By Finn Sipes ’22 News Reporter
On October 11, 12 and 13 Mercersburg Academy’s Stony Batter Players performed their rendition of Our Town. Originally written by Thornton Wilder in 1938, Our Town is a moving play that focuses on a message of appreciating life as we live it. The story is strong and depicts the poignant emotions that arise in reality. It follows the small town life of Emily Webb and George Gibbs as they fall in love, get married, and experience loss and grief. The play begins in the year 1901, and is set in Grover’s Corners, a small town in New Hampshire.
Eliza DuBose, who played Emily Webb, said, “As [director] Ms. [Laurie] Mufson loves to remind the cast, there are no recreating moments on stage, only reactions to the new situations that happen to share the same words.” Honest emotion cannot come on a whim, but must come from genuine connections with the story as it unfolds each night. Relating to the importance of emotion in Our Town, Chris Adams, who played George Gibbs, said, “The show, without energy, is deadly.” DuBose uses her own life experiences to make the performance more realistic for both her and the audience. “I think pretty much everyone is familiar with the way Emily feels at the beginning of the play. Most people know the feeling you have when you see your crush walking towards you and your stomach drops to your toes. That’s my favorite part of getting into character as Emily, remembering that feeling and allowing it to seep into my interactions with George on stage.”
Our Town used only chairs, tables, and briefly a pair of ladders to create a set. Strong acting in such a minimalistic set was a crucial aspect in keeping the audience locked in to the story. Many of the actions being performed were familiar to the average person, so viewers could easily tell what was going on without props. The non-necessity of props allowed more attention to other details of the play. Adams said, “The set being so minimal was awesome to me because the responsibility was on [the actors] to really express the situations we were in.”
The lack of set was not a challenge the actors had to face alone. The tech crew was given the daunting task of building the actors a world to live in without a set. Kelly Dowling, Production Designer and Manager of Our Town, noted that the show’s design and tech may seem minimal, so there were many small details put into it that might have gone unnoticed. The show includes over 50 sound cues, a detail that might have been left out of other kinds of productions but was necessary to creating a world for the audience. One of the center pieces of the set were the large picture frames hanging over the stage. Onto the enormous frames were projected photos to show images of a setting or scenes relating to the narration. Dowling said, ”I think this is the element I am most proud of, since it is a unique feature we added to our production and there are a couple of subtle moments we achieve with the pictures that we couldn’t have done otherwise.” The frames made up for the lack of traditional scenery and truly helped the show come alive. This play takes such a drastic twist from a traditional show, and seeing it, whether it be a community performance or on a big-name stages, is an incredibly fresh experience.