Skidmore News

Issue date: 3/5/10 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Media Credit: Courtesy of Katherine Sommer From left: Jeremy Ohringer '13, Julie Dietz '11, Kim Brown '10, Nicole Dancel '13. Photo courtesy of Katherine Sommer

Opening this weekend in the Blackbox of the Janet Kinghorn Bernhard Theater is "Thornton Wilder - The Trivial and the Divine." The play will be performed at 7 p.m from March 5 to 6 and 8 to 10, and at 2 p.m on March 7. While tickets for the weekend shows are sold out, there are still plenty available for the March 8 to 10 shows.

The show, which is a collection of six plays by Thornton Wilder, sports an ensemble cast featuring Julia Dietz '11, Jeremy Ohringer '13, Hannah Tamminen '10 and Nicole Dancel '13. It is directed by seniors Meredith Hackman and Katherine Sommer. Sommer took the time to sit down with Skidmore News to discuss the show.

Skidmore News: What is the show about?

Katherine Sommer: We took six short plays by Thornton Wilder and put them together with one overarching idea that kind of ties them all together. It focuses on themes of journey and moments in life that seem mundane or could be considered trivial, but aren't necessarily.

SN: Which Wilder plays were used to put the show together?

KS: There are two longer plays that are each about half-an-hour. One is "The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden" and the other is "The Long Christmas Dinner." And then there are four much shorter plays that are around three pages each. We used them to tie everything together.

SN: What is special about this play?

KS: It's something different. Meredith Hackman and I directed it together, and there are two different perspectives coming together to create one piece. Also, it's six plays that were not at all written to be together. We created character arcs that aren't written. It's really interested to see how the different plays that Wilder wrote focused on the same themes and how his language fits together nicely.

We're also using the room in a way that hasn't been done before. We have two stages, so the audience is on either side. And action happens on both stages. The whole concept with both the set and the costumes is artistic.

SN: How did you go about putting the plays together?

KS: We didn't change anything about the plays themselves, except for the names here and there, because it will make it less confusing if certain characters have only one name. But we pretty much conceptualized it all and picked which plays and the order.

SN: How did you choose which plays to use?

KS: We read everything he wrote and picked out the ones that we liked the best. And then it ended up working out. It took a lot of work to figure out the character arcs, because the characters aren't meant to be the same people.

SN: Why Thornton Wilder?

KS: He's most known for writing the play "Our Town," and that's all that anyone knows about him. It was a really pivotal play in American theater and he won a Pulitzer Prize for it. And he won two others. But he also wrote novels. He wrote "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," which he also won an award for. He wrote a screenplay for "Shadow of a Doubt," which is a Hitchcock movie.

He did things for theater, in terms of putting the theatricality on the stage. What he did for "Our Town" is have the stage manager actually on the stage.

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