beginning: our town at st. margaret's academy, arusha, tanzania

I was sitting in the posh lobby of my hair salon in the West Village one rainy rainy Friday night when my cell phone rang. It was Nancy.

“I’ve just had an idea,” she said. “What do you think of doing Our Town this summer with the kids at St. Margaret’s??”

“Perfect,” I said, trying to contain my enthusiasm in front of the other customers who sat there elegantly flipping through fashion magazines, while at the same time trying to speak as loudly into the phone as possible, as if that would help my voice to carry through the storm which was flipping umbrellas on a regular basis outside the tall glass windows facing 8th Avenue.

“I have to read it again,” she said, “But XXX suggested it and I thought, what a great idea. I think I’ve re-read every play Shakespeare ever wrote, and none of them seem very African to me.”

“That sounds great!” I say. “And I’ll be there a month early, so I can help with interviews.”

“Perfect,” she said, “Let’s meet and read it over and see if we can put a blueprint together before you leave.”

“Great.”

And besides the fact that I eventually had to walk home through the storm which thoroughly drenched my new haircut, everything was perfect.

And then, we started reading the play.

Phrases such as the following presented some problems.

pg. 4. Well, I’d better show you how our town lies. Up here - is Main Street. Way back there is the railway station; tracks go that way. Polish Town’s across the tracks, and some Canuck families.

“What kind of rail system is there in Tanzania?” Nancy asks me. We’re sitting in her Brooklyn apartment over something delicious she created out of couscous and chickpeas, also, some ginger cookies and some kind of mango ice cream.

“I’ve never seen a train,” I say. “There are some tracks by the airport but I don’t think they’re in use.”

“Ok, no problem, we’ll figure out what to put there,” she says. And we come to Polish town and just start laughing. “Obviously, we’ll have to change that.” She’s been to Tanzania twice and I’ve been four times, and lived there for six months, but still we don’t feel comfortable just making stuff up, so we start making a list of questions for me to ask when I get there.

pg. 5. This is our doctor’s house, Doc Gibbs’.... in those days our newspaper come out twice a week - the Grover’s Corners Sentinel - and this is Editor Webb’s house...

“Do your friends read newspapers in Tanzania?” she asks me.

“Hmm... not really... they sell them on the streets in town but mostly Western papers for tourists,” I say. “Most news travels by word of mouth, or on television.”

“Okay, so maybe Emily’s father can have a different job... and we’ll need to find something besides delivering papers for Joe Crowell in the first scene. What do most of the men do in your neighborhood?”

“Well... in the family I lived with, it was my host mother who worked,” I say.

“Well, okay, let’s make Emily’s mother the one who works,” she says. “Now let’s go on...”

And pretty soon we realized that Thornton Wilder’s Our Town was written about a couple of middle class families in a small town in New Hampshire in 1901, something he makes very clear in the first few utterances of Act One. Of course, the idea is that by looking at the very specific things about that one town, one can experience the universal truth about Our Town, Our life, Our lives. But when we re-read the play, we thought, how universal is this, really? How do you do this play in a town where people aren’t guaranteed the chance to go to school, university, or even the doctor? Will starting with this play be its own kind of cultural imperialism? Why compare? If the point is to celebrate the day to day life we live, why talk about how in America the first automobiles came around in 1906, when many of the people they know don’t have cars (and might not even want them)? At least half of the kids at the school where we’re doing the play have lost both birth parents, and they are young. How can we elegantly enter into the issues of the third act, given that these kids know more about death than we do?

So we decided to start from scratch. Three acts. The first: Daily Life. The second: Love and Marriage. The third: well, we decided to figure that out when we got there. Something about endings.