Hopkinton High School's 'Our Town' is Thrilling, Soulful

It was energizing to watch 21^st Century students inform the limpid realism of Thornton Wilder’s 1930s play about the turn of the century: the turn from the 19^th to 20^th Century.

Wilder was in his 30s when he looked back at what people then considered a time of declining American greatness. Small-town New Englanders in Wilder’s day had been battered by the Great War and the Great Depression.  Great had a new meaning to them.

In Wilder’s day, constant technological improvement made life at once more accessible and less personal. The car replaced the horse. Radio the choir. Film, then television upended theater. The Walkman. PCs. Digitization.  Twitter.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose, a French novelist said. Though he matched Wilder’s fluidity of language, few have matched Wilder’s intrinsic and American ability to express the universal through laconic  drama.

The Hopkinton High production was pitch true to Wilder’s mingling of the profound and the banal, the profound in the banal, and the poetry of the stage.

Wilder goes from girl in the window to the wide world to beyond the universe to the mind of God in heartbeats. Our Town is well-suited to and was splendidly performed by these high school actors, who in real life well know the uncertainties, boredom, idealism, contradictions and despair that Wilder reveals in us all, from youth to the grave.

The performance was a fundraiser for the Hopkinton High School Drama Ensemble's trip in August to Scotland's Fringe Festival, where it will perform Empty Page, Empty Stage, an original work by artistic director Valerie Von Rosenvinge and the enemble. To help finance the trip, visit http://www.hhsdramaensemble.com/.

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