“10 actors. 2 directors. 1 unforgettable experience.”
Theatrical Outfit launches its next season with two plays about American society, one, a quaint classic, and the other, a jarring, yet hopeful modern drama. Playing in repertory, each piece tells the story of a small town, with Thornton Wilder’s Our Town showing the journey of community life, and Moises Kaufman’s The Laramie Project the heartbreaking dark side that can exist even in a seemingly idealized community.
While – to our knowledge – these pieces have never before been produced together in repertory, the Downtown theatre is not the first to connect the two.
From a May 29, 2000 New York Times review
“Laramie is a latter-day Grover’s Corners, a cozy place where everyone appears to know everyone else’s business and actually finds comfort in this. The Laramie Project is Our Town with a question mark, as in, ‘Could this be our town? It can’t happen here,’ followed immediately by ‘And yet it has.’” –Ben Brantley
With an ensemble of ten actors portraying over 100 characters, the plays run August 27-September 29.
Check out photos of the cast below!
Our Town
Considered by many to be the greatest American play ever, Our Town depicts the town of Grover’s Corners in three acts: “Daily Life,” “Love and Marriage,” and “Death and Eternity.” Narrated by a stage manager character and performed with minimal props and sets, this classic chronicles the Webb and Gibbs families as their children fall in love, marry, and eventually – in one of the most famous scenes in theatre – die.
The Laramie Project
In 1998, a university student named Matthew Shepard was kidnapped, beaten, and tied to a prairie fence outside Laramie, Wyoming. When he died days later, the world learned Shepard was targeted because he was gay. A breathtaking collage of the local residents, The Laramie Project is virtuously determined to find the light in an event of harrowing darkness and exposes the depths to which humanity can sink and the heights of compassion of which we are capable.
Performance info
August 27-September 29 at The Balzer Theater at Herren’s (84 Luckie St. NW, Atlanta, GA 30303).
About those tickets…
Range from $15 – $51, at www.theatricaloutfit.org or by calling 678.528.1500.
Photo credit: Casey Gardner Photography
Allan Edwards, Maria Rodriguez-Sager, Shaun Maclean, Maggie Birgel, Stacy Melich, Jayson Warner Smith 
Allan Edwards, Shaun Maclean, Michael Hanson, Jayson Warner Smith, Curtis Lipsey 
Maria Rodriguez-Sager, Mary Lynn Owen, Stacy Melich, Asia Howard, Maggie Birgel 
Michael Hanson 
Maggie Birgel 
Curtis Lipsey 
Jayson Warner Smith 
Allan Edwards 
Maria Rodriguez-Sager 
Stacy Melich 
Asia Howard 
Shaun Maclean 
Mary Lynn Owen
