I’ve been in Our Town five different times in my acting career, from college to community to summer stock to regional over a twenty year span. I have played or understudied nearly every adult male character.
Very often I wound up in the Act III chorus of the Dead, where I’d usually doze off in my chair – though I never missed my cue. I’ve seen two separate productions using Bunraku-style puppetry. This play is in my blood.
So in retrospect it seems odd that it took twenty years and five productions for the idea of a zombie parody to sink in.
Our Town #5 was in 2010 at Everyman Theatre in Baltimore. I played Howie and Sam. Most of the children were played by students of the Baltimore School of the Arts. I always had a juvenile sense of humor, so we got along. I wanted to write something to make them laugh, I had a lot of time to myself in the dressing room. I don’t remember just what the seed for the idea was, but I wrote a short sketch and the kids laughed, so I kept on writing.
[adsanity_rotating align=”aligncenter” time=”10″ group_id=”1455″ /]
The muse rarely visits me, but this time it came to stay, and eventually I had a complete one-act play, and the story took me in directions I hadn’t foreseen. I still hear the voices of the Everyman cast when I read the play (Wil Love, Emily Townley, Bruce Norris, Morgan Duncan, Julia Proctor, Matt Schliegh, and a host of others too numerous to mention)
Even though I wrote with no intention of it being produced, I wanted to stay true to Wilder’s concepts and themes, though it occurred to me (somewhat retroactively) that he never dealt with the suffering of the bereaved. The Webbs lost both their children.
Doc Gibbs probably lived alone in his big old house after his kids moved away and his wife died, and then couldn’t save his own daughter-in-law. How do they go on? And what if, paralleling Emily in the real play, some zombies tried to re-visit their everyday lives? What if I promoted a few incidental or mentioned-but-not-seen characters up to protagonists/antagonists? What if we addressed the complicated economics of theatre, and the unceasing drive to monetize every single aspect of contemporary life?
I kept re-reading it over the years and thought it was a pretty solid piece. I am still surprised by its cleverness… well, at least I thought it was clever. Then, typical of me, it sat in my “Plays I Wrote” folder on my desktop for nearly a decade before I mentioned it to a friend, who wound up producing and directing it last summer at Providence Fringe; alas, I wasn’t able to see it though I heard it was good. But if I win a Tony someday, Dan Bourque, I hereby pledge to thank you in my speech.
