Our Town: Reimagining a Classic at Asolo Rep

By Ryan G. Van Cleave | December 2021

Now that patrons are feeling more comfortable with COVID-19 safety protocols in place, people are eager to return to the pleasures of live theatre. Asolo Rep is ready to deliver with a 2021-2022 season that is a welcome reclamation of American identity. 

Looking at the lineup of shows, it’s highlight after highlight: the premiere of the new musical Knoxville from the same writing team that created Ragtime; the raucous outbreak-comedy about vaccinations and the anti-vax movement, Eureka Day, which was created by a witty New College graduate; and there’s Hood, a musical about the world’s sexiest thief and the realization that not every damsel needs rescuing. But no season is fully complete without a new take on a beloved classic, and to fill that space this season is Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1938.

Producing Artistic Director Michael Donald Edwards had been thinking about including Our Town in the Asolo Rep lineup since before the pandemic. When he brought it up post-pandemic, people responded quite positively from the start. It makes sense, since Wilder is evergreen—always relevant, always in fashion.

After all, Our Town isn’t a dramatic piece of poetry. It’s not opera. And though Wilder was a masterful novelist—he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1927 and the National Book Award for a novel in 1968—he specifically chose theatre as the medium for this story. “He wants it to occur in a theatre,” Edwards explains, “where we all vibe in the room together with the story being told. Wilder wants the emphasis on the people and what they’re seeing—not on scenery, not on anything conventional to do with the theatre. Instead, he wants an empty theatre, a space that takes everything out that is unnecessary, so that you have a charged experience of being in this room together.” 

It’s the perfect place for us all to come back to, because when we actually get to see it (January 14 – March 26, 2022, with previews January 12 – 13), it’ll be the first time in two years that we’ve gathered to see a live play. “We have achingly missed it,” Edwards adds.

For years, Edwards has tried to land West Coast director Desdemona Chiang, but the schedules never quite worked out. Until now. “She has a brilliant mind, and she responded to the idea.” Asolo Rep is known for finding the best artists available and providing them a supportive environment to do their very best work. Chiang is creating her own fresh vision for the story.

“Grover’s Corners is set up as a small, kind of mundane town, and the play talks about how it’s uninteresting and unremarkable,” Chiang says. “Yet, at the end of the play, we dive into the issues of humanity and the universe and life and death. I think that’s why it’s so poignant now, coming out of the pandemic. It reminds us not to take our lives for granted. The everyday, the mundane—getting up for breakfast, paying the milkman—this is our life. That’s what life actually is. To overlook the small moments in search of something ambitiously larger means you’re actually missing out on your life. And that can be a hard reckoning.”

Some people might consider Our Town to be a sleepy nostalgia play, but Chiang disagrees. “It’s actually gutsy and very pointed. That’s the production I’m chasing. It should be a punch in the gut, and that’s what I want to deliver.”

Chiang is excited to be in Florida for Christmas and work with the Asolo Rep for the first time. But she’s even more eager to transform this classic into something potent that hits audiences in just the right ways. “Theatre is meant as a vehicle of communication, and that’s about messaging. A play, for me, is successful if I’m changed afterwards and I’m activated to do something.”

What does she hope to activate with her interpretation of Our Town? “When you think about the times Our Town is produced, it tends to be after moments of great trauma. After 9/11, the play was done all over. I think it sometimes takes that kind of great disruption to remind us not to waste what we have or take it for granted.” 

Edwards echoes that idea, saying, “If we race through everything and feel like we’re on this very tight schedule and agenda, we fail to actually notice everything that’s important about life until it’s too late. It seemed to be a very important idea to be reminded of this again.”

Edwards notes that all the arts organizations have agreed to rigorous health and safety protocols to keep live theatre safe. While Asolo Rep has done lots of outdoor and online events in the past two years, it doesn’t quite create the same level of connection between artists and audiences as in an actual theatre. 

“Ever since the first hunters staggered back off the plains and sat around the campfire to tell the story of the hunt, we’ve been doing versions of this for 10,000 years,” he says. “We still need to gather around the campfire and hear a great story because it’s such a profound human need. We don’t build community without it. We don’t develop empathy without it. We don’t develop our imaginations without it. We’ve got to have it.” 

With the new Asolo Rep season, once again, we do.

For more information on Our Town at Asolo Rep, please visit www.asolorep.org or call 941.351.8000.