'Our Town' gets alternate look in EMPAC production

As a child, Jack Ferver wanted to become both an actor and a therapist. “I imagined that the people on my film sets would be my clients,” Ferver recalled in a recent interview. 

That’s not what happened, exactly. Instead, Ferver (who uses they/them pronouns) went on to become a choreographer, theater director, writer and professor; they’ve been teaching at Bard College since 2014. But Ferver’s work is still driven by the “mission statement” of sorts that came to them when they were creating their first dance-theater work in 2008.

“I remember it very clearly,” they recalled. “I asked myself, why are you doing this? And the resounding answer came back: So that people don’t feel so alone.” 

That credo has informed the 16 full-length performance works Ferver has made since then, exploring the things that isolate us from each other and our striving to connect, nevertheless. Through narrative and movement, the Wisconsin native has investigated thorny topics like class divisions and gender politics (“Chambre,” 2014), finding one’s inner child (“Rumble Ghost,” 2010) and the impact of abuse on queer youth (“Two Alike,” 2011). 

Along the way, they’ve reinterpreted real and fictional stories that illuminate the fears and fixations that possess us—including the film “Poltergeist,” the Tennessee Williams play “Suddenly Last Summer,” and the astronaut Lisa Nowack’s 800-mile drive (in diapers) to attack her estranged husband’s girlfriend. 

“The things that I look for in art are the things that I find to be missing the most in society, and the two things I see missing the most are mystery and humor,” Ferver said. 

Another constant in Ferver’s work is the theme of death—from the frenetic obsessions on status and sex that distract us from our mortality (“Death Is Certain,” 2009) to the impact of the AIDS crisis on the generation that came after (“Nowhere Apparent,” 2023). 

Death is also at the center of their new performance work, “My Town,” which Ferver will premiere on Friday, March 21, at EMPAC, which commissioned the work. Set in upstate New York and a small town in Wisconsin, like the one in which Ferver grew up, “My Town” is accompanied by video by artist Jeremy Jacob. The solo work is inspired in part by the Thornton Wilder classic “Our Town,” which Ferver acted in three times throughout middle and high school.

“I became really interested in it because of how ubiquitous it is,” they said. “It’s a very rageful play … the fact that Wilder chooses for Emily to die in childbirth and that Simon Stimson, who is spoken of in a coded way as being gay, kills himself. We have these two characters who meet these really intense deaths, and I was very curious about that, about who gets disappeared in these small towns.”

Ferver started the creation process for “My Town” two years ago—researching, reading, “wandering and dreaming,” which led to a 6-hour script that they then whittled down to an hour. The text is typically their jumping-off point for movement and performance, so the next step was rigorous rehearsing, while allowing new voices and their embodiments to come through as part of the process.

“It’s the strongest writing and hardest performance I’ve ever had to do,” Ferver said. “I’m moving pretty much for the entire 65 minutes. The vocal and physical work has been really fun.”

While “My Town” revolves around heavy subjects—tragedy and trauma, the psyche and the shattering of self — Ferver also injects light, playfulness and compassion. Drawing from a bevy of muses, including the filmmaker David Lynch, the poet Emily Dickinson, the choreographer Martha Graham and the author Elena Ferrante, Ferver seeks to tap into our collective experience and humanity.

“All the artists that I love have an ability to digest the indigestible and bring it back to the audience,” Ferver said. “That is what I do.”