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"Our Greatest Play" --- TU's Department of Theatre Presents "Our Town"

[Aired Wednesday, March 7th.] Today we speak with Dr. David Cook, who has been on our show several times before, has been a member of the Theatre faculty here at the University of Tulsa for more than 30 years, and has announced that he'll retire at the end of this school year. Therefore, Cook is currently directing his final production for the TU Theatre Department: Thornton Wilder's iconic American masterpiece, "Our Town," which opens tomorrow night (Thursday the 8th) and runs through Sunday afternoon (the 11th) at the Chapman Theater in Kendall Hall on the TU campus. (Here's information about show times and tickets.) This widely beloved and highly influential work --- one of the most-performed plays in the world today, with productions happening all the time, all over the globe --- is, at its core, a three-act narrative composed in the late 1930s about life and death in smalltown America in the early 1900s. And further, as Dr. Cook notes on our program, quoting from some promotional copy of his own devising, "Our Town" is "so many things: it is the mirror held up to our American nature; it is the staged picture of what we were and hope to be; it is the spiritual reminder of what is important in our lives; it is, in Wilder’s words, 'an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life,' and finally, it is, arguably I suppose, our greatest play."

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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