Alan Paul On Building A Community In ‘Our Town’

metroweekly.com:

Our Town to life on stage. Especially during an ongoing global pandemic.“It’s been one of the craziest things, putting on this show in the time of COVID,” says Alan Paul, associate artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company, who directed the organization’s current production of the Thornton Wilder classic.Initially scheduled to run the first two months of 2022, the show was postponed until May in an effort to steer clear of this winter’s first wave of COVID’s omicron variant. “And then when we were getting ready to open the show, a bunch of people in the cast got COVID.

Eventually, it just became clear that we were going to have to open the show with understudies. So we opened the show with six understudies.

That’s one of the wildest things I’ve ever done.”Fortunately, they’ve managed to pull it off with aplomb, thanks to some choice heavy hitters Paul enlisted for understudy duty, and the extraordinary all-star ensemble cast he put together overall. “It’s a revolving door of the best actors in D.C,” he says. “I say revolving door because you don’t see all of them [during any one performance].”Take, for example, Erin Weaver.

The five-time Helen Hayes Award-winning actress is typically cast as a main supporting character, if not the leading lady, in high-profile productions at major theaters around town.