Our Town
Director's Notes
It is always a privilege working on this piece. Our Town, the opera by Ned Rorem and JD (Sandy) McClatchy, is based on the seminal play of the same name first produced in 1938. The play was an instant classic, revolutionizing theatre and theatrical practices on an international basis. Not long after its world premiere, it became the first American play produced in the Soviet Union and has been seen in multiple countries in various languages. It is believed to be the most produced play ever, even to this day.
One of the reasons for the play’s popularity is the timeless storyline. Most plays of this period dealt with upper-class people leading challenging, complicated existences in their mansions or penthouses. Along comes Wilder with a play about normal, mostly working-class people in a small town in New Hampshire (based on Portsmouth, NH, near to where the famous writers retreat, the McDowell Colony, is located in which Wilder wrote a large part of the play). On the surface, the play is about life and death, love, community and the common, everyday occurrences that make us all one society. But it is about so much more. It is about the importance of every minute of every life and appreciating those around you. As Emily says in the play, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”
Wilder spent a formative portion of his teenage years in a boarding school in China. He felt lost and not really seen when he went out into the communities in which he was living. He felt the dehumanization of living in a society where no one looked anyone else in the eyes. It is a feeling that would influence his entire body of work and a subject matter he would frequently discuss throughout his life with friends and colleagues the caliber of Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and the entirety of the Lost Generation. He never married and one never hears much about intimate relationships with others (although Samuel Steward, a college professor, wrote in his autobiography that he had had sexual relations with Wilder but this has been disputed). A close friend claimed that, “His (Wilder’s) interest in women was unshakably non-sexual.” His family was evangelical on one side and deeply religious on the other, yet he was a self-proclaimed Agnostic. His mother and father claimed to not have ever been deeply in love even though they had four children (actually five—Wilder had a twin who was stillborn), his father once wrote to his mother that the worst thing they ever did was to get married. He received a Bachelors degree from Yale and a Masters from Princeton. He also received three Pulitzer Prizes: in 1927 for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, in 1938 for Our Town, and in 1942 for the play The Skin of Our Teeth. He had several collections of one-act plays, poetry, and many other plays including The Matchmaker from which the musical Hello, Dolly! was created.
After his death, his sister, Isabel (named after his mother), took over the responsibility of his estate which included all of his works. Countless composers begged for the rights for Our Town but all were denied. After Isabel passed away, the librettist Sandy McClatchy gained the rights and convinced the great, distinctly American composer Ned Rorem to take on the composing responsibilities. The opera was specifically written for young artists to perform and had its world premiere in 2006 with the Indiana University Opera Theatre. Sandy, of necessity, eliminated a number of the townspeople from the opera (it would have been a six hour evening if he hadn’t) but kept the major characters and maintained their charm, pain, and joy. The opera, like the play, is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, the inimitable strength of women, and the desperately needed humaneness needed to survive in a world seemingly at odds with itself.
A word about the character of the Stage Manager: I see him as a guide, spiritual or otherwise, through this life and into whatever the next plain of existence holds. He is compassionate and emotionally non-committal. An enigmatic yet sympathetic and oddly human character.
I would like to dedicate my work on this production to my mother who left us in November of 2024. She was an actor, fine artist, pianist, dancer, and unique and creative mother, off of whom I constantly bounced production and character ideas. She is missed.
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—Ken Cazan