Queen Anne director Arne Zaslove thinks “Our Town,” acclaimed as one of the greatest American plays ever written, is cursed: It’s cursed to be performed in gymnasiums, high school drama classes and community theaters where it is sentimentalized, portrayed as a homey and idyllic piece of Americana.
Zaslove decided to probe deep into what he believed playwright Thornton Wilder intended when he penned the classic 75 years ago. What he came out with is a dark look at death.
“I realized, ‘Wait a minute, he mentions death all the time,’” Zaslove said, tapping his fingers on the table for emphasis. “All the time.”
So Zaslove embraced that concept. The main character, the Stage Manager, is often portrayed as a narrator. But in Zaslove’s interpretation, he is an angel of death, a messenger, and he leads the audience as they watch the characters reenact their lives.
“It’s all layered and layered,” Zaslove said. “It’s poetry, it’s music, and that’s what this play is.”
Like he has done with “Our Town,” Zaslove directs plays with his own twist. One of his most famous interpretations was of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which he set in the 1950s with rock-‘n’-roll music. That variation of the play has been picked up by other theaters, he said.
For Zaslove, the art form of theater is nothing new. He studied physical theater at Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris for two years, from 1964 to 1966, under a Fulbright scholarship.
“Receiving the Fulbright to go to Paris was the highest moment in my life at that time,” Zaslove said. “It was the most significant experience that I had, and I never looked back after that.
Zaslove received another Fulbright scholarship three years ago to teach theater in Iceland.
During his 40-year career working as a director, Zaslove spent 20 of those years at the Bathhouse Theater in Green Lake and has directed approximately 50 Shakespeare plays.
“Our Town,” Zaslove said, has the rich language of a Shakespeare play. When he read the play, Zaslove had to stop during the third act.
“It was so moving, so moving,” he said.
For actor Gordon Coffey, “Our Town” is about the human condition, with “universal applications” of mankind’s struggles. His character, the Stage Manager, is not a good guy or a bad guy, but a messenger for the “pass over.”
“He’s just the guy who comes and says, ‘Hey, it’s time,’” Coffey said. “And you know what? Nobody is ever ready.”
Coffey believes this adaptation is as close to the original meaning as they could get.
“I like the way we were not afraid to tackle the harder issues in this play," Coffey said. “When it’s time to be dark, it gets dark. But there are plenty of places to titter and laugh.”
A Hit and Run
“Our Town” is comprised of three acts. The first is about daily life in the small, fictional town of Grover’s Corners, N.H. The second concerns love and marriage, and the third addresses death. But Zaslove wanted the audience to know that the characters are dead from the beginning, so he opens the play with the iconic image from the third act, where the characters sit on the stage, draped in white fabric, dead.
“They’re all in purgatory; they’re waiting where they all are, so we’re opening there rather than ending there,” he said. “They came back to tell their story as a lesson.”
The lesson, Zaslove said, is to enjoy life, to enjoy the small things.
After a long career in the traditional-theater format, with long run times performing plays for a month straight, Zaslove wanted to do something different. He created his new company Hit and Run Theater Company. The plays have a short run time, like “Our Town,” which is only open for two weekends. Zaslove said this allows him to dig deeper into what a play means, something he wouldn’t have time for during a conventional run.
“We do a hit, and then we’re on the run,” Zaslove said.
Even though Zaslove appreciates the short run times, Coffey said he doesn’t like it, especially because “Our Town” has audience participation. Each night, random audience members are handed notecards with questions they should ask the Stage Manager when he calls for them.
“The missing link is the audience: They become part of the performance,” Coffey said. “It takes a while to adjust, [and] a longer run would help that.”
Different takes
Zaslove describes his new theater company’s approach as “ass-backwards.” Zaslove is relying on donations, ticket sales and grants to fund Hit and Run. All of the actors in “Our Town” are volunteering their time.
Many of the actors volunteered their time for a chance to work under Zaslove’s direction. Zaslove said his directing style is very improvisational: He doesn’t believe in going into rehearsals with finished ideas.
“When I read a play, I don’t hear it; I see it,” he said. “I know what the picture is, so I make the picture happen.”
Zaslove co-founded the Professional Actor Training Program at the University of Washington. When he taught directing, he brought boxes of art into the classroom and asked his students to find the movement and focus of the image. This helped the students translate what they see in the art into what they direct on the stage.
“You should know what’s going on without hearing the dialogue,” Zaslove said. “[It] has to be physicalized.”
Gianni Truzzi said he hated the play “Our Town” before he played Dr. Gibbs in Zaslove’s version. Truzzi thought it was sentimental and boring. He took the role for a chance to work with Zaslove and Coffey, whose talent he admires.
“[Zaslove] is a madman,” Truzzi said, laughing. “He’s very enthusiastic, very energetic. He’s eager to make sure everyone is on the same page and as excited as he is.”
Victoria Millard has known Zaslove for years through the clown community. She said she never knew “Our Town” was such a brilliant play before she was cast as Mrs. Gibbs.
Zaslove “has a gift for finding beauty in the moment, which infuses everything he does,” she said.
An unconventional space
The play is being staged in the Odd Fellows Hall in Capitol Hill. Zaslove said he wanted to do it in an unconventional space. The room is open, with a stage at the front. The actors weave through the aisles, coming from the back or the sides of the room or calling out things from the audience.
“After seeing how it is now, I don’t think I could do it in a conventional space,” Zaslove said.
The scenery is minimal, with chairs representing houses, church choirs and graveyards. As the play opens, the Stage Manager directs the audience to different areas of the room, indicating where the audience might find a schoolhouse or post office, if they look around the town being cobbled in their imagination.
A few antique tricycles, from Zaslove’s personal collection, are scattered around the room, relics of the past, to indicate that time goes by.
The Stage Manager interrupts the scene, telling the audience that they’re going back or forward in time, and the scene begins again in the past or the future.
The Stage Manager speaks more to the audience than the characters. But in one final scene, when a character is dead, gone too young, he listens to her when she asks: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”
Taking on the devil
After “Our Town” is over, Zaslove plans to work on “If Truman Met Einstein,” a political play asking how U.S. atomic history might have played out differently.
At the same time, he is exploring a different project concerning the devil. The desk in the small studio behind his house is lined with books about the devil. He’s working on a play asking who the devil is and how he may manifest himself in different people and cultures.
But until then, he’s focused on his unique interpretation of “Our Town” and getting more dates available for people to see the play.
“People are going to see [“Our Town”] in a way that’s not been done before,” he said.
“Retirement” is not a word in Zaslove’s vocabulary. He loves directing and plans to continue. “I’ll do it until my last days on earth I think,” he said.
Arne Zaslove will stage “Our Town” on Friday, Jan. 18, and Saturday, Jan. 19. For ticket information, go to BrownPaperTickets.com; seating is limited to 100 seats per performance.
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