Unique production of 'Our Town' Coming to Pitt-Bradford

A unique production of the classic play “Our Town” will be presented by Little Green Pig Theater next week at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford.

Thornton Wilder’s popular Pulitzer-prize winning drama will take the stage at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 28 in the Bromeley Family Theater in Blaisdell Hall.

The Five Points Star arts blog called the Little Green Pig production “a fresh, innovative, heart-squeezing new production.”

Performed with an all African-American cast, director Jay O’Berski told the Chapel Hill (N.C.) News that the Durham, N.C., theater group follows Wilder’s story line.

“It’s a place where birth, weddings and death are unencumbered by the sensationalistic elements that normally accompany black stories in modern media. It’s a look at what was and what is, through the lens of America’s most produced, iconic play.”

Five Points said the cast, which must play multiple roles, is “uniformly strong,” and particularly praised J. Alphonse Nicholson as teenager George Gibbs and Aurelia Belfield as protagonist Emily Webb.

Dr. Kevin Ewert, professor of theater at Pitt-Bradford, said, “In 2006, Little Green Pig did Checkhov’s ‘The Cherry Orchard’ with an all-black cast. It was extraordinary. It was like watching a new play that also happened to be this great classic, where the quiet museum reverence was traded in for something with a lot more life in it. ‘Our Town’ is being similarly reinvented.”

Little Green Pig is a nonprofit theater company with a model that is experimental but accessible, strange and dreamlike, but familiar and immediate.

Tickets are $6 for the public and $2 for all students and may be purchased through the Bromeley box office by calling (814)362-5113.

For disability-related need, contact the Office of Disability Resources and Services at (814)362-7609 or clh71@pitt.edu.

The news leader of the Twin Tiers ... since 1947