OUR TOWN Will Return to Broadway in 2024, Directed by Kenny Leon

Tony Award-winner Kenny Leon 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 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.

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.  

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