Our Town

Cody Fosdick swings a baseball bat backstage before rehearsals for the opera version of the Thornton Wilder play, "Our Town."\nFosdick, a performance diploma candidate in the Jacobs School of Music graduate program, is one of two students sharing the role of George Gibbs.\n"I know it's stupid," he said as fellow cast member and second-year \ngraduate student Liz Baldwin laughed at his admission, "but I'm supposed to be a baseball player." \nHe's also representing an internationally acclaimed opera program at the world premiere of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ned Rorem's newest opera.\n"Our Town" opens atw 8 p.m. Friday in the Musical Arts Center. Additional performances will be Saturday and March 3 and 4. \nRorem was commissioned by J.D. McClatchy, the show's librettist. McClatchy, the founding president of the Thornton Wilder Society, convinced Wilder's nephew, Tappan Wilder, to let him develop the 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play into an opera.\nTappan Wilder was considering an offer to turn "Our Town" into a Broadway musical when McClatchy pitched the opera.\n"The Broadway musical has changed," McClatchy said. "It's all helicopters and falling chandeliers. The emotional force of 'Our Town' depends on intimacy, direct contact with an audience."\nDirector Vincent Liotta has chosen to preserve the modest set used in the original play to maintain this intimacy. Wooden chairs and a podium are accented by a white projector screen background, which is used to resemble a scrapbook.\nThe whole play is a scrapbook of memories, Liotta said. The electronic screen is the modern, 2006 equivalent.\nThe play uses a narrator, or Stage Manager, as a character in the play to keep the plot moving and familiarize the audience with time and space.\nChristopher Wilburn, another performance diploma candidate, is one of the students singing this role. Liotta chose to use dual casts to involve more students with the opera and to minimize wear on the voices of those involved.\nSitting in the audience chewing a protein bar, Wilburn hummed along with Eric McCluskey, the other Stage Manager. \n"I'm thinking I like what he did there — when he grabbed her arm," Wilburn said. "Maybe I'll do that."\nFor the opera, McClatchy uses supertitles to help the Stage Manager narrate the action. Supertitles are the captions displayed on a digital screen for the audience. They are traditionally used to translate a foreign-language opera into English.\n"We had to make the opera work in a way that would focus the play," Liotta said.\nMcClatchy said musical time is much slower than normal time. \n"(It's) our time," he said. "It takes three times longer to sing the sentence I'm saying now. We wanted to keep the shape and tone but make it a third as long. It's tightened, but what you lose in text, you gain in music."\nThe text is about a community's daily life seen through the eyes of a dead woman named Emily.\n"Two teenagers whose extensively happy, complacent lives are jarred by love first, and then death," McClatchy said.\nIn rehearsal at 4 p.m. on Feb. 17, teenagers and young adults slid across the stage, some dead, some alive. All wore blue jeans and other anachronisms, singing arias about love and death in 1904.\nLiotta straightened up in his seat, watching. \n"The dead are getting there faster than the chairs," he muttered under his breath, rushing up to join the funeral procession — a white-bearded man floating among the performers, peering, like a ghost, over their necks as they sang.\nThe opening night will be general admission, and the auditorium doors will open at 7 p.m. Tickets are on sale at the MAC box office, through TicketMaster and online at www.music.indiana.edu/opera. General admission tickets for the Friday are $25 or $10 for students. For all other performances, tickets run from $15 to $35 or $10 to $20 for students.