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THEATER
Artie Isaac
Artie Isaac, founder of the Columbus advertising and marketing agency Young Isaac, first encountered Our Town in 1981. He was a senior at Yale University then, and played the leading male role—called the Stage Manager—in a student production. Isaac says as a 21-year-old he got the basic drift of the play's message, but missed a lot of its depth. One thing did stay with him, though.
"My father came out to college to see the production, and at the end of the show came down and he put his hands up and said, 'Don't act.' And that was all that I needed. Though the review in the college paper was favorable, it didn't overcome my own review."
His dad's comment scared Isaac away from the theater.
"After I left that production, I was so rattled by what I thought was a poor performance that I couldn't even buy a ticket and sit in the audience for almost 15 years. I was so afraid for the actors on the stage that they might lose their lines. I was even afraid for professionals. So I didn't even see much of the theater for 15 years and only started going back recently."
Heidi Callison Smith, of San Antonio, Texas, had also seen that Yale production of Our Town. But she had a different reaction to Isaac's performance.
"He blended completely into the character of the Stage Manager."
The Yale production was Smith's first experience with Our Town, and it changed her life.
"I determined right then and there that I was going to try to live my life a little more aware of what I was doing, and that if I was going to spend time with a person, I was going to give a hundred percent of myself to that time. And I've come to realize that one of the best gifts we can give one another is our time, is our presence. Being with one another."
Fast forward to the spring of 2007 and Isaac's 25th Yale class reunion. It was there that a mutual friend introduced Isaac to Smith.
"A woman I'd never met before told me she owed me her thanks. And I asked her who she was and she told me her name was Heidi Smith, from Texas, and that we had never met before, but that she wanted to thank me. And I said, 'Why are you thanking me?' And she said, 'Well, when my three-and-a-half-year-old son died . . ."
"When my youngest child died . . . I didn't have as many regrets as some people may have had having not learned the lessons of Our Town. We knew that every day he was alive was a gift, and we weren't going to waste that."
Isaac had all but shut the theater out of his life for nearly a quarter century, but Smith's story again put Our Town under his skin. Over lunch, Isaac told his friend New York playwright Rob Ackerman that he longed for an opportunity to once again play the Stage Manager in Our Town. Ackerman said, "Seize the day."
"I sort of said, 'If you want to do this, then do it. You can be the causal force that makes a production of Our Town happen in the Columbus community.'"
With little more than a dream and Ackerman's words of encouragement, Isaac turned to the Columbus community to help him put on the play. He hired producer Matt Slaybaugh and director Ian Short of Columbus' Available light [theater]. Isaac and Short plastered announcements for auditions in coffee houses around town. Short held auditions at Bexley's Maryland Avenue Elementary School and assembled a cast of amateur and professional actors. Some of the actors had played in Our Town before. For others, including Alison Draper, who plays the female lead character, Emily Webb, Isaac's production is a rare chance to play in a classic of the American theater repertory.
"Coming straight out of college, this is my first experience with theater in a non-academic setting, and it's really wonderful to be with a group of people who are really so clearly committed to this idea. You know, when you're in theater at school, everybody's there full time to do theater, but here I'm working with people who have families and jobs and then do this on top of it because they love it."
Isaac also e-mailed thousands of friends and business associates seeking rehearsal space and sponsors to underwrite production costs. For a while the cast rehearsed in the warehouse-like Grandview workspace of E-Play DVD, a DVD rental kiosk production firm. At one recent rehearsal, colored tape marked the dimensions of the stage on a gray concrete floor. Some actors sat on the sidelines in metal folding chairs, waiting for their lines to come. Others got plenty of practice projecting their voices over the constant drone of megacomputers and the roar of air conditioning fans.
In this month's production of Our Town, Isaac will chase away the demons that have kept him off the stage for more than a quarter century. He will also revisit this play from a more mature perspective.
"Well, the first time I encountered Our Town, I was 21 years old and so I saw it very much from George's point of view. George (being) the young man in the play who is falling in love. Now, I'm 48 years old. I see this from Doc Gibbs' point of view or Mr. Webb's point of view. I see it from the parents' point of view. I get to skip a generation ahead and look at George through an adult's eyes. I get to bring the last 25 years of growth and parenthood to it."
And the last 25 years of living, working, and playing in his town—our town: Columbus.
"I do believe that Columbus is Grover's Corners. When I think about, what is my community—my community is my block and the families that send their children to the schools my children go to. That's my community. That is Grover's Corners. It would be my hope that the people who come to this show, they will see their own community—however they define it—whether Columbus, or whether Bexley, or whether Grandview—they'll come to the show and they'll see their own communities held up in the looking glass. We are in Grover's Corners by any name, and Wilder's message is relevant to us, no matter when or where we are."
Artie Isaac's production of Our Town will be performed at Bexley's Cassingham Elementary School June 26-28 at 8 p.m., and June 29 at 2 p.m.
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