Cooper 1 Play: Our Town Playwright: Author - Thornton Wilder Director - Montana Wallace Theatre: Center on the Square - Community Dinner Theatre, Searcy AR Date: October 1, 2017 Description of the play: Our Town is mainly about small towns and what goes on in them. It is a very simple concept of the daily life of people throughout many years going from teenagers in love to the day of the wedding to the death of a loved one. There are two main characters: Emily Webb and George Gibbs. They end up liking each other as teenagers and getting married when they are older and the play ends with Emily Webb’s death. Throughout the play there are also other people that are needing to be mentioned in order for the third act to make sense but all-in-all, it is a play about life in a …show more content…
small town like Grover’s Corners. Purpose: The script’s central theme is about life and how it can be taken for granted if you don’t realize how blessed and thankful you really are.
In the last Act of the play, Emily has died and is with all the other dead men and women from the town in the graveyard (a few rows of people in chairs on the left side of the stage). When she looks back at all the people at her funeral she then wants to go back and re-live a moment of her life. The dead say no but she says yes. She goes back to her 12th birthday and remembers everything and she remembered not feeling grateful for that day but there is nothing she could do about now. Cooper 2 Production Elements: The Center on the Square set up this play very nicely. One aspect of the play that was unique was that the actors did not use any props except chairs, an ironing board, two ladders, and two white posts on each side of the stage. The stage was rather small but they used the space wisely on stage. One complaint would have to be that since the stage was so small and there was 3 or four different things going on, it was difficult to see everything happening. The set itself was interesting. It represented a black box because everything was blacked out but it was a proscenium layout. The back wall of the stage was the only part that had color or
a design. It was a wall full of chairs hanging in different directions or stools hanging in certain places. I didn’t really understand what that meant, it just kinda set a country kind of mood for me. Personal Reaction: I liked the play overall. It’s just something different that may take a better knowledge of the Arts than mine. It was interesting that they didn’t use props but it did kinda throw me off at times. The narrator was not painting the picture very well for me and I don’t think the lighting helped either. You can definitely tell when it was a sad or happy moment but when he talked about the sunrise I just couldn’t see it in my imagination. I like the meaning of the play because sometimes I realize that I am not feeling grateful for what God has given me so I have to stop and think of ways to change that feeling. I can somewhat relate and that makes it easier to understand. I would want to see Our Town again.
The setup of the stage was very simple. It was the living room of a home in the early 1980’s. It looked like a normal household, and it had small things such as crumpled up pieces of paper lying around the wastebasket. It also had a couch, circular class table and a recliner in the living room. The dining room was to the left side of the stage and only had the dining table and surrounding chairs. There was a door in the back of the set where characters entered and exited through. Beside the door was a table and stool where Willum presumably worked on his blueprints for the hotel. The lighting design was great; it put you into the atmosphere of the
Looking at the convention Mulitmedia, Stibbard used sound and projections. The space Stibbard used was large and was all painted black, like a floor plan, he would draw in his props with white chalk, he would pause the play to explain what he just drew, this goes on to V-effekt. Back to stagecraft, everything was in plain view, the projector stayed on stage the entire time. The set is split into three sections, a square for Thom’s apartment, a square for Alethea’s apartment, and a corridor where the days of the week are. The lighting on set is used for location, to locate
The production had many elements which for the most part formed a coalition to further the plot. The characters, the three part scenery and costumes represented well the period of time these people were going through. As far as the performers entering and exiting the stage, it could have been more organized. There were a few times when the performers exited at the wrong times or it seemed so due to the echo of the music. At certain moments the music was slightly loud and drowned the performers. Many of the songs dragged on, so the pacing could have been more effectively executed. Though the music was off at times, the director's decision to have most of the songs performed center sage was a wise one. Also the implementation of actual white characters that were competent in their roles came as a great surprise to the audience and heightened the realism.
The black box is a good representation of the central idea to the story. The box is painted in black, which has always been a universal symbol for evil and death.
redemption for Connie. Her twisted fate is all there is for her. This nihilistic close leaves us with
The Celine Dion concert had a very elaborate stage set up with beautiful props and decorations, that seemed to magically change to match each song she sang. I was expecting a similar set up at the Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. Their concert was just the opposite though. While waiting for Lynyrd Skynyrd to perform, I noticed that the stage set up was sparse and unimpressive. The only thing that really caught my eye was a baby grand piano on the left side of the stage. The other
progresses her actions to things happening around brought her to the end of her life. Other
to the Pet cemetary. Louis answers her honestly and later Rachel and him have an
Trethewey’s first use of grave and cemetery imagery outlines the guilt and regret that she feels surrounding her actions before, during, and after her mother’s burial. In one of the first references, in what she refers to as “childish vanity,” a young
appears to be alive and walking into the house that she sudden to cried herself and died of
The play is based loosely on fact but more importantly it is set in a
high, with a diameter of approximately 100 feet. The rectangular stage platform on which the plays
The narrator begins the play by talking about the families. He then sets up two tables with a couple of chairs at each table. The tables and chairs represent the two main families in the play, the Webb family and the Gibb family. Each family has a trellis in place of the back door.
The backdrop being an active background rather than the traditional painted scenery, and the seating arrangements of the audience made you feel fully experienced and immersed in the play. The use of a black box for the play was a great idea, because it gave focus to the backdrop; which to me was the center focus of the play, reminding us that this is just a daily occurrence. The play started in midafternoon at Feuf’s country home with her two friends Christina and Cindy. This scene is significant you learn that Fefu is a strong, independent woman, who doesn’t care what other people think about her. I would say the middle of the play is the most important because this is where you learn about Fefu’s friends. The characters are split up in different parts of the house, each one dealing with a different problem, from trying to understand themselves, to understanding life itself. This is where you start to figure out that each character is just a figment of Fefu’s imagination. Each character represents a different personality of hers. Which leads well to the end of the
The set, much like the play, was dynamic. Tents went from being fully constructed to