It started with an email newsletter: “Broadway Briefing.” I get it everyday. Some days I read through it all, and some days I only glance. 

This day in late April/early May 2024, there was a press release about an upcoming revival of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town starring Jim Parsons. I glanced at the announcement, clicked on the link and saw the photos of the cast. 

Later, I found myself wondering: Why would anyone want to produce this play again?

The last production of Our Town I saw was in Seattle in the early 2000’s at the Intiman Theatre, with Tom Skerritt as the Stage Manager. All I remember about that show was how charming Tom Skerritt was as a narrator and how they did some amazing effect with a big pile of Christmas lights. Nothing else about the production, or the story, stuck with me.

This caused a new question to form in my mind, one I just couldn’t seem to shake: What could an updated version of Our Town be and do for a contemporary audience? 

I envisioned a multimedia, modern-day retelling that would bring the timeless themes of Wilder’s classic to life for today’s theatergoers. I mentioned the idea to a few people; they were intrigued, but not overly enthused.

Then my husband threw me a 50th birthday party, which allowed me to reconnect to some of my favorite people, Dr. Adrienne MacIain among them. I pitched the Our Town idea to her. After sleeping on it, she shared an idea: what if we reimagined the story in the future, specifically the year 2038 (100 years after its original debut).

This kicked off a wonderful discussion around how we could use Our Town as a jumping-off point to explore what American culture and community could look like in the not-so-distant future. How could we use Thornton Wilder’s timeless story to help a contemporary American audience grapple with the big questions of life and death in a theatrical format? 

Questions like: 

• What does it mean to take ownership of the place where we live and die? To call a community Our Town?

• What do we want Our Town, our country, and our lives to be, today and into the future? 

• What stands in our way? 

This led us to the theme of connection: how difficult it is for people to look up from their technology and make real time connections with people, with their work, with anything important to them. To just be where they are, look up, and truly see what’s in front of them. 

That’s when it occurred to us that, when it comes to the theatre, the process is just as important as the product, if not more so. We envisioned a workshop setting that would empower emerging artists to explore new possibilities and connect: with the text, with each other, with professional mentors, and with their innate ability to innovate, collaborate, and create.

Thus the Look Up Lab and its first piece of programming, The Our Town Project, were born.

We want to tell stories theatrically, physically and visually. To get people to think outside the black mirrors they spend so much time and energy on and with. To help humans connect.

We tell and retell the same stories because they tap into universal truths about the human condition that we all relate to, that we all find transcendent. That is why Our Town is produced so often. It asks people to look at something and actually see it. 

Look Up.