Our Town
at Dominion High School

Reviewed on December 1, 2018

Kara Murri
McLean High School
Submitted for publication to Cappies News

It's an unremarkable town with unremarkable people that have relatively unremarkable lives, yet from within this mediocrity emerges a certainly remarkable story of the universal experiences of life and death. Displaying subtlety and charm, Dominion High School accomplished no easy task in producing the iconic narrative "Our Town."

Regarded as an American classic, Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" was highly unconventional when published in 1938. Wilder's play stripped away the embellishments of contemporary theatre and focused on human elements. Its minimalistic approach to the timeless themes of life, love, and death still retained warmth, crucial to storytelling. "Our Town" was first performed in New Jersey, then Massachusetts before moving to New York City. Wilder received the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and since then, there have been countless adaptations and revivals, including television versions, musical adaptations, and a revival that won the 1989 Tony Award for Best Revival.

Set in the early 20th century, the three-act narrative follows Emily Webb and George Gibbs as they grow up together, fall in love with each other, and are separated after Emily's tragic death. The play focuses on the larger community of Grover's Corners, as well as George and Emily. Maintaining individuality while establishing a common identity, Dominion High School's cast effectively showcased the ordinary in a touching manner.

Josh Thomas as George Gibbs and Eleanor Walter as Emily Webb both capably handled their roles as the twosome journeyed through daily life, marriage, and death together. Thomas's consistently high energy complemented Walter's more subdued, sensitive performance throughout Acts One and Two. After Emily's death, Thomas completed his character's development from teenage baseball addict to heartbroken widower with changed vocal intonation and physicality. In Emily's final moments of the third act, Walter's performance possessed emotional intensity. Especially when combined with the scene of a grim graveyard full of once lively people, draped in black, and a mourning George sobbing on his knees, the performance was tear jerking.

By far, the most unique character of "Our Town" is the Stage Manager, portrayed in Dominion's production by Saskia Hunter. Whether interacting with the townspeople, directing information to the audience, or reacting with the audience, Hunter maintained an aura of authenticity, both omniscient and omnipresent. As she meandered across town, pointing to buildings that were invisible to the audience, her deliberate sentimentality set the tone for the rest of the cast.

The whole cast balanced the emotional and lighthearted elements of the story, while still preserving the small-town aura of Grover's Corners. Townspeople such as Mrs. Webb (Leecy Silk) and the milkman Howie Newsome (Lars Nyman) elicited chuckles from the audience with their vocal abilities and distinct character choices. Keeping with the simplicity of the writing, many actors pantomimed everyday actions in the absence of props: stringing beans, drinking an ice cream soda, carrying a coffin.

To complement the simplicity of the almost bare stage and almost no props, the lights and sound greatly contributed to the atmosphere of the show. Varying warmths of light and shifts of focus helped prevent confusion and added drama to profound moments. Microphones also aided the performance of many actors, and sound effects such as a cow bell and clinking glasses when the milkman made his rounds added another layer of authenticity to the show.

Moment to moment, people fail to realize the wonder of the unremarkable and everyday. But every day remarkable things occur in the universe: birth, love, death. Dominion High School's production of "Our Town" inspired a sense of awe in every audience member at the unremarkably remarkable nature of the human experience.

Erik Wells
Lake Braddock Secondary
Submitted for publication to Cappies News 2

"There's a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn't that the point?" This closing line from "The Office" echoes the theme of appreciating the simple things in life for what they are, a theme that has been prevalent in many forms of modern American media, and can be traced back to Thornton Wilder's 1938 play, "Our Town," which details life and death in a small New England town at the turn of the 20th century.

In the late 1930's, Thornton Wilder was dissatisfied with the state of Broadway, so he decided to write a play in a metatheatrical style in order to get back to the root of what he deemed important about the stage. The play is narrated by an omnipresent character known as the Stage Manager, who leads us through the story-within-the-story about the young lovers George Gibbs and Emily Webb as they grow up in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. A 1946 production in East Berlin was cancelled by the Russian government, who deemed the ending too depressing, afraid it would lead to a wave of suicides in Germany. On the contrary, Wilder's intent was to encourage the audience to live their lives to the fullest. Based on the play's Pulitzer Prize, it seems like some people got the message.

Integral to the tone for Dominion's production is Saskia Hunter's performance as the Stage Manager. Hunter delivers five-minute monologues with a calm, educating tone that makes them seem like they were a breeze to memorize. Even when she is quietly observing the action from the side of the stage, she gives off the vibe of someone watching over and caring for the town, not a high schooler anxiously waiting for her next line. Another make-or-break factor for the play is the relationship between George and Emily, played here by Josh Thomas and Eleanor Walter. The pair have a good dynamic, always elevating the energy of the scenes they share, and Thomas especially does a great job of showing the character's progression from a teen to a young adult to a man made older by experience. Their relationship feels plausible since we see the progression from their nervous energy in Act 1 to the pure bliss of Act 2.

As was Wilder's intent with his metatheatrical style, the play utilizes minimal scenery and props in order to draw focus to the acting. As a result, the atmosphere is largely created by sound effects and some pantomiming from the actors. The vast majority of the actors did a consistent job with their pantomiming, and the sound designers demonstrated appreciable specificity with their effects. The subtle undertone of crickets throughout some night scenes is not always heard when actors are talking, but that only makes them all the more palpable when there are gaps in dialogue. Sound effects were also helpful in creating distance so that the limited stage space felt like the sprawl of a town. For example, the sound of the milkman's clinking gradually faded the farther away he was from the Gibbs and Webb households.

In the third act, Emily ponders, "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?" The Stage Manager responds that, other than perhaps the saints and poets, we do not. And while this may be true, we can all get a few steps closer to appreciating life by taking a trip through Grover's Corners with the cast of crew of Dominion High School's "Our Town."

Simon Van Der Weide
Flint Hill School
Submitted for publication to Patch.com

Does love survive beyond the grave? Does anything? Dominion High School's production of the "Great American Drama," Our Town, invites the audience into the small, languid town of Grover's Corners, asking existential questions about life, love, death, and the world beyond.

Written by prominent playwright Thornton Wilder as a rebellion against the opulence of early 20th-century American theatre, Our Town debuted on Broadway in 1938. Our Town won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and its revivals and adaptations have gone on to win numerous awards. With a traditionally bare stage and no props, the townspeople of Our Town show the vicissitudes of life in three acts from the first sparks of love to the tragedy of death. The show, narrated by the Stage Manager, focuses on the heart-warming and heart-breaking tale of George Gibbs and Emily Webb, the young lovers of Grover's Corners.

Saskia Hunter (Stage Manager) opened the show with aplomb, confidently breaking the fourth wall and enticing the audience into her play-within-a-play. Hunter displayed a wide range of emotions in reaction to her own tale of Grover's Corners and connected to the audience with inspired physicality. As Thornton Wilder's mastermind behind the entire show, Hunter played the puppeteer exceptionally, interacting with both the audience and all of her characters to teach the lessons of the show. From her first introduction of the townspeople to the bleak outlook on life in the end, Hunter deftly held up the show on her two feet.

Inside the Stage Manager's play, Josh Thomas (George Gibbs) and Eleanor Walter (Emily Webb) gave remarkable performances as the young couple struggling through the vicious cycles of life together. Thomas brought authentic and meaningful emotion to his part, captivating the audience with playful smiles in his naive youth and a more reserved nature in his age. Walter exemplified another side of Grover's Corners as an infinitely nervous and intelligent woman trying to find love with her best friend. The pair's chemistry drove the show forward; it provided the climactic catharsis when one of them met death, and the other was left to grieve in the world of the living.

The townspeople of Grover's Corners were entertaining and showed all different sides of a seemingly one-dimensional New Hampshire town. Whether bringing the milk to every household or spending the dark evenings at choir practice, the ensemble brought the town to life and showed their uniqueness whenever they graced the stage. Especially striking were the motherly Marie Knight (Mrs. Gibbs) and the fatherly Dylan O'Rourke (Mr. Webb), who embraced their roles as parents with genuine care.

The aesthetics of the performance were true to Thornton Wilder's original vision of Our Town: a minimalist show with nothing but ladders, tables, and benches on stage. Instead of props, the cast convincingly pantomimed such actions as throwing newspapers and stringing beans for the winter. Although the lighting sometimes left people in shadow, and the microphones were sometimes inconsistent, neither of these shortcomings detracted from the overall appeal of the show.

The cast of Dominion High School's Our Town powerfully captured the gritty and down-to-earth drama of a sleepy American town and the plight of humanity when confronted by death.

Erin Mullins
Lake Braddock Secondary
Submitted for publication to Loudoun Now

If given the chance to look into the future and see how it ends, would you take it? Or would you prefer to live on in blissful ignorance? Likewise, if you reached the end and were allowed to relive one day, would you? Dominion High School challenges the fragility of life with their production of Our Town.

Written in 1934 by Thornton Wilder, Our Town is a three act play that revolves around the small town life of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. The audience is introduced to a variety of characters by the Stage Manager, who serves as an omnipresent storyteller of the lives and deaths of the town's citizens. The length of the play stretches out over the course of twelve years, and each act is dedicated to life, love, and death respectively.

Josh Thomas brought life to his character George Gibbs, the "boy next door" and love interest of Emily Webb (Eleanor Walter). Thomas played off of his fellow actors well and carried high levels of energy throughout the entire show that enraptured the audience. His chemistry with Walter lead to an accurate representation of a budding relationship, and he captured the growth of his character as he developed from a carefree teenager to a hard-working and family oriented young man.

A constant onstage presence, Saskia Hunter (who played the Stage Manager) never let her character drop, consistently reacting to the events of the play as they unfolded, even when she was not actively participating in the scene. She easily formed a connection with the audience, and in doing so formed a bridge that allowed the audience to feel as though they were a part of the story themselves.

With the whole cast being onstage for the entirety of the play, the use of muted, blue lighting (Jamie Hunt, Kyra Yergin, Emanuel Irizarry, and Macy Crow) upstage helped section off what characters were a part of the scene and which were not. The use of sound (Kyra Yergin, Emanuel Irizarry, Macy Crow, and Eleanor Walter) created the unseen world in the heavily pantomimed show and defined the actions of the actors, which avoided any possible confusion the audience may have as to what was happening onstage.

Dominion High School's performance of Our Town connected with the audience through subtle technical designs and heartfelt performances. The cast showed dedication to their individual roles and reinforced the importance of living even the most typical of days to the fullest.

Leo Tesfaye
Lake Braddock Secondary
Submitted for publication to Loudoun Times-Mirror

Henry David Thoreau once said,"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail." Dominion High School's production of Our Town proves Thoreau's point that simplicity is key.

Author Thornton Wilder wrote this play for the sole purpose of of it being simple. This is made clear with the lack of set, pantomimed properties, and the focus placed on the acting. Wilder's reasoning for not having these attributes was because he thought theatre was focusing to much on the technical aspects rather than the actual acting itself. He wrote Our Town in 1983 and it went on to be performed on many stages, winning numerous awards. The play follows a love story that is split into three acts. Act one, daily life, features all the townspeople and their routines. Act two focuses on the love and marriage of two characters, and act three follows the death of one of the lovers.

The Stage Manager (Saskia Hunter) who narrates every scene was an elegant storyteller with a voice that flowed like honey and engulfed the audience in the story. Hunter's ability to maintain her character through the entire show and provide appropriate reactions was astounding to say the least. There was never a moment on stage that Hunter wasn't engrossed in a story and every reaction seemed as if she was doing it for the first time. She gave raw emotion in every one of her monologues and produced energy that the rest of the cast lacked. Hunter's voice filled the void that was made by the intentional lack of tech to the brim.

George Gibbs (Josh Thomas) was a member of the town as well as the lead of the story. Thomas beautifully portrayed what growing old was like without the use of age makeup or props. As the acts progressed, so did Thomas, and the audience watched as he changed from a young immature boy, to a love struck young adult, and finally into a man mourning the loss of the love of his life.

Mrs.Webb (Leecy Silk) played a sassy but loving mother to Emily, the other protagonist. Silk was also able to portray age without the use of makeup and utilized the pantomime. She was able to never break her pantomime, even when the focus was pulled onto someone else.

Time and time again we are told that less is more, and in the case of Dominion High School's production of Our Town, that couldn't be more true.