Greg Maupin takes one of the tall chairs near the piano, a stack of identical books beside him. When the reading begins, he leans back, stretches out his legs with one elbow propped on the chair’s back. Tonight, and not for the first time, he’s reading the part of Simon Stimson, and so he keeps his own script in his hands, closed. In a little while he’ll lead us all in a tuneless rendition of “Blessed Be the Ties That Bind” – the worse, we are either warned or advised, the better. Until just before Simon is mentioned, though, he gazes somewhere just beyond the center of the circle of others who have gathered with him for another meeting of the Church of Our Town. I end up watching his expression when I’m not looking at whoever is reading lines at the moment, wondering why now he’s nodding or what would make someone look so moved by people acting out an average breakfast scene. He looks focused in a way that is neither intense nor distant, both present with the people around him and also in some far-off place and time I would like very much to visit.
There, the day is May 7th, 1901. The time is just before dawn in the town of Grover’s Corners.
Now I have to interrupt again here. You see, we want to know how all this began – this wedding, this plan to spend a lifetime together. I’m awfully interested in how big things like that begin.
Stage Manager, Act II
Approximately 53% of Louisville is religious in one way or another, but by my estimate less than 0.0005% of its inhabitants attend the Church of Grover’s Corners. You won’t find it on any map, not down in the holler or beyond the tracks. It meets maybe once a month or two, in different spaces, but the ritual the people of Grover’s Corners practice is always the same: a group of people gather to share food and read Our Town by Thorton Wilder aloud.
That’s a play that comes with some pretty loaded connotations. “It’s become the epitome of community theater and not in a positive way. It’s an easy play to do in the sense that you don’t need much in the way of sets…. It’s deliberately meant to be not elaborate. There’s also a lot of parts that make it attractive for community theater,” Tara said. The stage directions direct actors to mime actions rather than perform them with real objects. But it’s also unbreakable: “There can be more skillful or less skillful productions – you can’t ruin it,” Tara said. Thorton Wilder won his second Pulitzer for it and has seen many adaptations from its first run to the 1955 TV musical to the 2006 opera composed by Ned Rorem.
When the 2014 Actors Theater run of Our Town ended, putting the play on day in and day out had not spoiled the experience for Greg one bit. He joked that the cast should get together once a month and read it again, although the cast lived spread out across the country. When a discussion of people’s first experience with Our Town started online as part of a celebration of the play’s 80th anniversary, he shared the sentiment on Twitter and discovered other people thought this was a church they’d like to join, too. On February 11th, 2018, the Church of Grover’s Corners met for the first time. It would have been Emily Webb’s 131st birthday.
Since then, this “non-belief based church” has met a little less frequently than once a month for just over a year. Tara Anderson has hosted several times, but they’ve also met at Odeon and the Old Louisville Brewery. The important criteria are that people can gather and read in relative quiet, which is a practical consideration as well as indicative of the kind of reverence attendees have for the experience. “I haven’t been a traditional church-going person for many many years but I admit there’s an aspect about getting together in a room with a bunch of people who agree that’s what they’re there for to kind of think about how all this stuff works. Not to necessarily tell you, but to go, ‘Weird, right?’- and Our Town very much does that,” Greg said.
The Church of Grover’s Corners is community theater, in the sense that theater modifies community. The theater is almost incidental, because the ritual of reading Our Town is not a performance of the play. First, and between acts, there is a potluck for people to have dinner and chat. Greg deals parts to whomever is willing to read them, without adhering to the gender or age or type of the character. Sometimes, they’re deliberately casts against type, like the occasion he cast a couple as husband and wife. “I gave them the role of Emily’s parents and asked them to swap – he played mom and she played dad. And he did just the little bit – he’s a tenor anyway, he softened his voice up; she was a little surlier – she’s a mezzo, she can do it. That’s all they did, they didn’t do a thing… and Act III – which is the heartbreaking act which the mom does a lot of stuff in – in the moment you’re like I’ve never thought of it this way before, because why would I? You’ve cast a person who was right for the part, but I’ve seen this play several times over the last six months and many times before that and now like, okay that. It still has things. Apparently I haven’t seen it too many times.”
While there are professional actors among the unconventional congregation, there are also folks who have no acting experience whatsoever. “People are stumbling over words or missing lines because they weren’t paying attention, but it doesn’t matter,” Tara told me months before I was able to attend, and it’s true. I missed both times my character began speaking because I was distracted listening and later because I was trying and failing not to cry.
EMILY: Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?
STAGE MANAGER: No. (Pause.) The saints and poets, maybe – they do some.
After the reading was over, the man who had played Professor Willard told me it had been remarkable to see my reaction during the third act. The stage directions describe the professor as a “rural savant,” and his particular rendition of Willard’s methodical, monotone rambling was maybe the funniest delivery of the evening. It was also the first time he’d been to a reading, and it was very kind of him to put his comment that way: I sobbed heavily from the moment A Woman Among the Dead mentions hoping for hymns until the very last line.
It’s not embarrassing to talk about how deeply moved I was, sitting among mostly strangers I’d never met and crying openly as the play progressed on around me in the same steady and unalterable way that life always does. That is what gives the ritual of the Church of Grover’s Corners meaning, after all: not that crying is required, but that the experience is both deeply, deeply personal and communally supported. It explains Greg’s concentration that had me so fascinated me – I figure he’s participated in this play over 30 times now, the longest-practicing member of this faith without any explicit beliefs.
I’m sure there’s plenty of different meanings to be gleaned from the play, but one of the biggest is the importance of appreciating the mundane expressions of feeling that we come to regard as background noise. Tara described it to me as “a play about your mom making breakfast,” a premise that seems at first glance to be too little to sustain an entire play, but when the dead look back to the living in Act III, Emily and the audience both realize. In the context of the play, to realize is to really see one another, to have an appreciation for ordinary things like a breakfast your mom makes you and how those mundane things constitute so much of what defines being alive. “As a mother, this play has meant a lot to me because it kind of reminds me of the value of those little everyday things I do for my family that can sometimes start to feel like drudgery – but then you remember that this is the fabric of my children’s growing up,” Tara said. “It’s not meaningless, and it’s not something to rush through.”
At the Church of Grover’s Corners, the story of making breakfast and having a potluck and getting married and crying is made ordinary by its repetition, and in its repetition becomes ritual, too. This is realizing: the holiness of the everyday.
Communities are made of people, individuals, who all have meaningful ordinary lives that are not passive recipients of enlightenment through art but whose active engagement with art has the power to make material differences in their personal and collective lives, and to construct and transform understanding of artistic meaning and value at the personal and collective scale. The power of an arts renaissance is often measured in terms of economic value – tickets sold, dollars made and spent, businesses enticed – but its real power is in these ordinary, often unseen moments where in our interactions with art, or music, or writing, or a communal reading of a play about ordinary lives in an ordinary town we realize something saints and poets know.
So I’m going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now’ll know a few simple facts about us – more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight. See what I mean? So – people a thousand years from now – this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.
Stage Manager, Act I.
the Louisville Renaissance Project 