UNT opera production highlights small-town life

by Amanda Mielcerak of North Texas Daily

The floor of the Lyric Theater, donning the blueprint of fictional town Grover's Corners, will be livened tomorrow night with the UNT Opera and Chamber Orchestra's performance of Ned Rorem's Our Town.

The show will take place at 8 p.m. at the theater, which is in the Murchison Performing Arts Center.

The show will be conducted by Stephen Dubberly and directed by Paula Homer, both of the music faculty. Based on Thornton Wilder's play of the same name, the opera premiered in 2006. Tomorrow night's show will mark the opera's Southwest premiere.

Our Town takes place at the turn of the 20th century in a small town in New Hampshire.

"It's about common people living common lives and how very dramatic that is," Homer said. The play seeks to communicate how "we feel like we are something big and nothing all at the same time," she said.

Rorem's operatic translation of Wilder's play seeks to maintain the simplicity of the original work, as does UNT's production.

"[Wilder] believed if you give the audience everything on the set, the audience will feel detached from the play because that's the world of the play, and you're sitting outside of it," Homer said. "He took away all but the barest necessities of the set, so the actors are moving in simple sets. He hoped this would make the audience engage their imagination and start to see themselves in the play and relate more directly and deeply inside the world of the play."

In this spirit, the stage is left nearly bare, with only a few scattered chairs, benches and tables.

Instead of using hand props, the performers mime using whatever prop they would be holding. In lieu of extravagant sets, the production relies heavily on the performers, the imagination of the audience and dramatic lighting to communicate its various themes.

Leading the audience through the lives of the residents of Grover's Corners is the stage manager, who is played by vocal studies graduates Kevin Park for half of the shows and Jonathan Yarrington for the other half.

"He's sort of the master educator," Yarrington said. "The very first thing he says at the beginning of the play is 'they don't understand' and 'they'll never understand,' which is essentially the point of the play."

Of course, transitioning a piece from prose to libretto has its challenges.

"The most challenging part is making sure the text is intelligible," Yarrington said. "To come out and start singing creates distance, eliminating the natural ease of the play. The challenge is to try to go beyond that and make it conversational."

The show, which will have three repeat performances, will be preceded by a lecture titled "In the Know," presented by Dubberly. The lecture is about the opera and its composer and will feature a video in which Rorem answers questions pertaining to the opera. Tickets for the show cost between $15 and $35, the latter price including dessert and wine.