[Aired Wednesday, March 7th.] Today we speak with Dr. David Cook, who has been on our show several times before, has been a member of the Theatre faculty here at the University of Tulsa for more than 30 years, and has announced that he'll retire at the end of this school year. Therefore, Cook is currently directing his final production for the TU Theatre Department: Thornton Wilder's iconic American masterpiece, "Our Town," which opens tomorrow night (Thursday the 8th) and runs through Sunday afternoon (the 11th) at the Chapman Theater in Kendall Hall on the TU campus. (Here's information about show times and tickets.) This widely beloved and highly influential work --- one of the most-performed plays in the world today, with productions happening all the time, all over the globe --- is, at its core, a three-act narrative composed in the late 1930s about life and death in smalltown America in the early 1900s. And further, as Dr. Cook notes on our program, quoting from some promotional copy of his own devising, "Our Town" is "so many things: it is the mirror held up to our American nature; it is the staged picture of what we were and hope to be; it is the spiritual reminder of what is important in our lives; it is, in Wilder’s words, 'an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life,' and finally, it is, arguably I suppose, our greatest play."
"Our Greatest Play" --- TU's Department of Theatre Presents "Our Town"
