OUR TOWN

ABOUT THE SHOW:

‘Something about the scene in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” when recently deceased Emily temporarily returns to mortal life to view her 12th birthday–a la Ebenezer Scrooge– gets me every single time. I think its’ the moment when she sees her father, as he had been those 14 years before, return home from out of town and call “Where’s my birthday girl?”‘

The whole effort has come a long way since an autumn 2001 coffee shop conversation between Jones and co-founder Dan Martschenko. Martschenko, a longtime Cary resident, wanted to get re-involved in theater; calling around, he realized Cary offered no adult opportunities.

When he called Jones, a veteran of nearly three decades in theater and leader of Herman LeVern Jones Theatre Consultant Agency and the Southeast Raleigh School of the Arts, he discovered another longtime Cary resident who thought it awful that a place with more than 100,000 people had no theater.

A few years ago, Cary offered pretty much nothing in the way of cultural arts, but things have been changing steadily through nonprofits like Cary Visual Arts and for-profit efforts like Six String Cafe & Music Hall. Jones related the story of an older woman who called to buy “Our Town” tickets, and said “she was thrilled, that she had waited for years to have a chance to go to things like that in the neighborhood.”