A play nearly as old as the school itself, South’s Pointe Players’ production of Our Town gives strong insight into the lives we choose to live every day through the lens of the tiny 18-century fictional town, Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire.
Starting out as a profile of normal, boring life, the play follows the Webbs and the Gibbs families going about their repetitive days, always fairly content with the world around them. Nearing the end of Act One, teenagers Emily Webb (Aliana Ritter ‘25) and George Gibbs (Zach Neme ‘26) take a liking to each other, leading into Act Two, where they get married. However, Act Three shows a different perspective on the world through the eyes of the dead, philosophizing about the meaning of life and what people do with the time they have every day.
One performance stole the show, that performance being Ritter as Emily Webb. Ritter was able to deliver her witty and quick lines flawlessly throughout the first two acts, and still anchor the emotional contents of the play in the third act as her character struggles to find a conclusion to her life. She understood her character to the level of being fully confident in her every move, fully transforming into Emily during the show. Ellie Sahutske ‘26’s role as the narrator of our story is an impressive feat in itself, not only because she memorized nearly half of the lines spoken in the whole play, but also because she was able to deliver them with an astounding level of patience and composure.
Every cast member seemed to understand their characters to a T, from Neme’s confident cluelessness as George to Neo Neds-Fox’s accurately unwise marriage advice of an 18th-century father. For a play that many high school students might not know to appreciate to its fullest extent in my opinion, every single student working on it seemed to resonate with the profound and sometimes alarming themes of death, its inevitability, and everything leading up to it.
While that may seem like a broad theme, that is exactly how Our Town makes you feel: “broad.” You think of life in a broad sense, questioning just how long you will be here for. You think of society in a broad sense, grouping the mannerisms of an American household with those of a Babylonian household. However, you feel tiny at the same time. 90 years of living shrinks down to just the run time of a stage production, and the things you worry about feel miniscule in the long run.
Our Town takes two hours to make an audience of people reflect on a lifetime of events, which, to me, is a remarkably impressive feat.
