Pale yellow chairs, I bring my dead

Our Town previews start tonight. We open Wednesday. Next Thursday, 10/14, is Pay What You Can night -- be at the Intiman at noon to buy tix; limit 4/person, min $5/ticket.

The set is of wood which has all been sanded, bleached, and stained a uniform dry pale yellow. The theatre has been stripped to its back wall, cavernous, with the thrust removed and a proscenium frame built. Audience will sit on throw pillows in the half-circle where the thrust used to be. The proscenium frame, the floor, chairs, tables, hatrack, ladders, and rolling door-frames are all pale yellow. It is amazing how theatrically that one decision lifts all the actors. Everything becomes a symbol. In dim light, the set feels like a desert, dawn. In white light, it looks like the sun.

Costumes follow an arc from pale to vivid -- in Daily Life they are pale, at the Wedding they are brighter, and in the graveyard they are most vivid.

None of the plain spidery wood chairs are of the same make, nor are the tables. Even the ladders are different heights, to support the illusion that the Stage Manager is using whatever is handy backstage, to tell the story.

From the sky, a stardrop -- a transparent cloud, sprinkled with lights -- slowly lowers in front of the choir as they sing. It is hand-made from four 8' sheets of fiber-optic cables, looped and strung, with lights twinkling every 2 or 3 feet. In the dark, you can't see the cables. all you see are hundreds of tiny firefly lights, like stars. We borrowed it from Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

In the rainy scene later, the fiber optic lights are turned off, and the cables are revealed in all their dull plastic drabness against a four-storey back-lit grey wall. They look like loops and loops of hospital tubing, hanging down. The glints on the cross-loops look like rain. A perfect Brechtian touch by Chris Akerlind, the scenic designer, where even the magic gets stripped back. Plainness is a deeper magic.

From the front rows, it's an actors' play. From the back rows, it's a director's. A Kabuki set, a Kabuki take.

"This is a received play," said Bart at our first run-through. "You could play these characters for a thousand years, and still not have explored everything that's there."

Our Town was one of my father's favorite plays to direct. During tech, while the stardrop twinkled in the blackness, and the choir sang, "Blessed Be The Tie That Binds," I put him on the seat beside me. "Look, Daddy -- I'm in a real theatre. Look how big that stage is. All those lights. We're doing Our Town. Those are real actors. That's a movie star doing the stage manager -- a 71-year-old, not a high school kid. That director, he trained in England. The set designer, he's from the East Coast. Listen, here come George and Emily."

I bring my dead to watch a play about the dead returning to watch a day.

"Pick the most unimportant day you can," advises one of the dead, when Emily is preparing to go back. "It will be important enough."