"Curtain Up…"

Well, if there were curtains in theaters anymore, Their Town's is officially up. We opened last night - good crowd, wonderfully receptive, thrilling that they actually laughed at the jokes! As one of the actors, Leah Klocko, and I discussed after the show, you get so close to the material and lose so much perspective during rehearsals, you forget that the play is funny.

Ok, there was some questionable set stuff ("I hate that lamp post!" the director Adam Kukic told me after the show - it's some sort of big ol' Christmas candle), but hey, this is theater on a shoestring. What's more important is that the ensemble was great - I feel like I know the script by heart at this point, and they had their characters and lines nailed. Particularly exciting to me is that the character of Thornton Wilder - a statue in Grover's Corners' park - really works. Todd Betker plays him with a lot of humor and affection, and his mugging made the audience laugh. Poor Todd wears a suit and hat painted gray, gray face makeup, and gray gloves, so he's pretty hot by the end of the play. But anything for art, right? Originally, the script called for Wilder not to look like a statue, and to play various other parts, too - a la the Stage Manager in Our Town. But it was Adam's idea to have him fully "statuesque," and it was a great call - I intend to write it into the script after the run.

"Two Weeks and Counting…"

Two more weeks until Their Town goes up, and I continue to tweak scenes and lines here and there. Nothing very serious, but a number of small things that need to be "touched up," rather like applying little dabs of concealing makeup rather than performing major cosmetic surgery. For example, I discovered at rehearsal last night that my main character, Margaret, doesn't have any reaction when the statue of Thornton Wilder tells her he's gay. All the times that I've heard those lines read over the past three years, and I never caught that - it only became apparent when I saw it staged. So I patched that up this morning. She's a polite New Englander, so luckily, didn't need much of a reaction.

The actors are a strong bunch, and since their names aren't on the promotional copy (there were too many to fit, and the play wasn't completely cast when the posters were printed), I feel the need to acknowledge them here: Todd Betker, Lou Bojarski, John Feightner, Diana Ifft, Leah Klocko, Jaime Slavinsky, Paige Spara, Joe Stitman, and Scott van de Mark.

"His Town"

Today I posted an item at my other blog, "The Queerest Places," on Thornton Wilder's grave in Hamden, Connecticut - which is, coincidentally, the hometown of my brother-in-law. I'll have to ask him if he's ever been to Wilder's grave. So check it out when you get a chance.

Lots of activity coming up around the Pride Theater Festival - a meeting for all playwrights and directors this weekend, then auditions the following weekend. I'll have much more to report on soon, as we head into the real deal - rehearsals!

"An Our Town Aside"

Our Town, it seems, was recently turned into an opera by none other than Ned Rorem, an openly gay composer. According to the press, two other queer composers - Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein - tried to get Thornton Wilder to sign on to an Our Town opera during his lifetime, but the playwright refused. (It's interesting that all these queers were enamored of such a heterosexual play.) But Tappan Wilder, Thornton's nephew and executor of his estate, gave his blessing to the Rorem opera. You can read more about it at Rorem's website.

Our Town, the opera

What's It All About? A Synopsis of Their Town

Margaret Craig, a single mother who has been struggling to support her 16-year-old daughter, has recently landed a good, solid job: she's been elected town clerk of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire - of Our Town fame. At the same time, the town's new, young mayor, Joe Hersey, who ran on the same ticket with Margaret, wants to further his own career and aid the economy of his beleaguered town by garnering publicity in a sensational way - by performing a legal marriage ceremony for two of the town's lesbian citizens, longtime residents Ginny Gibbs and Eliza Webb.

But the town council president, Lyle Hawkins starts a "Take Back Our Town" movement that threatens Margaret's new job if she doesn't obey the state law against same-sex marriage. Worried about her job and certain that gay marriage has nothing to do with her, Margaret refuses to issue the license. Joe, however, devises another plan, with the help of a gay-rights attorney, to file a lawsuit against the state, using other, more "professional" couples than Ginny and Eliza. The two women turn to Joe's gay brother, Charlie, an out-of-town lawyer, to help them win the right to marry in their town.

But in the meantime, Margaret is drawn deeper and more unwillingly into the issue by a personal crisis that brings home the political issue of equal marriage rights. Leading Margaret in her coming-to-terms process is a statue come-to-life of Thornton Wilder, author of Our Town and creator of Grover's Corners - who was himself, Margaret learns, a closeted homosexual.

On Thornton Wilder and His Closet

Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) was born in Madison, Wis., a town of only 18,000 residents at that time - the typical sort of "our town" he later immortalized in his Pulitzer Prize-winning play.

Thornton Wilder performing as the Stage Manager in Our Town, 1950

Financial difficulties (Thornton's father was part-owner of an unsuccessful newspaper) drove Wilder Senior to seek a new, more lucrative career, and in 1906, he succeeded in persuading President Taft, an old college friend, to appoint him consul general of Hong Kong. The family moved there briefly, but Thornton's mother didn't like life abroad and moved back to the United States with her children. Thornton spent the rest of his adolescence in another small town, Berkeley, Calif.

Young Wilder attended Thacher, a boys' boarding school, where he was taunted by classmates as a "freak." At Thacher, Wilder discovered his love of the theater and delighted in the school's dramatic club. But when he was cast as Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilder's father - fearing the meaning of his son's effeminate ways - stepped in and forbade him to play female roles. Painfully aware of his difference from other boys, Wilder early on described himself as "a queer pupil" with a "queer walk."

As a teenager in Berkeley, Wilder began writing stories and plays. He confessed dramatically in his journal that if he wasn't writing he had "no right to breathe." In college, he continued to pursue both writing and the theater, first at Oberlin, where he wrote poetry to a favorite male professor, and then at Yale, where he became infatuated with a young actor. "Sheer genius and poetry," Wilder wrote to describe Gareth Hughes. "And when his glasses are off the divinest thing to look upon that I have ever seen."

In the way of many closeted queers, Wilder was intensely homophobic. He once commented to Gore Vidal that "a writer ought not to commit himself to a homosexual situation of the domestic sort" because it would damage his career. As a result, Wilder's love life consisted mostly of infatuations, often with actors (including the young Montgomery Clift), and brief sexual encounters (most famously with writer Samuel Steward). Wilder would have hated my play Their Town, which addresses his sexuality. He believed that to speculate on the sexuality of famous writers was simply to "whip up a prurient oh-ha! in millions of people."

How I Decided to Write Their Town

...And Why You Should Care

I wrote the first draft of my play Their Town in late 2004, after reading and re-reading a lot of classic American drama, including Thornton Wilder's Our Town. In the past, I had written fiction and nonfiction exclusively, and was just starting to dip into playwriting.

Doing some online research on Wilder's play, I learned that Our Town is produced on some stage in this country every single day of the year. It struck me as ironic that the most-produced play in the U.S. - considered so quintessentially "American" that many of the productions are in high schools and small-town theaters - was written by a closeted gay man. (More on Wilder in another post.)

At the same time that I was re-reading Our Town, the straight mayors of San Francisco and New Paltz, N.Y., were making headlines on same-sex marriage rights; the clerk of Sandoval County, N.M., began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples; and Massachusetts became the first state to extend marriage rights to gay people. There were numerous news stories about how (heterosexual) town clerks suddenly had to deal with unforeseen problems - like creating gender-free marriage licenses, readying their offices for a possible barrage of marriage license requests, or having to follow a law they personally didn't agree with. The situation seemed ripe for drama. I wrote the play first as a one-act of about 20 pages, called "Our Town 2," but my very smart peer writing group, SPEC (short for "Screenwriters and Playwrights Eat and Critique"), said it needed to be much longer. And that's how Their Town was born.

Three years ago, I remember feeling an urgency to finish the play and get it "out there," thinking that the topic of same-sex marriage would be stale in a short time. But here we are in 2007, and marriage rights are still a hot-button issue. Massachusetts remains the only state to grant marriage rights to same-sex couples.

This blog will chronicle the path of Their Town as it moves closer to its first production in June 2007 at the Pittsburgh Pride Theater Festival, a program of Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company.