Caution: This is a workshop. This is a draft. This is not a fully formed anything.
Rude Mechs invites you to join us for a very first draft of a first draft of a new play based on the production we mounted of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town back in 2024.
We are at the place where we want your feedback to help us head in a direction we all want to go with this work. We have A LOT of ideas. We’ve narrowed them down to roughly 45 to 60 minutes of material (we don’t know yet), and we want you to watch, dance, then hang out afterwards and talk to us about it.
on stage
Mari Akita, Alexandra Bassiakou Shaw, Haddon Britt, Madge Darlington, Thomas Graves, Lana Lesley, and Keren Sofia Ortega, along with friends who are dropping in and out as we go.
accessibility
We strive to host inclusive, accessible events that enable all individuals, including individuals with disabilities, to engage fully. If you have questions about accessibility or require an accommodation such as CART captioning or ASL interpretation to participate in this event, please contact Accessibility Manager Madge Darlington via boxoffice”at”rudemechs.com. Requests made by two weeks in advance will generally allow us to provide seamless access, but Rude Mechs will make every effort to meet requests made after this date.
about Our Town from the Wilder estate website :
This timeless drama of life in the mythical village of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, has become an American classic with universal appeal. Thornton Wilder’s most frequently performed play, Our Town appeared on Broadway in 1938 to wide acclaim, and won the Pulitzer Prize. From the very beginning, Our Town has been produced throughout the world.
Our Town explores the relationship between two young Grover’s Corners neighbors, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, whose childhood friendship blossoms into romance, and then culminates in marriage. When Emily looses her life in childbirth, the circle of life portrayed in each of the three acts of Our Town–growing up, adulthood, and death–is fully realized.
Wilder offers a couple of chairs on a bare stage as the backdrop for an exploration of the universal human experience. The simple story of a love affair is constantly rediscovered because it asks timeless questions about the meaning of love, life and death. In the final moments of the play, the recently deceased Emily is granted the opportunity to revisit one day in her life, only to discover that she never fully appreciated all she possessed until she lost it. “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you,” she says as she takes her place among the dead.