our town BY THORNTON WILDER DIRECTED BY LEE LEWIS Jimi Bani, Colin Smith Welcome to 2021. It is so exciting to be back embarking on a season of theatre, with some much-loved plays and others unknown. Amanda Jolly Executive Director And what better work massive. Like reaching out to return with than this to a neighbour. Taking a great American classic moment for a colleague — directed by our own who’s struggling. Calling Artistic Director, Lee Lewis a distant friend. And and featuring a cast of 16 above all, spending time outstanding Queensland with family. We craved actors. You’ll find some togetherness, and meaning, familiar faces and discover and hope. some rising stars of Our Town celebrates all tomorrow — a village of of this and more. With its artists. simplicity and heart, it When the coronavirus reminds us of the power of pandemic forced us all theatre and how much we indoors last year, we have all been missing this eventually came to realise shared experience. Enjoy. what has been most — Best wishes, important all along. It turned Amanda out to be the little things, the things we had been too busy for, the things so tiny that they’re actually Queensland Theatre would like to acknowledge the Jagera and Turrbal people who are the Traditional Custodians of this land. We pay our respects to their Elders both past and present, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. QUEENSLAND THEATRE IS ASSISTED BY THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT THROUGH THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL, ITS ARTS FUNDING AND ADVISORY BODY. QUEENSLAND THEATRE IS SUPPORTED BY THE QUEENSLAND GOVERNMENT THROUGH ARTS QUEENSLAND. 3 QUEENSLAND THEATRE PRESENTS our town BY THORNTON WILDER DIRECTED BY LEE LEWIS With a story so simple and complex, funny and Joy and a heart so warm, heartbreaking fabric that is this classic celebrates all community. And for all its that is precious in life. simplicity, this play reveals a great truth at its heart: Life in a small town. Babies deep meaning and startling are born. Children go value are in every moment Community to school, and play and of existence. You don’t dream. People grow up, fall know what you’ve got until in love, get married, hold Life it’s gone. down a job, and grow old. The same surnames last Pulitzer Prize-winning down through the years, Our Town has long been but the faces change. There America’s most performed are inevitable tragedies and play. It reminds us to look to triumphant joys. the future with hope, to see the beauty in the everyday As we come to know the world and to cherish the people in this town, we people we love. see how the threads of their everyday lives are gently woven into the rich ‘The climax of this play needs only five square feet of boarding, and the passion to know what life means to us.’ – Thornton Wilder CREATIVES Playwright Thornton Wilder 30 JAN – 20 FEB 2021 Director Lee Lewis BILLE BROWN THEATRE Costume Designer Nathalie Ryner Lighting Designer Paul Jackson Composer/Sound Designer THE SWEATS LOCATION Stage Manager Pete Sutherland Bille Brown Theatre Assistant Stage Manager 78 Montague Road, South Brisbane Margaret Burrows DURATION CAST 2 hours 45 minutes, including intervals Stage Manager Jimi Bani Professor Willard/Sam Craig WARNINGS Andrew Buchanan This play contains mature themes, Mia Foley Rebecca Gibbs including a reference to suicide, theatrical Angus Freer Wally Webb haze and lighting blackouts. The use of Lucy Heathcote Emily Webb photographic or recording equipment is Luca Klarwein Wally Webb not permitted inside the theatre. Mrs Webb Amy Lehpamer Mrs Soames/Jo Crowell/Si Crowell OUR TOWN © 1938, 1957 Roxanne McDonald The Wilder Family LLC Libby Munro Mrs Gibbs Copyright agent: Alan Brodie Hugh Parker Mr Webb Representation Ltd George Gibbs Jayden Popik www.alanbrodie.com Constable Warren Silvan Rus Rebecca Gibbs Ava Ryan Dr Gibbs Colin Smith Simon Stimson Anthony Standish Howie Newsome Egan Sun-Bin 5 Colin Smith, Hugh Parker Libby Munro, Lee Lewis Lee Lewis, Lucy Heathcote Jayden Popik I am writing this note for the Our Town program on the night before Joe Biden is inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States of America. Lee Lewis Director The ‘united’ states… the last 20 years have beautiful group of actors together in the seen the disintegration of that state of days after a difficult Christmas, his words unity, accelerating towards an attack on started to work their magic on all of us. the Capitol in the final days of Donald His scenes and sentences remind us to Trump’s term in office. The America of cherish every moment we have with those Thornton Wilder’s Our Town may be lost, we love. This was a voice coming to us but strangely I have always found the from another difficult time — proof that we humanity he details more strongly here in have survived difficult times before and Australia than I ever did in my years over will again. This playwright lived through there. a World War, the Spanish Flu pandemic and the Depression. He gathered bits of Tucked in a freezing cold pocket of the wisdom and distilled them into a play we Southern Highlands is the little town can use over 80 years later, on the other I grew up in, Goulburn, my Grover’s side of the planet, when we need to hear Corners. Funnily enough, in the first those thoughts again. I am always in awe week of rehearsal we spent a lot of time of the power of the playwright! talking about where we find our own Grover’s Corners: Ipswich, Grafton, We are hearing his words in our Tewantin, Thursday Island are just a few own voice — I hope you don’t mind. communities we recognised through Sometimes we want to travel through a Thornton Wilder's lens. He wasn’t writing play and sometimes we want to find the for America — he was writing for a play in us. Maybe because the geography sense of humanity. He was writing for of Goulburn is so like the geography of people who need to take a moment Grover’s Corners, I have always heard and recognise the importance of family, this play in Australian voices. And what community and the familiar. He was a collection of voices it is. I want to writing for times like the one he found thank each and every one of the actors himself in – 1938 – when the world knew for all the life they have poured into the it was heading towards another global making of this play. It has been such a joy conflict, and fear, anxiety and denial drove being back in a rehearsal room and I feel all conversations. incredibly grateful to them all for the leap of faith they have taken in making this play So back in June last year, when we were with me. They are our artists. They are our trying to imagine what stories people town. Please join me in cherishing what could possibly want to see in a seemingly they have created. impossible 2021, my heart reached out to — Lee Thornton Wilder’s story. And gathering this 7 Libby Munro, Roxanne McDonald, Amy Lehpamer Creatives Thornton Wilder Lee Lewis As Costume Supervisor: La Boite Theatre Company: A Doll’s House, Playwright Director Wizard of Oz, Holding the Man, Born in Madison, Queensland Cosi; Bangarra: Blak; Polytoxic: Wisconsin, and Theatre: The Rat Trap; QPAC: The Flying educated at Mouthpiece, Orchestra, Cabaret. As Costumier: Oberlin, Yale Rice. Other Bazmark Productions: La Boheme; (B.A. 1920) and Credits: Griffin Opera Australia: Orpheus of the Princeton (M.A. Theatre Company: Underworld, The Pearl Fishers, 1925), Thornton First Love is Lucia di Lammermoor, Mikado. Niven Wilder was the Revolution, Film: As Costumier: Star Wars: an accomplished Prima Facie, The Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, novelist and playwright whose Almighty Sometimes, Kill Climate The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix works, exploring the connection Deniers, The Homosexuals or Revolutions, Dynasty: The Making between the commonplace and Faggots, Gloria, The Bleeding of a Guilty Pleasure, The Frontier. the cosmic dimensions of human Tree, 8 Gigabytes of Hardcore Television: Hi-5. Training: Fashion experience, continue to be read and Pornography, Masquerade, Emerald Design Diploma, Ecole Jeoffrin produced around the world. Wilder City, A Rabbit for Kim Jong-il, The Byrs International Paris; Diploma is the only writer to win Pulitzer Serpent’s Table, Silent Disco, The in Theatre Costume, Sydney Prizes for both fiction and drama – Bull, The Moon and The Coronet Institute TAFE. Positions: Costume for his novel The Bridge of San Luis of Stars, The Call, A Hoax, The Supervisor (Current), Queensland Rey (1927) and two plays, Our Town Nightwatchman, The Literati; Theatre. Awards: Matilda Award (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth Sydney Theatre Company: Mary nomination – Co-Design Caligula. (1942). His other novels include The Stuart, Honour, Love Lies Bleeding, Cabala, The Woman of Andros, ZEBRA!; Melbourne Theatre Paul Jackson Heaven’s My Destination, The Ides Company: Gloria, Hayfever, Rupert; Lighting Designer of March, The Eighth Day and Belvoir: That Face, This Heaven, Queensland Theophilus North. His other major 2000 Feet Away, Half and Half, A Theatre: Debut. dramas include The Matchmaker Number, Ladybird; Bell Shakespeare: Other Credits: As (adapted as the musical Hello, The School for Wives, Twelfth Night; Lighting Designer: Dolly!) and The Alcestiad. The Australian Theatre for Young People: The Australian Happy Journey to Trenton and Battlegrounds, Citizenship; Darwin Ballet, Royal Camden and The Long Christmas Festival: Highway of Lost Hearts; New Zealand Dinner are among his celebrated Western Australian Academy of Ballet, Berlin shorter plays.