This is the time of year that promises a student equal amounts of joy and stress. The holidays are approaching fast and the smell of finals are in the air. We’ll soon come to the end of one of the most stunning autumns that I’ve ever seen in Victoria. I always relish in the reds and golds that fall has to offer, but this year the flora and fauna have been fit to bursting with glorious colour; it’s been a perfect season to inspire whatever a student writer sets out to write. This is why I felt like it must be serendipitous that I was invited to review Thornton Wilder’s Our Town at the Phoenix Theatre.
Our Town—which runs until Saturday, November 22—is one of those rare pieces that forces the audience to stop, look, and collect themselves over the small motions of being alive. Watching it, one might feel a bit stripped. There are minimal sets and props, and we have a stage manager who acts as both a guide and a provocative storyteller. Once an audience member gives their head a shake to bring themselves into this storytelling, then it’s in in this sparseness that the play really gathers its force. Wilder has constructed a simple world, but this simplicity shows us that we rarely see how important it is to absorb what’s already here.
Guest directed by Toronto-based Soheil Parsa, Our Town takes place in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners and moves through the lives of the Gibbs and Webb families. The storyline follows these families through time’s forward push, and the audience watches them as they plod through their most rudimentary of tasks: eating breakfast, chatting in the schoolyard, shouting across the lawn to one another, courting each other, and, eventually, dying together. Wilder’s writing uses these blasé moments of life and the crucial realization of death in a way that forces one to find intimacy in the everyday.
The Phoenix Theatre student actors have thrown themselves passionately into their work yet again. They’ve embraced their roles in Our Town, obviously finding themselves a real connection to it.
I want to give a special shout-out to Mikan Munson, who plays Mrs. Webb. Munson may have borne her soul in this role, I think, because she’s utterly believable as her character.
The set and costumes, designed by Molly Somers, are minimal, as Wilder intended them to be. Without props, the audience must be forced to imagine; without props, the actors are going to bond with their characters’ movements and body language.
We need to find the joy in life before it’s all over; we need to appreciate the beauty that’s already around us. Phoenix Theatre’s take on Our Town reminds us all of that.
Our Town
Various days and times, until Saturday, November 22
Student rush tickets $20 30 minutes before showtime
Phoenix Theatre, UVic
phoenixtheatres.ca