More Information About Our Town

Description

Berkeley Rep brings Our Town back to our town!

"It's a little play with all the big subjects in it," Thornton Wilder wrote to his friend, Gertrude Stein--and that little play proved him right by forever changing American theatre. Opening in the first years of a new century, Our Town still speaks to us about the beauty and transience of life through its bittersweet portrait of a small American town. Like life, the story moves from the carefree to the profound: characters grow up, fall in love, get married, bear children and--in the heart-rending final act--encounter untimely death. The Pulitzer Prize-winning script from one of Berkeley High's most illustrious graduates has become so familiar that we forget how its debut revolutionized theatre.

Under the direction of Jonathan Moscone, who brought Ghosts to Berkeley Rep in 2004, our production cleaves to this revolutionary spirit. "Across the nation," writes Berkeley Rep Artistic Director Tony Taccone, "we are engaged in a debate about what it means to be an American. Issues that had become dormant, rights that we had taken for granted are being argued in a public forum and polarizing our country. What better time to revisit the play that has come to symbolize the ideal of how we live among each other? And what a perfect combination of irony and logic: this script that has become an ode to patriotism was written by a Berkeley radical attempting to shake things up."

About the Ticket Supplier: Berkeley Repertory Theatre

Known for its amazing and adventurous audience, the nonprofit has provided a home for emerging and established artists since 1968. With two stages and a Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre, Berkeley Rep premieres exhilarating new plays and reimagined classics. In the last five years alone, the company has helped send five shows to Broadway: Green Day's American Idiot, Bridge & Tunnel, In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), Passing Strange and Wishful Drinking. Come see tomorrow's plays today at Berkeley Rep.

Berkeley Rep operates two performance spaces: the Roda Theatre, a state-of-the-art 600-seat proscenium theatre, and the intimate, 400-seat Thrust Stage. The Theatre is located in the heart of downtown Berkeley's arts district, just a half block from the Berkeley BART station, near lots of restaurants, cafe, pubs, and cool retailers.