Your Town

Watch a film version of “Your Town”: https://youtu.be/dBME1jZSphI

A NOTE FROM THE PLAYWRIGHT

I consider Thornton Wilder’s Our Town to be one of the greatest plays ever written. It takes place in a small New Hampshire town named Grover’s Corners between 1901 and 1913, but its themes are huge and universal. One of Wilder’s innovations was a character known simply as the Stage Manager, who describes for the audience where the town is, who lives in it, and what they’ll find there. But every time I see Our Town, whether on stage or on film, I can’t help but wonder what Grover’s Corners might be like today. And that was the impetus for Your Town, which I wrote as a fifteen-minute play for one actor, called the Stage Manager, to be performed on an empty stage. In this short work, I tried to take into account the America we live in today, yet keep the plain, folksy tone the Stage Manager uses in Our Town. When my play was chosen to be part of Equity Library Theatre of New York’s Virtual New Works Festival, an opportunity arose to film Your Town, The film was produced and directed by Anthony Caruso of Pocketbear Productions and stars Sam Tsoutsouvas, a veteran New York stage actor. Over one sweltering weekend in August 2021, Anthony and his cameraman Sebastian Blue scouted locations in and around a small town in Pennsylvania and filmed Your Town. The play is meant to have a sharp, satirical bite—but I think you will have no trouble recognizing the Your Town we all live in today.