SPOTLIGHT MIDDLETOWN

Jun 27, 2018

^{Written by Walter Strydom}

“What’s the deal with everything on earth?”

There are only two tweets on playwright, Will Eno’s modest Twitter-account. This is one of them. 46 retweets. 2 comments. No answer. Much like this tweet, a preoccupation with the bigger questions of existence can be found throughout most of Eno's work.

Middletown, one of Eno's numerous acclaimed plays, is often compared to Thornton Wilder's Our Town – a 1938 metatheatrical three-act play about the everyday lives of the citizens of a small American town. In it Wilder places the interactions of the town's inhabitants under a theatrical microscope to ponder the extent to which humanity actually appreciates how preciously ephemeral life is.

“Middletown glimmers from start to finish with tart, funny, gorgeous little comments on big things: the need for love and forgiveness, the search for meaning in life, the long, lonely ache of disappointment.”

– THE NEW YORK TIMES

Middletown is a meditation on life and death and the "living part" that comes between. The lives of his characters intersect in strange and poignant ways in a journey that takes them from the local library to outer space and points between. As a friendship develops between long-time resident John Dodge and new arrival Mary Swanson, the accumulated glancing exchanges among the inhabitants of Middletown become an acute and entertaining study of human connection.

“A play is something that needs an audience to achieve its fullest expression; the private thoughts and feelings and responses that occur in the audience are the other half of the play.”

– WILL ENO

Growing up in suburban Boston, Eno became a semi-professional cyclist and only saw his first Shakespearian play at the age of 28. Now a celebrated playwright, with plays performed all over the world, Eno has raked in numerous accolades – from a 2005 Pulitzer Prize nomination for Thom Pain (based on nothing) to a Special Drama Desk Award for “two extraordinary casts and one impressively inventive playwright.” The latter he shared with the casts of the 2014 New York productions of The Open House and The Realistic Joneses.

Debuting in 2017 under the direction of Meg Roe, the Shaw Festival production of Middletown stars, amongst others, the incomparable Moya O’Connell and Gray Powell.

Rated as one of the top theatre shows of 2017 by the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail – whose reviewer unabashedly wrote that he broke down sobbing in the parking lot after the play – Middletown will be premiering in Toronto in October 2018 as part of Crow’s 2018-19 Season with the original Shaw Festival cast.

Middletown is 1 of the 9 exciting plays that you can choose from when compiling your Frequent Flyer subscription.