Wooden chairs. Ladder staircases. An all-knowing Stage Manager. MTSU director Lauren Shouse keeps true to these quintessential attributes of the 1930’s classic “Our Town” while adding unique set elements, contemporary costumes and purposeful movements.

MTSU Theatre and Dance will perform “Our Town” from opening night on Thursday, Feb. 27 through Sunday, Mar. 2, at Tucker Theatre. Showtimes are 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and a 2 p.m. matinee on Sunday. Tickets are available through the MTSU arts website and the “Our Town” information page.

Now considered a classic American drama, Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” first premiered on Broadway in 1938. In the original script, actors pantomime — or mimic interactions with objects — but Shouse, with the assistance of co-movement director Julia Kelly, focused on incorporating movements into scenes and scene changes to communicate a deeper human awareness through the physical, Shouse said. 

“This is not a play about 1930’s small town,” Shouse said. “This is a play about humanity and ultimately sort of asks the question, how can we as human beings, be more awake?”

Shouse and Kelly followed the Frantic Method of movement direction for “Our Town,” a style developed by Scott Graham of the U.K. theater company Frantic Assembly, well known for their work in shows like “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” This method helps teach performers how their bodies can convey nuances they haven’t noticed before, and to be hyperaware of their movements.

Zoe Kuhn, an 18-year-old freshman majoring in entertainment journalism, attended the preview. The Frantic Assembly-style movements impressed her and the story flowed smoothly, she said.

“It was honestly really impressive how so many people [moved] in and out of stage really quickly,” Kuhn

said. “It was really cool to watch … obviously a lot of work goes into that.”

Dramaturgy is the connective tissue between historical research, context and playwright information, “Our Town” dramaturg Cate Heiner said. Heiner agreed to work on the project with Shouse last summer. Heiner helped guide students to stay within historically consistent and proper message suggestions through movements and rehearsals —for example, how character relationships could be framed.

The goal was finding the mundane and magnifying it, Heiner said. 

The character of the Stage Manager, played by MTSU student Moira Cagle, echoes this sentiment throughout the play. The audience is given monologues throughout that depict the beauty and simplicity of Grover’s Corners, the play’s setting, and an omniscient perspective on a community instead of an intimate cast of characters.

“[Wilder] describes it as triggering the universal truth in everyone of thinking about relationships and connection and community,” Heiner said.

The set design consists of the play’s traditional pair of wooden tables on either end of the stage, with their surrounding wooden chairs, and two large staircase ladders. Shouse added a few unique set pieces, like white trellises on both ends of the stage. The trellises’ vines coiled around the hatched, white wood, and decorated the doorways with white flowers.

Glassless, white-framed windows populated the stage in various sizes and shapes; There were oval shapes taller than the student actors, large and small hexagons with hatched centers, rectangles and squares.

“’Cause, we were really interested in sort of like the windows into people’s life and the chairs sort of as a representation of a life,” Shouse said

At the curtain call, 150 audience members gave a minute-long standing ovation for the preview performance.

There will be a post-performance cast and crew discussion on Friday night, according to the play website.