By Oscar Lake 24102530

1. Initial thoughts and research

When I first first read Our Town I was inspired by Thornton Wilder’s naturalistic approach to this small fictional town in New Hampshire. Every character felt real and had personal issues and true to life family dynamics. The third act took this play to another level, introducing the after life with themes of regret and liminality. 

In order to build the world around us we began by researching political and social events that had taken place not only in the 20th century but many centuries before and how they would affect the context these characters were living in. We established that the town would religiously be predominantly protestant with a small mix of Catholics and politically mainly republicans. 

I believe Wilder wrote Our Town with the main goal of encouraging people, at a time of global tension, to really appreciate the trivial details of everyday life. He executed this with a focus on shared humanity, delving into living-marrying-dying, which is reflected in the themes of each act. 

We compiled a big page of words that felt tied into the plays core beliefs and picked out Grief, belonging, time and liminality as our stand out words.

2. Character Work

After a few initial read throughs, Beth Knight, our director wanted us to pick characters that we were interested in before going into a 1-1 conversation about our views on this character as well as the play itself.

Doctor Frank Gibbs was my main focus ever since the first read. He felt like a man who was depended on in the town with an interesting utilitarian mindset. Every conversation that he had felt thought out or previously planned, which particularly reflected with me as something I find myself doing in everyday life. 

As an actor, I have wanted to push myself to play a role with a notable influence and had been encouraged by teachers in Rehearsal Practices to do so. 

Before I started physicalising doctor Gibbs I wanted to explore his given circumstances in detail. Aligning with what I had been testing in Rehearsal Practices I firstly wanted to look at his family and his role within it. Gibbs was solely relied upon in his family as the main source of income. He would likely spend a lot of his time working, making house calls at all hours of the day; so when he had time with his family he would try to make the most of it by raising George and Rebecca into what he believes is right. This notion of what he believes is right was important for my idea of him as a person. He has an idea of what is right and wrong when it comes to things like marriage and family roles; he strives for people to align with them. I found that this unconscious stubbornness must have come from a strict upbringing on the farm he was raised on. I decided most of this by following ‘Stanislavski’s 5 W’s’, a technique I’d been experimenting with previously.

Further on from this, throughout my process I would free write as Doctor Gibbs. This would usually be a diary entry. These free writes were both useful to discover his feelings on important plot beats and also for getting into role and better understanding my unbroken line of action. I experimented with doing these at the side of the stage in order to stop myself from falling out of character when not on stage.

As I shared the role with Seb, it was important that every physical choice we made for the character was clear, deliberate, and consistent. I began by focusing on his walk. As he grew up working on a farm, I chose to angle his feet slightly outwards, reflecting the physical effects of farm labour. Repeatedly lifting heavy objects can create imbalances in the joints, particularly in the hips and knees, which influenced this choice.

In LABAN terms, I found that Gibbs operates with an internal push and an external glide. He moves with a smooth, confident stride, yet carries stress and tension internally. For example, I incorporated rigid shoulders, which could stem from the physical demands of manual labour that his work as a doctor involves. This rigidity also reflects his layer of masculine protection and emotional restraint.

I then looked into improving my New Hampshire accent. This accent was new for me and something that we hadn’t specifically worked on in any of our work with Jessica in Accents And Phonetics. However, knowing that New Hampshire is close to New York, I knew that the accent would be general american with certain hints of New York City English. Knowing this I used an american accent and added in smaller New York sounds. For example, I knew that with a New York accent they regularly don’t have an ‘R’ sound when talking so when I said the word ‘sure’ I became more of a ‘shoo-wah’ sound. 

To help me get into the accent I would use various hooklines that worked for me. Some of my favourite hooklines for New York city English were ‘I’m walking here!’ for consonants specifically and ‘That shirt will be perfect for the little girl’. My preferred hookline for a General American accent was ‘the water in Britain is dirty’, which although not true was very helpful for getting the flapping and glottalization of the ‘T’ sound.

We had Jessica, our accent teacher, come in and watch a few scenes each. This was a perfect time for me to get some feedback for my accent, which at this time I had been developing for 2 or 3 weeks. To my relief, my feedback was brief and my main takeaway was that I was speaking at too low a volume, which was a simple fix for me. It was also brought to the attention that my ‘dark L’ was leaning too much towards a ‘W’ sound. These changes, albeit small, helped me massively in perfecting the accent for my character.

Next I looked into the relationship between Doctor and Mrs Gibbs. Both are hard working parents with Mrs Gibbs managing household jobs and Doctor Gibbs as the sole doctor in town. Mrs Gibbs fulfils the stereotypical gender roles whilst Doctor gently dominates by dismissing her aspirations to see Europe. However, despite these disagreements there is still clear underlying love and deep affection towards their years together. 

While Mrs Gibbs is often seen in social settings with friends, Doc Gibbs is more focused on his work and providing for his family. This reflects a common modern dynamic where one partner maintains the social side of family life, while the other becomes more centred on responsibility and work. This is clear in Doctor Gibbs and helps explain his quiet, stoic nature, particularly in the narrative of Our Town. I noticed this in that much of his life is shaped by routine, duty, and practical concerns rather than open emotional expression. His restraint reflects in the rest of the play, where love and care are often shown through action and responsibility rather than words.

3. Rehearsal process

My main scene consisted of Doctor Gibbs and Mrs Gibbs on the morning of George and Emily’s wedding. This scene had a myriad of emotions in such a short time. Mrs Gibbs was evidently more apprehensive about the marriage than Doc Gibbs; consequently, as Doctor Gibbs is a collected and assured man, his initial response was to sooth her feelings.

This clashes with her and doesn’t help, therefore he has to change up his approach from reassurance to an irregular more emotionally vulnerable side of him. He talks about remembering his wedding morning in a nostalgic more empathetic manner.

This moment for me was the most challenging but rewarding moment of the scene. I struggled initially to find a meaningful way of performing the moment until Beth introduced me to a scene breakdown method she uses. This was a simple yet effective way of finding my objective. We essentially went line by line discussing what the character wanted the other character to feel and then how they actually react, consequently influencing the next line and so on. After this discussion I found that Doc was confused by Julia’s negative responses and was able to pull that into the scene and richen my character. 

During this rehearsal process, I explored a technique taught by Alex Palmer called The Five Layers of Why. This is a tool I used while experimenting with F.M., which helped me expand on my objective and explore the deeper motivations behind my character’s actions. The process involves identifying your objective and then repeatedly asking yourself “why,” using each answer as the starting point for the next question. Although this could be continued indefinitely, I found that going through five layers provided enough depth and context without becoming overwhelming.

Using this technique made me feel more confident in my character choices, and my director commented that the intentions read clearly in my scene. As a result, I will be taking this technique forward in my future work and am pleased to have had the opportunity to experiment with it further.

In a different rehearsal we looked into actioning. This is something that I had previously worked on but hadn’t been massively useful. These were categorised into nurturing, using and damaging. Using the actioning app, these categories gave us a list of words that fit into a ‘i___you’ format. We noted down every verb that felt connected with our characters core beliefs and then whittled it down to a few that felt most identified. 

We then had our scenes read to us cold with these action words in mind. My previous thoughts on actioning had been that these words needed to be specific to certain lines, which hadn’t previously worked for me. However, in this session we focused on letting these actions grow throughout our scene. I feel this helped me stay in the thought process of Doctor Gibbs; when putting this into practice my feedback was massively positive from our director and I had felt like I made a significant breakthrough with my scene. 

Another rehearsal session that proved especially beneficial to my acting process involved the full cast. We were each asked to choose a song that represented our character and to enter the room already in role. Once inside, we sat as our characters would, and one by one we moved around the space, interacting with the other characters.

When interacting with each character it took my thought process to different places. For example, with George I felt a sense of pride and confidence in how I raised him and the man he would grow up to be. I held onto this feeling for the scene after Emily’s funeral, where I am left facing George. During this moment Doc Gibbs is left reminded of his own wife’s death and how he felt hopeless and left with regret; I was directed to show this mix of emotions through my facial expressions and believe this particular rehearsal was helpful in letting me reach that point.

Doing this exercise with three different actors playing my wife, Julia, gave me a different view for each time zone. With Ella, who played the earliest Julia, I felt a moment of nostalgia and joy; whereas with Norelle, who played the modern day Julia, I felt confusion and the sense that Doctor Gibbs had unknowingly dampened their relationship.

4. Final performance

As a whole, this show has taught me what works with my acting process as well as introducing me to new tools that I can take forward. In my opinion, the final show went very well and I was so glad to be able to present what I’d been working on  to an audience. I feel I could improve in a bit of clarity in my voice with certain words but I felt very connected with both my character and my scene partners. Our Town is such a perfectly imperfect play with a depiction of the early 1900s that, with Beth Knight’s help, felt so satisfying to slip into as an actor.