Osimous Theatre's Our Town - I Am Escaped With The Skin Of My Teeth
Sunday, October 05, 2014
“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.”
Emily Webb, Act III, Our Town, Thorton Wilder
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| Helianthus annuus |
As a child I used to
look at illustrated world maps and I would notice a quaint Mexican wearing a
sombrero sleeping siesta leaning against (to his spiny peril) a saguaro. There
was a man in leather short pants over Germany
and a woman wearing a conical hat planting rice in China. And in my Buenos
Aires it would be a gaucho on horseback on the Pampa. Everybody had their place.
Exotic in Argentina was la Cochinchina (Vietnam). I remember
having one of my Argentine cousins asking me in around 1964 if black people had
a smell all their own. This same cousin, a year ago asked me how I could tell
the difference between the Japanese and the Chinese. I told him, “You can tell
the difference. When you cannot then they are Korean.”
In the late 50s in Austin, Texas Richard
Mosby was the only black student (he was a day student) in my St. Edward’s High
School class. The only other black man obvious to most of us was basketball
player Oscar Robertson. Robertson was in fact my hero. In school we had no idea
of the meaning of the word and perhaps we had never even heard it, Kosher.
Everybody had their
place.
But my world in Austin was not one of
isolation from a world about to change. One day, perhaps it was in 1957 Brother
Dunstan Bowles, C.S.C. entered our English class (we did not know we were being
taught drama) and told us he was all excited. He had discovered a young
playwright called Harold Pinter.
Brother Dunstan went
on during that school year to tell us about more about Harold Pinter, Geoffrey
Chaucer, the Greek dramatists and his absolute fave, Thornton Wilder.
While I was always
attracted to theatre and acting I was never able to memorize even small poems
without undue labours. Acting was out. I have satisfied my theatrical bug by
going to the theatre.
In the last 10 years
in Vancouver I
have attended a lot of it. Two plays stand out by sheer cathartic jolts to my
inners. One was with Bill Dow and Main
Street’s production, directed by Stephen Malloy,
of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glenn Ross which I saw in November 2008. My friend John Lekich and I were in the very room where all action happened. If we hadn’t
been careful we could have been stomped on by the rapidly moving actors. We
were immersed in the play. We left in shock.
The other cathartic
event happened Saturday night at an Osimous Theatre production of Thornton
Wilder’s Our Town at the First Christian Reformed Church.
Brother Dunstan
particularly stressed to us that although the ancient Greek audience of Greek
tragedies knew what was going to happen, that knowledge did not prevent that
act of purification of the soul that comes with catharsis.
The Osimous Theatre
production of Our Town had us in comfy sofas and chairs surrounding all the
action in the middle of the church. There were a couple of tables with chairs
where the two families of the play, the Gibbs and the Webbs had their meals, a
couple of ladders, and hanging strings of lights that had a multi- purpose. The
actors before and during the two intervals freely talked with us so we soon
felt part of it all.
Had my wife, daughter
and granddaughter, 12, left right after the second act we could have gone home
with smiles and the satisfaction of having lived vicariously a simpler life, in
which races did not mix, marriage consisted in heterosexual couples who might
never divorce, and culture such as ballet, music, and even theatre were out of
the picture. It was a life much like the one I had as a child when the ice man
or the milkman came in a horse-drawn carriage and, yes, Mexican’s slept lazy
siestas under saguaros.
Thornton Wilder’s Our
Town does not prepare you (even if you have seen the play before) for that
third act. It is a third act, a terrible, heart wrenching, depressing third act,
where young people might not be much affected. Death to them is in a far away
future.
In that third act,
Emily Webb played by the dead serious but lovely Lauren Jackson utters
these lines:
1. I can’t bear it. They’re so young and
beautiful. Why did they ever have to get old? Mama, I’m here. I’m grown up. I
love you all, everything.—I can’t look at everything hard enough.
2. Do human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every
minute?
If you add to that this
said by Emily Webb’s mother (dead) to her daughter (dead) when Emily asks why
she should not re-live past memories:
That’s not the only reason why you shouldn’t do
it, Emily. When you’ve been here longer you’ll see that our life here is to
forget all that, and think only of what’s ahead, and be ready for what’s ahead.
When you’ve been here longer you will understand.
I cannot think of
anything sadder than the idea of forgetting one’s life. But as I watched Emily,
the dead one, in frustration trying to tell her mother, the live one, to notice
those ordinary (and wonderful by that very fact) events I understood that at
least for this old man, 72, it is not too late, while I am still alive, to
remember, savour all those ordinary, and extraordinary moments of my life and
of my life shared.
My granddaughter
Lauren, turned to me after the second act and said, “There are two coincidences
here.” “What?” I asked her. “Emily Gibbs is called Lauren like me and we saw
this play as a film only two weeks ago.”
And if Lauren is this
observant then she will live her life fully and this Osimous production of Our
Town will become a memory not to be forgotten, at least while she is alive on
this planet. I will take almost as fact Wilder’s intimation that there is an
eternal in all of us that transcends even the stars.
The play isn't all somber all of the time. How the actors imitate noise effects (surprising what it takes to replicate a mechanical push mower or the delivery of a newspaper) is fascinating. But just watching Dawn Petten, Mrs. Webb, become a chicken is very funny or watching how she cries when seeing her daughter, Lauren Jackson as Emily, about to marry is almost funny.
The play isn't all somber all of the time. How the actors imitate noise effects (surprising what it takes to replicate a mechanical push mower or the delivery of a newspaper) is fascinating. But just watching Dawn Petten, Mrs. Webb, become a chicken is very funny or watching how she cries when seeing her daughter, Lauren Jackson as Emily, about to marry is almost funny.
That this big play in
a little church did this to me and to us attests to Osimous Artistic Director,
Bob Frazer’s goal:
… to
create theatre that makes me passionate in my everyday life - theatre that gets
inside my head and stays with me long after the curtain drops. I don’t care
whether the play makes me angry or happy or sad – just as long as it makes me
feel something. I want us to always look beyond the expected and push for
something more, something better. I want to create inspired new works and I
want to breathe intimacy into classical works. I want us to be explosive yet
gentle, raw and honest, but most importantly real. I want audiences to
re-experience theatre – to live each moment with us from beginning to end and
leave forever changed. That’s what I want - for my fellow ensemble members, for
osimous and for our audiences.
Thornton Wilder reads from Act III
Potato weather for sure
Of Memory - Jorge Luís Borges & Thornton Wilder
Thornton Wilder reads from Act III
Potato weather for sure
Of Memory - Jorge Luís Borges & Thornton Wilder
