Workshop – “NOT THEATER”

Join us for an interactive three-session exploration of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Each two-hour session will focus on one act of the play, combining a communal staged reading with conversation, dramatic exploration, and opportunities for participants to step into the world of Grover’s Corners.

This is not a conventional performance or lecture. It is an invitation to discover the play together—by reading, listening, discussing, experimenting, and enjoying the possibilities that drama creates. No previous acting experience is required.

THE PLAY

First performed in 1938, Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Our Town” follows the inhabitants of Grover’s Corners, a small New Hampshire community, through the ordinary and extraordinary experiences of daily life, love, marriage, and death.

Performed with minimal scenery and guided by the Stage Manager, the play asks us to look more closely at the moments that make up a human life. At once intimate and universal, Our Town remains a moving celebration of community—and a reminder of how easily the value of everyday experience can escape our notice.

THE SESSIONS

Session One → Act I: Daily Life – Friday, September 18th 6:30PM-8:30PM

We enter Grover’s Corners, meet its inhabitants, and explore the routines, relationships, and social forces that shape a community.

Session Two → Act II: Love and Marriage – Saturday, September 19th 11AM-1PM

We follow George and Emily into adulthood, examining love, commitment, communication, and the expectations surrounding life’s major transitions.

Session Three → Act III: Death and Eternity – Sunday, September 20th 11AM-1PM

We encounter the play’s deepest questions about memory, mortality, time, and our capacity to appreciate life while we are living it.

THE APPROACH

Each session combines participatory reading, informal performance, guided discussion, and accessible drama exercises. Roles may be shared or rotated, allowing different voices and interpretations to emerge. Participants can contribute by reading, performing, discussing, observing, or simply listening.

The approach draws upon Performative Complex Realism, a framework that considers characters not in isolation but as people shaped by relationships, circumstances, ideas,

and the worlds they inhabit. Together, we will examine how these forces operate within Wilder’s apparently simple town and how active participation can reveal dimensions of the play that silent reading or passive viewing alone may not uncover.

The emphasis throughout will be on curiosity, exploration, communal discovery, and enjoyment. No theatrical background is necessary: only a willingness to engage with the play and with one another.

ABOUT THE FACILITATOR

Anton Bonnici is a teacher, playwright, and dramaturg with more than twenty years of international classroom experience. His work brings together drama, literature, creative writing, and performance-based learning. He is also the creator of Performative Complex Realism, an educational and creative framework concerned with character-driven stories and the social worlds that shape them.

Through workshops, staged readings, and collaborative exercises, he encourages participants to approach drama as a living encounter, a practice he calls Not Theatre: a way of exploring ideas, testing interpretations, entering other perspectives, and discovering what becomes possible when a group gathers around a play where community and understanding surpass aesthetic concerns.