Every theatre company has its own bucket list.  The big musicals and the crowd pleasers. Elaborate shows with giant sets, flying rigs, and the orchestra that somehow has to fit into a pit the size of a bathtub.

That’s all well and good, of course.  But every once in a while a theatre should produce something that isn’t about spectacle at all. Something that forces everyone involved — actors, directors, stage managers, the whole gang — to actually sharpen their craft.

Community theatre should also be about improving your abilities.  About education and challenging yourself and others.

There are a few plays that do this. The classics that quietly train actors while the audience thinks they’re just watching a play.  And there’s one that – in my opinion – almost every theatre should produce at least once

Our Town.

Cue the groans.  When people hear Our Town, they often picture a dusty high school production with ladders pretending to be houses and people miming breakfast. It has this reputation for being quaint, polite, and maybe a little sleepy.

But really,  when you actually try to do the play properly, you realize pretty quickly that it’s one of the most brutally honest acting exercises ever written.

There’s nowhere to hide in that play.  No big set pieces to distract the audience. No lighting trick that saves a scene. Half the time there aren’t even props. It’s just actors standing on a bare stage telling a story about ordinary people living ordinary lives – which means the acting actually has to work.

OUR TOWN is perfect for training theatre enthusiasts the following:

1 – LISTENING.  The dialogue feels casual – almost offhand sometimes. But if the actors are just waiting for their next line instead of actually hearing each other, the whole thing dies instantly. The life of the play lives in those tiny human moments — the pauses, the reactions, the feeling that people are actually sharing space and time together.  That’s just not anything you can fake.

2 – RESTRAINT.  Community theatre sometimes falls into the trap of thinking bigger emotions equal better acting. Our Town shuts that down immediately. Push too hard and the play turns into syrup. Try to wring tears out of the audience and it just feels false.

The play only works when the actors and directors trust the simplicity of it. Just say the words. Just be the people. Let the audience do the rest.

3 – ENSEMBLE.  There really aren’t stars in Our Town. Even the Stage Manager — who technically carries the show — is really just guiding the audience through the life of a community. The town itself becomes the main character.  When the ensemble is strong, the play feels like a living organism.  When it isn’t… well, you find out pretty quickly.

And then Act III comes along and quietly flips the entire experience on its head.

I’ve watched actors get to that act in rehearsal and suddenly realize they’ve been misunderstanding the play the whole time. What starts out feeling like a gentle portrait of small-town life turns into something much bigger — a meditation on time, memory, and the strange fact that most of us are so busy living that we forget to notice life while it’s happening.  That realization hits actors just as hard as it hits audiences – which is why I think almost every theatre should tackle this play once.

It builds actors.  It teaches people to listen. It teaches directors to trust simplicity. It reminds everyone in the room that theatre, at its core, is just human beings telling a story together.