Iowa City Community Theatre opens season with ‘Our Town’

When one curtain falls, another one rises.

A year ago, the volunteers at the Iowa City Community Theatre (ICCT) thought their time at the Johnson County Fairgrounds would end at the close of the 2022-23 season.

So they embarked on an effort to find a new space — or spaces — in which to make theatrical magic onstage, behind the scenes and for their audiences. But they also kept speaking with fairgrounds officials.

“We were able to work with the fairgrounds to stay there for one more year,” said Elinor Levin of Iowa City, ICCT’s past president. She noted that Building A — dating back to the 1950s and the theater’s home since 1962 — has “too many problems to maintain at this point, unfortunately.” Among the challenges are cracks that lead to flooding, despite efforts to seal the foundation.

While searching for venues, the community theater turned to the community and found a lovely outdoor space in which to launch its 2023-24 season. Thorton Wilder’s classic, “Our Town,” will be presented on the Festival Stage in Iowa City’s Lower City Park from Sept. 8 to 17, 2023. The troupe will return there next May for the musical “Once Upon a Mattress.” In between, the rest of the season will be staged at the fairgrounds.

But that’s not the end of the story.

In another major development, ICCT has purchased property in Iowa City’s South of 6 Business District in the Pepperwood Plaza area. Levin said the site is along Pepperwood Lane, off Keokuk Road, and the community theater soon will launch a fundraising campaign to build its new home there.

“It gives us the opportunity to kind of custom build,” Levin said, adding that the best-case scenario would be to raise funds this season, and perhaps open in August 2025.

Right now, the fundraising goals are still in the works.

“We're working with a consulting firm to make sure that we are being realistic about that number,” she said. “ ... I've been working on this for about five years, and we did not move forward until we saw an actual avenue for success.

“We're an all-volunteer organization. We don't have any staff. Our of our board is all volunteer. Our directors and actors and scenic designers and technical designers are all volunteers. And so at no point does the board want to set the organization on a course for something that's not going to be sustainable and that's going to hurt us in the long run.”

Until then, they’re looking forward to this weekend’s season launch, and following Riverside Theatre’s free Shakespeare in the park example, they secured a show sponsor at a level that allows them to offer free admission to “Our Town.” But they also will gratefully accept donations.

“It really pays off in the availability for people to just get to experience live community theater,” Levin said. “So while it's not something that we as a board can afford to do every single show, it's something that we really felt was a great opportunity and helps more people to get that experience of live theater in our community.”

‘Our Town’

What better way to showcase community than a show about community.

Set in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners at the turn of the 20th century, the ICCT website says the play takes the townsfolk through their typical days, highlighting the “Webb and Gibbs families as their children fall in love, marry and eventually die.”

“It’s play in three acts,” said director Krista Neumann, 73, of Iowa City. “The first act is daily life. The second act is love and marriage. And the third act ... is about death.

“And so I think that's why it's been so successful, because it's a universal thing that we all go through. Whether we like it or not, death maybe far in the future, but we know internally that that's what's going to happen to all of us. Whether you’re rich or poor, you can’t avoid the process of life.”

At the end of the first run-through, "there were several of us weeping,“ Neumann said. Some of those tears were from relief, since the original director and the actor playing the main role of the narrator, called Stage Manager, had to step aside for health reasons about two weeks before the show opens.

Neumann, a professional actor on both coasts, had stepped to direct a previous directing gig locally when a director bowed out, and said yes when asked to do so again. Veteran actor Scot Hughes of Cedar Rapids played the narrator’s role in "Our Town“ at Central College in Pella during his student days, so he agreed to play the part again, 40 years later.

It felt “weirdly comfortable,” to pick up the role again, he said. “The lines came back easier than I thought — I still had to work hard on them, though.”

He had been cast as Mr. Webb, but since a replacement for the Stage Manager came with so little time to prepare, Neumann said it just made sense to have Hughes slide into that role.

“The thing is, it's familiar to him,” Neumann said. “He knows he knows the Stage Manager. He's got that warmth, he's got that ability to tell a story. ... It takes a certain kind of something. It’s not like being a character, and he has a deeper understanding ... for the Stage Manager.

“The Stage Manager is interesting,” she said, “because he has to watch a lot, he has to get out of the way a lot, he has to know when he is in the scene. And Scot just has this natural ability because he did it in his formative years in college.”

She sees a mysticism in the Stage Manager, who helps makes the scenes come to life. It’s a thread that runs throughout the show, as they discover in death that life is really about the mundane, everyday things that mean the most.

“There is a mysticism by the end of the play about all human beings,” Neumann said, as well as lessons to learn about the unity that blurs lines between differences in religion, politics, occupations, cultures and stations in life in Grover’s Corners.

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com