Actor Ed Herrmann on the small-town life

SALISBURY — Ed Herrmann has never played the stage manager in Thornton Wilder’s great play, “Our Town,” but on Sept. 28 he will read from the play at Salisbury, Our Town, a fundraiser for Salisbury Family Services.Herrmann, tall and distinguished with a baritone that slides effortlessly from accent to accent, would seem a natural for the role, and he knows a great deal about what Wilder wanted from performances. “He once did the play in Williamstown and asked the cast why they were ‘acting,’” he said in an interview at his Salisbury home last week. Wilder wanted them to play against their training, and let emotion flow naturally from within themselves.He observed that most actors have performed the role of the stage manager as an avuncular observer of the small-town life Wilder saw as embodying universal concerns of life, love, death and eternity. In the 1940 movie made from a screenplay by Wilder himself, the stage manager is “almost angry at the blindness of people to what is around them,” Herrmann said. How he will deliver the stage manager’s great monologue from the cemetery on the hill that opens Act III he won’t reveal.Herrmann is one of several actors, writers and musicians with local ties who will perform at the Salisbury Family Services benefit. The organizing committee began work last February to find prose and poetry that best “celebrate small-town life,” according to committee member Dan Dwyer. There will be memoirs and oral history from local archives; a selection by E. B. White on a town meeting “when democracy sat up and looked around;” even a poem by e.e. cummings titled “anyone lived in a pretty how town.”Actors joining Herrmann will include Mamie Gummer, John Benjamin Hickey and Laura Linney. Local author John Burnham Schwartz will read from “Northwest Corner,” the follow-up to his acclaimed novel, “Reservation Road;” and National Book Award winner Ann Arensberg will share a passage from her as-yet-unpublished novel. Songs and musical continuity will be provided by the Joint Chiefs.Salisbury, Our Town will be performed in the Walker Auditorium at The Hotchkiss School on Saturday, Sept. 28, at 6 p.m. Tickets are $25 for the performance, $200 for the performance plus a dinner following the performance in one of five private homes. For tickets and information, call 860-435-6677.

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