playbill vip

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

                                                                                                                             --Thornton Wilder

Rolling out of the pandemic year, our Mills theater company emerged scarred but definitely not broken. Luckier than most performers, we have been able to look back on a one weekend run of the super-fun Legally Blonde, followed by a radio play version of The Crucible and then the totally Zoom Addams Family musical.

This year, we wanted to ease into the notion of full sets and big crews to produce a classic, Thornton Wilder's Our Town, following the exciting outdoor premiere of Athena's Island. Although Our Town is deliberately without a fancy set (Wilder wanted to present a timeless and simple-to-produce show), it is said that somewhere in the world at every moment, this play is being perfomed live. 

Our Town is a brilliant piece of Modernist Literature. First performed in 1938, it broke the fourth wall from the opening lines of the Stage Manager (Kaylie Lee)--essentially a "Ghost of Christmas Future" of sorts. The three-act format divides the text into Act 1: Daily Life, Act 2: Love and Marriage, and Act 3: Death and Eternity. These subtexts sound more like the chapters in a progressive rock B-side, but they resonate with an existential exploration of life and what truly matters when all is said and done.

Thornton Wilder grew up living around the world. Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1897, he was a product of the Midwestern town. Yet, just before the great 1906 Earthquake and Fire of San Francisco, he and his family sailed through the Golden Gate to China (his father would work for there many years), where Thorton would spend a great deal of his childhood. He would return to the the Bay Area, however, and live in Berkeley--graduating from Berkeley High School in 1915. During his Berkeley days, the young Thornton fell in love with Drama, experiencing Classical Greek and Roman Drama at the then  brand new Greek Theater, built by William Randolph Hearst. 

Wilder then attended Oberlan College, then Yale, where he would earn a Bachelor's Degree. He would then travel to Rome to study archeology and Italian, then he would earn an MA in French at Princeton.