Video: Jim Parsons Recalls First Time Reading OUR TOWN

Jim Parsons, who is playing the role of the Stage Manager in the current Broadway production, was not intimately familiar with the play before his involvement. 

"I'd never been in it, I'd never seen it, and when they offered it to me and I read it, I realized, 'Oh, I've never read this,'" the performer admitted on a recent visit to Late Night with Seth Meyers. "Nothing surprised me in it because it's around so much, especially if you're in theatre like I am. I knew basically everything that happens," he added.

"The way Thornton Wilder writes these ideas and the wording, I'm like 'I would remember this. This is profound, it's very moving, and this would have stuck with me,'" Parsons said.

In another video, the actor shared a story from a recent performance of Our Town when an audience member who was sitting near him had a coughing fit during the show. "I was like, 'She gets one more cough and then I'm crossing the stage [to tell her to go offstage]. Watch the segment here!

The new Broadway production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town directed by Tony Award-winner Kenny Leon, features 28 actors led by Emmy, Golden Globe & Screen Actors Guild Award-winner Jim Parsons as “Stage Manager”, Zoey Deutch as “Emily Webb”, Katie Holmes as “Mrs. Webb”, Obie & Audelco Award-winner and Drama Desk-nominee Billy Eugene Jones as “Dr. Gibbs”, Tony & Grammy Award-nominee Ephraim Sykes as “George Gibbs”, Tony & Drama Desk Award-nominee and Emmy-Award-winner Richard Thomas as “Mr. Webb”, Tony & Drama Desk-nominee Michelle Wilson as “Mrs. Gibbs”, 2021 Special Tony Award-winner and Drama Desk-nominee Julie Halston as “Mrs. Soames”, Donald Webber Jr. as “Simon Stimpson”, as well as Ephie Aardema, Heather Ayers, Willa Bost, Bobby Daye, Safiya Kaijya Harris, Doron JéPaul, Shyla Lefner, Anthony Michael Lopez, John McGinty, Bryonha Marie, Kevyn Morrow, Hagan Oliveras, Noah Pyzik, Sky Smith, Bill Timoney, Matthew Elijah Webb and Nimene Sierra Wureh.

The design team for Our Town includes scenic design by Tony Award-winner Beowulf Boritt (New York, New York; Act One,), costume design by Tony Award-nominee and Drama Desk Award winner Dede Ayite (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding; Topdog/Underdog), lighting design by Tony Award-nominee Allen Lee Hughes (Topdog/Underdog; A Soldier’s Play), sound design by Tony  Award-nominee Justin Ellington (Ohio State Murders; for colored girls…) and the dialect coach is Kate Wilson (The Shark is Broken, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window). 

Our Town, the timeless drama of life in the mythical village of Grover’s Corners, New  Hampshire, has become an American classic with universal appeal. Thornton Wilder’s most frequently performed play, Our Town appeared on Broadway in 1938 to wide acclaim, and won the Pulitzer Prize. From the very beginning, Our Town has been produced throughout the world. 

Our Town explores the relationship between two young Grover’s Corners neighbors, George  Gibbs and Emily Webb, whose childhood friendship blossoms into romance, and then culminates in marriage. When Emily loses her life in childbirth, the circle of life portrayed in each of the three acts of Our Town–growing up, adulthood, and death–is fully realized. Wilder offers a couple of chairs on a bare stage as the backdrop for an exploration of the universal human experience. The simple story of a love affair is constantly rediscovered because it asks timeless questions about the meaning of love, life, and death. In the final moments of the play,  the recently deceased Emily is granted the opportunity to revisit one day in her life, only to discover that she never fully appreciated all she possessed until she lost it. “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you,” she says as she takes her place among the dead.

Photo Credit: Lloyd Bishop/NBC