change
of the seasons; yes everybody knows about them.

I was surprised to find inmates, both those in obvious period costume and those in prison drab, freely mingling with the invited audience, greeting many who they seemed to know. They were shaking hands and even embracing visitors, contrary to every fictional depiction in which contact between prisoners and guests was forbidden. I had been told that the cast’s families were not permitted to attend; I assume the obviously pre-existing relationships were because the audience (almost entirely white and over 50) were in some way affiliated with RTA or other prison outreach programs.

Kate Powers, the show’s director and one of my friends from Twitter, introduced me first to her stage manager (the actual stage manager, not the character of the Stage Manager from the play), then to a large man in overalls who I was told would play Howie Newsome the milkman, then to a younger man who would play George Gibbs. The last spoke of Kate’s “unique style of directing,” so I asked whether he’d been in other plays. Only one, he replied, prompting me to wonder what was so unique that someone with presumably little frame of reference would find it so unusual.

Having arrived at the prison just after 5 pm and having been processed through security by about 5:40, it was just over an hour before we were called to our seats, as the last guests were cleared through.

*  *  *

Now you know! That’s what it is to be alive.
To move about in a cloud of ignorance
to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those. . .
of those about you. To spend and waste time
as though you had a million years.
To always be at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another.

Had I wished to, I suspect I could have learned a great deal more about the circumstances of the production from Kate. She had posted the occasional comment to Twitter, or to Facebook, about a challenge (one inmate struggled with an umbrella, unfamiliar with the mechanism) or about an acting breakthrough, or an emotional one.  She did an interview with journalist Jonathan Mandell. But I left it at that. I may well wish to understand the logistics and stories behind putting on a play in such an environment, but this night I simply wanted to react, to the setting and to the production, as I would in most theatergoing experiences.

Seated behind me was Peter Kramer, a local reporter who had seen the production two nights earlier, sitting with the general population; he has written previously about the prison’s theatre program. To my immediate right was a woman who had appeared in RTA’s production of West Side Story (three actresses had been brought in for this production as well, to play Emily, Mrs. Webb and Mrs. Gibbs). To her right was a veteran of the RTA theatre program, a former inmate, who now worked on the outside, counseling others, a man clearly well known to all there.

I guess we’re all hunting like everybody else for a way
the diligent and sensible can rise to the top
and the lazy and quarrelsome can sink to the bottom.
But it ain’t easy to find. Meanwhile, we do all we can
to help those that can’t themselves and those that we can we leave alone.

Had I learned the backstories of the actors, they surely wouldn’t have resembled a Playbill bio. I might have been able to find out their crimes, the length of their terms, whether this was their first incarceration. Perhaps I should have. But I was not there to judge them, since they had already been judged; I was not there to second-guess the judicial system or the penal system, flawed as it may be. Most of what I know about jurisprudence and incarceration, as I’ve said, is via fiction. Reality is vastly more complex, but I am not sufficiently versed in the subject to explore that. Theatre is what I do, and what I can, respond to.

*   *   *

Detail of art for the RTA production of OUR TOWN by inmate Robert Pollack

And so: Our Town.

No differently than attending a student production, it would be unfair to write anything resembling a review. The casting pool is limited, as is any prior experience. While we know the stories of Rick Cluchey or Charles S. Dutton, former prison inmates who ultimately became acclaimed professional actors, future acting careers surely wasn’t the point of the show. It was about the teamwork, the self-esteem building that surely we all know if we’ve ever been in a show, a music group or (I imagine) a sports team.

What I can tell you is that Wilder’s play came through loud and clear. There were some minor alterations: George’s kid sister became a kid brother; Grover’s Corners was re-situated in New York along the Hudson River, there’s a mosque up the hill in town these days, and the religious affiliations of the community include a sizable share of Muslims. Historically accurate interpolations for Wilder’s drama set at the turn of the century? No. Perfectly in keeping with the meta-theatrics that power the play? Absolutely.

Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal,
and something has to do with human beings.
All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that
for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised
how people are always losing hold of it.

There was no bashfulness in the cast, but no showboating either. No one peered out and waved to those they knew in the audience. No one flubbed lines, or goofed around. Every word, every action came through loud and clear, enough so that the play worked its sad magic on me once again. As I know more and more people who live in that cemetery among its conversing residents, I find the play increasingly moving, almost painfully so. When Emily spoke of loving George “forever and ever,” my knowledge of what was to come brought me deep sorrow. No matter that I was in prison, watching amateur actors with backgrounds that might have evoked pity or fear. I was in Grover’s Corners once again.

Cover art from a 1961 paperback edition of OUR TOWN

The outside world intruded upon the production in one way that wouldn’t have been possible in the cloistered environs of an auditorium. With the performance commencing at 6:50 and coming down, intermissionless, at about 8:50, the wall of west-facing windows provided a natural illumination that, at first, overrode the institutional lighting. The actors were lit up by blazing light during the time movie-makers call “magic hour” when the sun approaches the horizon, casting a particularly rich, orange glow. As the play progressed, Grover’s Corners shifted from daylight to magic hour and then, by act three, as darkness took over the prison yard, the train tracks, and the river, the inner light became only the unvaried white of fluorescent bulbs. Nature had receded leaving only the cold surroundings of the visitors room, brighter than a wet funeral afternoon, but harsh in its own way, and surely as unforgiving.

Beyond nature’s magic, Kate Powers achieved her own coup de theatre, less instantly startling than the one employed by David Cromer in his rightly hailed Our Town, but one organic to the venue and this cast, and deeply, quietly powerful. As act two bled directly into act three, as the wedding seating was shifted to become the gravestones, nine men, inmates, dressed in green work shirts, green work pants and heavy boots (the other actors wore costumes that were a rough approximation of the play’s original period), made their way in slow motion up to the top riser. There they proceeded to seat themselves in one long row and stare out at us, unmoving, for the entire act. These were of course, within the context of the play, more gravestones, more of the deceased. But as these nine men sat and stared out, unspeaking, I could not help but see them as prisoners and actors all at once, locked away for crimes I knew nothing of, for how long I did not know. Were their lives over, as in the play? Was the play itself their escape, or even a sign of their eventual redemption? Their stares gave away nothing. No threat, no sadness. No heaven, no hell. Perhaps those in the audience with deep faith saw hope, perhaps those who believe only in this life saw nothing but emptiness. I saw Wilder by way of Beckett,  I saw beauty and the abyss, and I saw superb theatre.

They stay here while the earth part of ‘em burns away and burns out;
and all that time they slowly get indifferent.

*   *   *

It’s worth pointing out that Sing Sing is one of five prisons where Rehabilitation Through the Arts works, and that there are prison arts programs in many places around the world, and have been for many years. I have read about them often, and shared their stories with others through social media. Nothing I’ve written should suggest that this experience is singular or unique – it is simply the first time it ceased to be an abstract idea for me, and became reality.

I’m going to be grappling with the experience of seeing Our Town at Sing Sing for some time, I expect, because I have to process so much more than I do when simply seeing a professional production. I probably have to learn more as well. Even if I see another theatre production in a prison, it cannot possibly have the same impact as this one did, this first foray, ever so slightly, ever so briefly, behind prison walls, into a human drama far greater than any work of fiction can encompass.  But as someone who attends theatre relentlessly, and who at times despairs for it, this was one of those evenings that reminds me why theatre is my life’s work, and more than simply make-believe.

If you haven’t realized it at this point, the italicized sections that punctuate this essay are all dialogue from Our Town itself. They stood out in bold relief when they were spoken on Friday night. Even though they weren’t emphasized or called out in any way, they took me away from the play in startling flashes with meaning beyond what even Wilder might have imagined, given the setting, and the speakers. Even by accident or coincidence, great works reveal the world to us in new ways each time we encounter them, even – or perhaps most especially – behind bars.

My, wasn’t life awful – and wonderful.