(SOUTH ORANGE, NJ) -- Kent Place School presents Our Town by Thornton Wilder February 27-28 at South Orange Performing Arts Center (SOPAC). Described by Edward Albee as "the greatest American play ever written," Our Town presents the small town of Grover's Corners in three acts: "Daily Life," "Love and Marriage" and "Death and Eternity."
Narrated by a stage manager and performed with minimal props and sets, the play depicts the simple daily lives of the Webb and Gibbs families as their children fall in love, marry, and eventually – in one of the most famous scenes in American theatre – die. Thornton Wilder's final word on how he wanted his play performed is an invaluable addition to the American stage and to the libraries of theatre lovers internationally.
Our Town opened on Broadway at Henry Miller's Theatre on February 4, 1938, produced and directed by Jed Harris. The original cast featured Frank Craven, Martha Scott and John Craven. The play returned to Broadway four times: in 1944 starring Marc Connelly; in 1969 starring Henry Fonda; in 1988 starring Spalding Gray; and in 2002 starring Paul Newman. The play won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 1988 revival won the 1989 Tony and Drama Desk Awards for Best Revival.
Performances take place Friday, February 27 at 7:30pm and Saturday, February 28 at 7:30pm. Tickets are available for purchase online. South Orange Performing Arts Center (SOPAC) is located at One SOPAC Way in South Orange, New Jersey.
The show is directed by Keri Lesnik P ’27, Upper School Theater teacher. It will run approximately two hours with one 15-minute intermission, and is appropriate for all ages.
The cast includes: Mia Ramos ’26, Cecília Hirawat ’26, Kendi Littletree ’27, Eva Obalde ’29, Vivienne Vengroff ’27, Hannah Kelley ’26, Emily Foerster ’27, Ana Monteiro ’27, Sydney Chen ’28, Arabella Crofton ’28, Gita Shirhattikar ’28, Annabelle Lesnik ’27, Nicole Hoffman ’28, Sarah Mattle ’28, Austen Fiala ’28, and Caroline Slattery ’28.
The stage management team includes: Gracen Hill ’27, Samantha Heck ’27, Sophia DeFoe ’27, and Suzy Salazar ’29; logo design by Kendi Littletree ’27; cast headshots by Ani Mendieta-Frost ’26.
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) is the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes for both drama (Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth) and fiction (The Bridge of San Luis Rey). He collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on Shadow of a Doubt, hiked the Alps with the heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney, received a bronze star for his service in World War II, and was credited with discovering Orson Welles. He was also a much-loved teacher, letter-writer (especially with Gertrude Stein), and public speaker – in four languages. Hello, Dolly! is based on his play The Matchmaker. Read more about his exciting life below.
Thornton Wilder, born in Madison, Wisconsin, and educated at Yale and Princeton, was an accomplished novelist and playwright whose works explore the connection between the commonplace and the cosmic dimensions of human experience. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of his seven novels, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, and his next-to-last novel, The Eighth Day, received the National Book Award (1968). Two of his four major plays garnered Pulitzer Prizes: Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1943). His play The Matchmaker ran on Broadway for 486 performances (1955-1957), Mr. Wilder’s Broadway record, and was later adapted into the record-breaking musical Hello, Dolly!
Mr. Wilder also enjoyed enormous success with many other forms of the written and spoken word, among them translation, acting, opera librettos, lecturing, teaching and film (his screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 psycho-thriller Shadow of a Doubt remains a classic to this day). Letter writing held a central place in Mr. Wilder’s life, and since his death, three volumes of his letters have been published.
Mr. Wilder’s many honors include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Book Committee’s Medal for Literature. On April 17, 1997, the centenary of his birth, the US Postal Service unveiled the Thornton Wilder 32-cent stamp in Hamden, Connecticut, his official address after 1930 and where he died on December 7, 1975.
