University of Oklahoma School of Drama

Sooner Theatre

October 17 – October 26, 2014

Directed by:  Tom Houston Orr

Costume Designer:  Lloyd Cracknell

Lighting Designer:  Samuel Brown

 

 

One of the most recognized pieces of dramatic literature, Our Town tells the story of Grovers Corners, a fictional town in New Hampshire.  Done in a metatheatrical style, the story tells the lives of the people in the town, focusing on a couple of families in particular.  Throughout each day as the story is told, we see the people living their lives.  A lot of focus is paid to the routine of things, such as the preparation of breakfast, and the events of a typical evening.  In act two, two of the characters are married, and the day focuses around that preparation.  In act three, someone has died, and they go back to a single day in their lives to experience it again, realizing how little the people in their life appreciate the simple joys of the moment.

 

Right from the beginning, Tom Orr wanted the sound to be natural sound, done using foley.  My research for this involved diving into all the prop storage areas of our theatres, finding devices that could make the sounds we needed.  Foley is a fantastic art of using different devices to create different sounds.  Sometimes the perfect sound comes from an actual device.  More often than not, we have to create the sounds we need using similar devices. 

 

On a long props table located in the balcony of the theatre, we set up our foley station.  Handles, buckets, grates, plates and silverware, heavy cast iron pots, Styrofoam and cellophane, a miniature door, newspapers, hammers and screwdrivers, all these became the sound fodder.  The foley artists and I sat down and identified the sounds we wanted to make (a lot of them revolving around breakfast prep) and how we would make them.  Since the cast were wearing body microphones, we placed several microphones along the table and routed the sound to upstage speakers.  This centered our sound world within the area of the stage, allowing us to awaken the imagination of the performers and our audience members.

 

One particular challenge to these sounds was making sure that they would work throughout the world of the play regardless of the time of any given act.  The director also decided that the memory moment in act three would be done on a full physical representation of the kitchen.  So, all the sounds we were creating in the first two acts needed to be accurate to the very real world of this kitchen in act 3.  This proved to be a fun artistic challenge, and the foley artists outdid themselves on several occasions.