Will Eno’s Middletown presented at UCSB

Tom Whitaker is directing the UCSB Department of Theater and Dance’s fall production of Will Eno’s Middletown, a play which draws inspiration from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, yet is stamped with the insignia of a playwright who has been called by the New York Times, “a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation.” An essential shorthand for the play might be read in a Facebook meme Whitaker came across recently: “I’m in that awkward stage of life between birth and death.” Performed by twelve actors, and set in mid-twentieth century Middle America, the play infuses the quaint relationships and familiar irksomeness of small town life with the unsettling big issues that gnaw at the psyche from underneath.