The Pioneer Players and the Platteville of Performing and Digital Arts closed out the 2023 year with Thorton Wilder’s “Our Town” in the Blackbox Theatre in the CFA.
“Our Town” is a Pulitzer prize-winning three-act play that shows the audience the lives of the families living in the small, fictional town of Grover’s Corners. The play has limited sets and props, so the audience only focuses on the two main families, the Gibbs and the Webbs.
The play follows George Gibbs and Emily Webb, two childhood friends and next door neighbors as the pair goes through their lives, slowly falling in love, getting married and dying.
The show is narrated by a character simply known as the Stage Manager.
Director Dr. Ann Dillon Farrelly said that the play serves as “a warning to all of us to see the brevity and fragility of life and pay attention to what’s important before our time on Earth is through.”
For UW-Platteville’s adaptation of the show, Dr. Farrelly wanted to answer two questions that have always intrigued her; What happened to Emily and George’s second child, and who is the Stage Manager? The production team decided to connect these two questions by making the Stage Manager George and Emily’s second child.
The Pioneer Players will open their 2024 season with Andrew Lippa’s “The Addams Family,” which was adapted from Marshall Brickman’s and Rick Elice’s book of the same name, running April 5 through April 14. The semester will then end with the One Act Festival, running May 2 through May 4.
