After over one year of silence and darkness at the Haugh Performing Arts Center, action has returned to the stage—outside the Haugh.
The Haugh Performing Arts Center hosted three outdoor performances of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” by Citrus College theatre arts students at 7 p.m. from Sept. 24 to Sept. 26 in the VPA courtyard.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning play follows the lives of the residents of Grover’s Corners, a small town in New Hampshire. While the characters navigate their daily lives, they encounter the challenges of love, belonging, purpose and community.
The Gibbs and Webb children, first introduced as neighborhood study buddies, eventually marry, have relationship challenges, grow old and experience loss. The milestones in their lives are contained within the show’s two-and-a-half hour runtime and remind the audience that the precious moments in their lives pass by quickly and should be savored.
The stage manager has the unique role of keeping the audience engaged while also participating in the plot. He is an overseer of both the daily lives of the families in Grover’s Corner and the audience’s experience.
The cast had been preparing for the show for about three months, said Ricardo Estrada, who played the stage manager. Due to health concerns, the show was repeatedly postponed, but was quickly resurrected when it was safe to do so.
“During the entire process, we stayed healthy, we followed regulations, we did everything to code, we didn’t have any hiccups in the fact that this group is able to be so connected after such a long period of being disconnected from one another,” Estrada said.
The stage crew controlled lights and sound from a tent behind the audience, some bundled in blankets as they worked in the cold. They set up the stage and lighting in just one week, stage crew member Justin Gomez said.
“I really miss this,” Gomez said. “I really wanted to do it throughout COVID, but because it was online, it was much harder to do.” He is grateful for the friends he’s made and opportunities to learn and teach skills in the Emerging Theatre Technologies program at Citrus.
As the last rays of sun set over campus, stage lights illuminated the courtyard, audience members shuffled in and the play was introduced by director Jason Buuck.
With minimal props and stage design, actors filled the stage in 1900s attire to the tune of “Spiegel im Spiegel” by Arvo Pärt.
Most of the character’s actions were mimed, with no props (but some chairs) for any of the objects they interacted with, but it wasn’t the material things that were important—it was the moments the characters shared on the stage.
Estrada, the stage manager, played Simon Stimson, the town church’s choir director in a production of the play at his high school.
“That was the first show I ever did, and got me into acting,” Estrada said. “It kind of was, just, a full circle, which is nice.” He said the play reminded him of the “things that we should be happy about that we just tend to miss” in our own lives. “There’s definitely a lot that connected with me personally.”
