Kenny Leon to direct Broadway Revival of Our Town For 2024-2025 Season
Tony Award-winner Kenny Leon, who directed the current critically and widely-acclaimed Broadway production of Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch now open at The Music Box Theatre, will direct a new Broadway production of Our Town by Thornton Wilder in the fall of 2024. This will be the first major Broadway revival of the classic play in nearly 25 years. The dates, cast, and a theatre will be announced at a later date.
The design team for Our Town will include scenic design by Tony Award-winner Beowulf Boritt (New York, New York; Act One,), costume design by Tony Award-nominee and Drama Desk Award-winner Dede Ayite (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding; Topdog/Underdog), lighting design by Tony Award-nominee Allen Lee Hughes (Topdog/Underdog; A Soldier’s Play), sound design by Tony Award-nominee Justin Ellington (Ohio State Murders; for colored girls…) and the dialect coach will be Kate Wilson (The Shark is Broken, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window).
Kenny Leon, hailed as a “maestro” by The Washington Post and noted by The New Yorker as having “a flair for showmanship and sizzle” is one of the most accomplished directors of the American stage. In recent years, he has staged powerhouse and highly acclaimed productions of Suzan Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog (Tony Award for Best Revival), Ohio State Murders by Adrienne Kennedy, A Soldier’s Play, Fences, American Son and two revivals of A Raisin in the Sun garnering him a Tony Award for Best Director. In the spring of 2024, he will direct the previously announced Broadway production of Home by Samm-Art Williams presented by Roundabout Theatre Company at the American Airlines Theatre.
“Thornton Wilder’s Our Town - in my mind stands at the top of the Mount Rushmore of great American Theatre,” said Kenny Leon. “I feel blessed and fortunate to have gained the trust of The Wilder estate to present this classic to another generation of theatre lovers. It’s long been a burning desire to collaborate on a Broadway production of such magnitude that speaks so beautifully and intimately to all people about our shared time on the planet.”
Speaking for the Wilder family, the playwright’s nephew and literary executor, Tappan Wilder said: “The Wilders are thrilled beyond measure that the distinguished director Kenny Leon has agreed to direct Our Town on Broadway. The stars are truly aligned for Grover’s Corners, the play about everywhere.”
Our Town, the timeless drama of life in the mythical village of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, has become an American classic with universal appeal. Thornton Wilder’s most frequently performed play, Our Town appeared on Broadway in 1938 to wide acclaim, and won the Pulitzer Prize. From the very beginning, Our Town has been produced throughout the world.
Our Town explores the relationship between two young Grover’s Corners neighbors, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, whose childhood friendship blossoms into romance, and then culminates in marriage. When Emily loses her life in childbirth, the circle of life portrayed in each of the three acts of Our Town–growing up, adulthood, and death–is fully realized. Wilder offers a couple of chairs on a bare stage as the backdrop for an exploration of the universal human experience. The simple story of a love affair is constantly rediscovered because it asks timeless questions about the meaning of love, life and death. In the final moments of the play, the recently deceased Emily is granted the opportunity to revisit one day in her life, only to discover that she never fully appreciated all she possessed until she lost it. “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you,” she says as she takes her place among the dead.
MORE ABOUT THORNTON WILDER AND OUR TOWN
“The play’s success across cultural borders around the world attests to its being something much greater than an American play: it is a play that captures the universal experience of being alive.”
-Donald Margulies in his foreword to Our Town
"If I were asked to name what I consider to be the finest serious American play, I would immediately say Our Town--not for its giant Americanness but because it is a superbly written, gloriously observed, tough, and breathtaking statement of what it is to be alive, the wonder and hopeless loss of the space between birth and the grave."
-Edward Albee in his foreword to Thornton Wilder: A Life
Best-selling author Ann Patchett, whose recently published 2023 critically acclaimed novel “Tom Lake: A Novel” (#1 New York Times Bestseller; A Reese’s Book Club Pick) was influenced by her love and appreciation of Our Town with the novel paralleling and referencing the play.
Patchett wrote the following in her Author’s Note: “I thank Thornton Wilder, who wrote the play that has been an enduring comfort, guide, and inspiration throughout my life. If this novel has a goal, it is turn the reader back to Our Town, and to all of Wilder’s work therein lies the joy.”
Thornton Wilder did most of his writing while traveling away from his home in Hamden, CT. Our Town was written on transatlantic steamers, in hotels and in hideaways across the United States and Europe, especially in Switzerland. His fictional town of Grover’s Corners was inspired by the real-life New Hampshire town of Peterborough, home to MacDowell, the famed artists residency program where Wilder stayed and wrote. Patchett herself, also had a residency there.
In a New York Times essay titled “The Genius of Grover’s Corners” in 2007 at the time of publication of Thornton Wilder’s volume of drama in the Library of America (“Wilder’s Collected Plays & Writings on Theater”), Jeremy McCarter wrote: “When stated properly, the play doesn’t let us feel simple nostalgia. We ought to weep at Emily’s famous line not because she finds earth wonderful, but because she was unable to find it so during her close-minded life in her close-minded town – which is, of course, our town. Wilder makes a profound statement about the limits of human understanding here, one that requires delicacy and a little steel to convey.”
For more background information on Thornton Wilder and the history of Our Town, please visit https://www.thorntonwilder.com/our-town, the official website of the Thornton Wilder family.
This production is being produced by Jeffrey Richards, Hunter Arnold, Craig Balsam, Irene Gandy, Rebecca Gold, Louise Gund, Willette & Manny Klausner, M/B/P Productions, Daryl Roth and Jayne Baron Sherman.