Opening Night | Our Town | Theater Basel
Our town - POSTPONED
Play by Thornton Wilder
Schauspiel in three acts by Thornton Wilder
Grover’s Corners is a fictional small town in New Hampshire at the turn of the century. A world where everything is fine and everyone knows everyone else. A place a long way away from any drama, sensation or scandal. Wilder’s central character, the Stage Manager, takes the audience on a tour of this peaceful little town in the style of a master of ceremonies, introducing its inhabitants, their lives and everyday goings on one by one. He knows all about their hopes and dreams and their secret desires and longings. Like those of the two children Emily Webb and George Gibbs who grow up next door to each other, form an early affection during their school years before life separates them and ultimately brings them back together again. But in Wilder’s play this happy ending is little more than just another day in the chronicle of Grover’s Corners, a chronicle of life and its transitory nature.
Thornton Wilder’s play «Our Town», written in 1938 in Rüschlikon near Zürich, is like a mirror of our world. And this play transforms the whole of life into a parable that compares our lives with all past and future times. For Wilder all manner of technical, social and scientific progress has changed nothing to make life more desirable or worthwhile. His play, conceived as a piece of epic theatre, is a huge appeal to slow the pace of our everyday lives in order to be able to re-evaluate and enjoy life and its simple, little moments. Wilder himself called it a «meditation on the difficulty of understanding life while we are living it».
The Australian director Anne-Louise Sarks will be familiar to Basel audiences from the German-language premiere of her version of the Medea trilogy in the 2017 / 2018 season.
Perforamnces
Do 19. March 2020, Schauspielhaus, 19h30, Premiere
Do 26. March 2020, Schauspielhaus, 19h30
Mo 30. March 2020, Schauspielhaus, 19h30
Sa 18. March 2020, Schauspielhaus, 19h30
Sa 25. March2020, Schauspielhaus, 19h30
More perforamnces are planned.