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VOLUME 16
NEW BERN, N. C. 28560, FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 1973
NUMBER 3
Yesterday was when New
Bern’s Little Theater, under the
demanding and dedicated
guidance of Helen Jones,
presented Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town in the High School’s
woefully inadequate Moses
Griffin auditorium.
It was most fortunate that the
(day, winner of a Pulitzer prize
on Broadway in 1938, requires
no scenery. Aside from the
performers, the only objects on
stage are two step ladders,
several chairs, and a board.
Precisely, that’s the way it
was done during its long New
York run, and ever since by
coliege and community
thespians. So beautifully
written are the tender lines that
pr£ps aren’t necessary.
Those of us who had roles, a
third of a century ago, in Our
Town were deeply mov^ by the
experience. More than any
other amateur production ever
tackled here, it ieft a lasting
impression on cast and
audience alike.
Severai of the actors and
actresses are no longer among
the living, including Jane
Holland, Eva Jarvis, and Albert
Willis, Sr. Stili around are
Gerald Colvin, Theresa Shipp,
Bob Pugh, and the former Page
Daniel.
Our Town, then and now, is
still beckoning to us. Even when
first present^ in 1938, the play
was blamed for being a
theatrical stunt, too sen
timental, too romantic, an over
idealized rendition of small
town Americana.
But Wilder’s dramatic
masterwork never pretended to
be journalism, never meant to
offer ig> sociology. Its gentle
lyrical ccnnpUation of daily life,
love and marriage, and death
was mythic and not literal,
dealing less with facts than with
truth.
Our Town, in fact, was a poem
about essentials and essences,
not so much concerned with the
way we happened to be living in
America around the turn of the
century as about what it means
to be human.
In 1973, in spite of all the
changes, underneath our
facades, beneath the debris of
our shaken insUtutimis and
shaking values, we remain our
same vulnerable selves, sub
ject to the vicissitudes of birth
and love and wonder and age
and ultimate extinction.
And playwright Wilder’s
‘Message” to us all, whatever
our^^ or race or political
persuasion, to cherish the
textinre of life itself, to grab on
to and find warmth and jov in
the very pain of the living of life,
is not only as valid as it was way
back then but perhaps even
more needed in an age of steel
and plastic and endless crni-
crete.
Somewhere, dera inside, we
are still “the famfiy of man.’’
We are all related by birth, and
death, sons and daughters and
parents of each other. As we
realize always only when it is
too late.
In a time of growing
fragmentation and uncertainty,
it is good to find an American
play—the American play—that
(Continued on page 8)
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I CAN’T BELIEVE IT—Jennifer Hope Williams, nine what turned her on. Maybe some choic^
month old daughter of the John Williams of 805 Howell sip, or an exciting ^Isode on hdr favorite TV program.
Road, Is obviously astounded, and she reacts In typi- —Photo by Wray Studio.
cal feminine fashion. We don’t have the slightest idea