Come see “the greatest American play ever written,” according to playwright Edward Albee. At the upper town hall, at 7:30, next weekend both Friday 10/21 and Saturday 10/22, the Washington Street Players will be putting on a grand version of Our Town. Tickets are available at the door or contact info@Washingtonstreetplayers.org.

Few plays in the American canon of literature are more beloved than Our Town, penned by Thornton Wilder. Written in 1938, it opened in New Jersey, jumped to Broadway, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama that very year. It tells the story of a fictional small town in New Hampshire called Grover’s Corners. Opening in 1901 and ending in 1913, it tells of the everyday lives of its citizens, their dreams, their disappointments, their loves, their deaths, and their legacies to their children and to the world.

Directed by Jim Porter, and produced by Karen Dinehart, the Washington Street Players go far beyond doing justice to this masterpiece. Unlike most plays, the action is introduced, related and commented on by the Stage Manager (John Alzapiedie) and others, with a bare stage and few props. The poignancy and simplicity of the lives here could be 1901 Holliston, or any other small American town.

With Scott Joplin’s ragtime music in the background, the curtain opens to reveal two rows of actors and actresses sitting in chairs on stage right and stage left. The Stage Manager does a fine job of conveying the old-time good humor and wisdom of a townsman who knows every church, every person, every birth and every death in the town he is proud to live in. His is the pivotal role of the play, ever present, able to tell the audience in his warm and folksy way both about the past and the future of every character.

Doc Gibbs (Dan Jewett,) his wife Mrs. Gibbs (Chrissy Petersen,) Charles Webb, the editor of the local paper (David A. Nestelbaum) and his wife Mrs. Webb, (Lynda Slocomb) well serve as the lens through which we see into the typical family life of the town. They set up kitchens on either side of the stage. Done in pantomime, the two women snap beans together and talk. Chrissy Peterson embodies the small-town hopes of a housewife especially well, one who works from sunup to sundown without ever getting a vacation, and yet dreams of selling the antique highboy and seeing Paris someday. Izzy Lima, playing young Rebecca Gibbs, recites with wonder my favorite speech of the play, marveling that the return address on the envelope of a letter was from Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, the U.S.A., the Western Hemisphere, the Earth, etc. to “the mind of God.”John Alzapiedie asks the audience if they have any questions, and answers that no, there isn’t really any culture in the town, but they do love watching the sun coming over the mountains and following the birds. It is this unpretentiousness that makes the audience fall in love with this mythical town.

Two tall ladders then represent the upstairs of the Gibbs and Webb houses. Emily Webb, played by Candra Baizan, calls over the solution to a math problem to George Gibbs (William Annand.) As they stumble through adolescence, fall in love, and eventually marry, Candra shines as an eager top high school student, and then a radiant, innocent young bride who on the morning of her wedding, in a picture-perfect white gown, declares, “I hate him. I wish I was dead.” As the play progresses, a graveyard is depicted by one set of chairs, and soon Candra appears, convincingly ghostlike, to take her place there after dying in childbirth. William, as George, has a charming awkwardness as he reveals he’ll forgo college to stay in Grover’s Corners to remain close to Emily. As a groom he is perfectly nervous and sweaty, and as a grieving young man, suddenly widowed, he convincingly throws himself on Emily’s grave and weeps.

What happens next is theatrical magic. Now dead, Emily learns that she will have one chance to go back and relive one day of her life. The others already in the graveyard try to convince her not to go, because it will be too painful. She insists anyway and goes back to her twelfth birthday. As the scene unfolds, she understands why. She is immensely touched by the fragility of life, and yet how people rush by each other, taking every precious moment for granted, never stopping to appreciate the wonder of a hug, the strong and lasting love within a family, or the little white fence that used to be outside her house. Soon she begs the Stage Manager to take her back to the graveyard. This play, done as well as here by the Washington Street Players, makes one glow with happiness just to be alive.

This production features four Hollistonians, from our own town: the aforementioned Chrissy Petersen, Izzy Lima, Dan Jewett, and Asher Horton.

Do not miss a chance to see this production in our town hall where in 1901 high school graduations were actually held and young hearts bloomed, just as in this play