Vol. 38, No. 18

1-31-2007
By: Julia Harris

'Bohr'ing into 'Our Town'

It doesn’t intimidate Jimmy Bohr that “Our Town” was a favorite play of OSU theatre legend Roy Bowen.

What does concern the newest Department of Theatre faculty member is that “Our Town” is one of those plays people think they know — either because they’ve been in it or seen it done — and are therefore likely to dismiss.

“It has gotten, over the years, a reputation for being a very sentimental piece of theater, probably because it seems so accessible and has been done by many high schools and colleges,” Bohr says.

He admits that in his long career as a director in New York, he never worked on the play, although he’d seen it done a number of times. It wasn’t until he accepted the position at Ohio State this past fall and signed on to direct “Our Town” that he delved into the text in earnest.

What he found in the familiar words of playwright Thornton Wilder was anything but familiar.

“It struck my heart in a really profound way,” he recalls. “I mean, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938 for a reason; it’s one of the classical American plays for a reason.”
Determined to give the production the artistic weight it deserves, Bohr decided to go a somewhat novel — for OSU theatre — route and cast professional actors in roles he felt demanded more authenticity.

“I didn’t want 20-year-olds playing the parents of 23-year-olds, and I didn’t want 18-year-olds playing the roles of children,” he explains.

To create the atmosphere he wanted, Bohr tapped alum Glenn Peters (M.F.A. 1999), now a professional actor in New York, to play the central — and complicated — role of Stage Manager in the production. And for the three children in the play, Bohr worked with Columbus Children’s Theatre to find the right performers.

The role of Mrs. Webb, mother of one of the main characters in the show, is being played by Mary Gray, a professional actress in Columbus who also is the director of the Ohio Arts Council’s Riffe Gallery. For Gray, the role is an opportunity to return to the stage after a five-year absence, and she has high expectations for the production.

“I hope that, through Wilder’s words, we’ll inspire people to be very present and to appreciate life, even if only for a moment.”

The addition of seasoned professionals like Gray made it easier for Bohr to round out the cast, a task made especially challenging because Maureen Ryan, an assistant theatre professor, was holding auditions at the same time for “Dead Man Walking” — a cast of 42 actors.

“With more than 60 roles being cast in one quarter, basically every student who wanted to be in a play is in a play,” Bohr says.

The plays overlap only slightly in their production runs. “Our Town” is on stage in the Roy Bowen Theatre from Feb. 8-24, while “Dead Man Walking” begins Feb. 22 in the Thurber Theatre and closes March 3.

Bringing the fictional town of Grover’s Corners, N.H., to life has meant a lot of work and study on the part of actors and director alike. Since one of the theatrical traditions of “Our Town” involves a mostly bare stage with the actors miming all the props, Bohr put his cast through a week of intensive mime workshops to make every action consistent, artistic and authentic.

“We have a thick packet of research just on the kitchens of 1901 and how they worked,” Bohr says. “We mapped out our kitchens in incredible detail — where the coffee pots sit, where the pumps are on the sinks, how to light coal stoves versus wood stoves.”

And then there’s the dialect. For most of the cast, the effort of nailing down the flattened New Hampshire accent has been very difficult.

That part has been easy for Associate Professor Alan Woods, who has two small roles in the play. “I grew up in a very small town in northern Massachusetts,” he says in a perfect New England accent. “There were 42 people in my high school graduating class, everybody knew everybody else’s business, so it’s exactly like Grover’s Corners.”
Woods, who has not acted in a university production since 1975, is hopeful that Bohr’s commitment to the artistic integrity of the play will make it appeal to today’s audience.

“Going back to what the play is really about is a way of rediscovering it,” he says. “Because it has become burdened with so many layers of bad production, the darker edges are so often lost.”

For a schedule and ticket pricing, call 292-2295.

The Bowen legacy

“Our Town” was first produced at Ohio State in the summer of 1956, directed by then-visiting Assistant Professor Roy Bowen, who had earned his doctorate at OSU in 1951. He became a full-time member of the faculty in 1958 and director of the theatre department in 1960. His tenure at the university brought him national recognition as a champion of new works and for his work to establish the American Playwrights Theatre.

Before his death last January at the age of 93, Bowen had more than 140 major productions to his credit, including two stagings of “Our Town” at Ohio State. (Another production of Thornton Wilder’s famous play was done here in 1980, but this rendition was set in Granville, Ohio, as an attempt to contemporize the piece. In the eyes of many who saw it, the production was not a success.)

In 1999, the Stadium II Theatre in the Drake Performance and Event Center was renamed the Roy Bowen Theatre in his honor.

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