LWT
Long Wharf Theatre decided to make its revived version of Our Town look more like our town — in part by casting Myra Lucretia Taylor and others in roles once filled exclusively by white actors.
Taylor heads the cast of the latest revival of Hamden-born playwright Thornton Wilder’s 1938 masterpiece Our Townas the orchestrating and fairly omniscient Stage Manager. The revival kicks off Long Wharf’s 50th season on Oct. 8.
“It’s traditionally done with an all-white cast,” said Gordon Edelstein, Long Wharf’s artistic director. “Truth is, our town doesn’t look like that anymore.”
Taylor said in an interview that she thinks Wilder would be very pleased with a female and African-American Stage Manager along with the diverse cast that the Long Wharf has assembled. Because he was writing a play that is universal, about one race only, she said: the human race.
“We are all one,” Taylor remarked.
Although Grover’s Corners will not suddenly sprout a view of East Rock and the young lovers George and Emily will not likely be dropping by for a pre-nuptual pie at Frank Pepe’s, all the 22 speaking parts are Long Wharf alums. (Click here for a “meet” the cast” roster of the performers, who include Namumba Santos, a sixth grader at the King Robinson Inter-District Magnet School (pictured on the far right), Elm Shakespeare Company Artistic Director James Andreassi, and new Wooster Squarite Steve Routman, who starred at the Long Wharf in a Steve Martin-written revival of The Underpants last year.)
Taylor’s star turn as a female Stage Manager is not a first. She reported that Geraldine Fitzgerald was the first female Stage Manager at Williamstown Theater Festival back in 1971. The play has been done with diverse casts in other venues.
“We are all one,” Taylor added. She noted that while Wilder portrayed his mythical Grover’s Corners as a largely white New Hampershire-ish town at the turn of the 20th century, it is at heart about the basic and universal human experiences: getting born and getting to know who you are, loving and marrying and working, and then, a great deal to do with dying.
“Everything we’re going through has been gone through by millions of people before. It’s a tiny micro and macro [play]; it’s quite comforting,” Taylor added.
And comforting in a very specific way for Taylor, a 1981 Yale College grad who is performing in this play for the first time. She was close to her parents, her mom a pediatric nurse and particularly her dad, who died in April. She described him as a man who came up from the South to New York City where he drove a bus for the MTA and then moved up in the ranks to become a supervisor.
“He was very good at his job. Solid, middle class people,” she said, just like the unheralded ordinary folks in Our Town.
She leafed through her well-marked and post-it-ed playscript (pictured) and quoted, as personally meaningful, one of the many famous passages about the fragility and preciousness of the quotidian that permeate the play.
It occurs towards the end of the third and final act when Emily, now dead, insists on going back to spend one regular day with her family, but finds what she experiences nearly unbearable:
Emily: … Good-by, Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners … Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking … and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths … and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. (She looks word the Stage Manager and asks abruptly through her tears:) … Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?
Stage Manager: No. (Pause) The saints and poets, maybe — they do some.
“I feel I got a cosmic break because I’m an actor,” Taylor said, adding thespians as another category to Wilder’s saints and poets, maybe.
“I miss my dad, but we saw [and talked with] each other and the rest we can sort out later — and this play reminds me to keep going. You can’t realize each [ed: emphasis added] moment, of course. We’d be insane. When we have a moment of time, we should [take it and absorb it]. I’m grateful to the play.”
Bringing Our Town To Ferguson
Our Town cast photo.
Asked whether the play might have local or topical references, Taylor said the script follows exactly, nothing added and nothing dropped, from the original Wilder play.
That doesn’t mean that the Stage Manager and the the other actors don’t bring the contemporary moment to what they do in Grover’s Corners. In that regard Taylor mentioned the recent racial incidents in Ferguson, Missouri.
“I’m kind of tired of hearing about race. There’s only one race. The human race. Enough! Cut through it. Ferguson is not what happened to those black people, but those human beings.
“I’m not naive. Discrimination happens because of what people look like. I’m a human being. That’s what I respond to. It makes me amazingly grateful to do this play [as a human being], not my gender or the melanin content of my skin.
“We are all one.”
