Main Street

By Tom Isbell
Adapted from the novel by Sinclair Lewis

Creative Team

Director: Tom Isbell

Choreographer: Thressa Schultz

Dramaturg: Isabelle Hopewell

Scenic Designer: Curtis Phillips
Assoc. Scenic Designer: Lisa Scott
Costume Designer: Ryan Hamilton
Hair/Makeup Designer: Moriah Babinski

Lighting Designer: Jake Pulkrabek

Sound Designer: Maddy Uecker
Technical Director: Scott Boyle
Stage Manager: Jordyn Rodriguez

Asst. Stage Manager: Olivia Zastrow

Asst. Stage Manager: Zawadi Mwabury

Acknowledgments

UMD Office of Disability Resources American Sign Language interpreters Judy Hlina and Jody Elwell, Drew Check, and Markus Staab for his recording of "If She Were the Only Girl in the World"

Understudies: Courtney Larson and Kylee Paar

Cast & Creative Team

Director's Note

When Sinclair Lewis published Main Street in 1920, no one expected – least of all the Minnesota author himself – the sensation it would cause. It was deemed by Publishers Weekly as the best-selling book of the first quarter of the 20th century, and author Malcolm Cowley claimed that “if you visited the parlor of almost any boarding house, you would see a copy of Main Street standing between the Bible and Ben Hur.”

Coinciding with its popularity was its controversy. No other author had written so honestly about small-town America, mixing equal doses of realism with satire. The Pulitzer Prize jury awarded Sinclair Lewis the prize for Main Street, but the Pulitzer trustees deemed the book too “critical” of the values established by the prize. (The Pulitzer was thus awarded to Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence as the novel “best expressing American values.”) It’s no wonder the book spoke to so many – and frightened so many others: It sought the liberation of women and “all the oppressed peoples.”

In 1930, Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first American to receive such an honor. In his acceptance speech, he claimed that America is “the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today.” Main Street captures all of those aspects.

Main Street is not an attack on small towns. It is an attack on complacency, on smugness, on brain-dead conformity. Alas, small towns don’t own a monopoly on small-minded thinking.

Carol Kennicott’s story is our story. She is flawed, yes, but determined to make the world a better place. She is acutely aware of society’s shortcomings, and one of the few brave enough to try to do something about it. Alas, change is difficult, and perhaps nowhere more acutely than the town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.

Our production team first met on March 15th of this year: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s birthday. The late Supreme Court Justice once said, “Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.” This is not Carol Kennicott’s strong suit. One reviewer of Main Street called her “comically naïve,” and yet those flaws make her more like us. She is determined to reform the world; she just doesn’t know how to go about it.

As we strive to make our own world better – sometimes successfully, sometimes less so – let’s remember Carol’s tenacity and be heartened by the fact that 102 years after the book’s publication, an extraordinary group of students – actors, designers, dramaturgs, stage managers – are trying to do the same as she. That is worth celebrating.

Adapting and working on this production has been a revelation – a stirring reminder of how far we’ve come as a country, and how much farther we need to go.

Tom Isbell

Dramaturg's Note

Tucked away in the Congdon Park neighborhood, surrounded by a grove of trees, sits Nobel Prize-winning author Sinclair Lewis’ stately brick manor. Lewis was transient. He spent his life traveling the globe. But beauty, art, and romanticism led him to settle down right here in Duluth. While Lewis was one of the most successful authors of the twentieth century, few know that the writer responsible for Babbitt and Main Street resided along the shores of Lake Superior. The Minnesota-born author returned to his home state from 1944-46 while developing his novel Kingsblood Royal, which depicted race relations in a Minnesota city. Over these two years, he hosted lavish parties bringing together both white and Black members of the Duluth community. While this impulse to integrate the city was progressive to a certain extent, Lewis’ methods were flawed. 

St. Scholastica professor, George Killough, discovered the author’s ornate house one morning on his running route. After being fascinated with the writer in his teenage years, Killough made it his mission to track down everyone who ever interacted with Lewis, ultimately creating a career teaching Lewis’ work. Killough established an oral history of Lewis’ time in Duluth, documenting as many stories about the author as possible. “There are stories about Lewis having social occasions where he invited white and Black people,” Killough said. “Now, these Black people had been servants while the white people were Duluth blue-bloods. So, everyone was embarrassed.” 

Killough admitted that Lewis’ journalistic finesse lessened at the tail-end of his career. “By the time Lewis was in Duluth he lost some of his reporter's ability to know how to approach people and get information,” Killough said. But in general, despite the author's penchant for social faux-pas, Lewis was still generally well-liked within the Duluth community. One particular connection Lewis made was with Marjorie Wilkins. A celebrity in her own right, Wilkins was Duluth’s first African-American surgical and anesthesiologist nurse. The two exchanged correspondence with each other for the rest of Lewis’ life. Wilkins was even the prototype for a character in Kingsblood Royal. 

Though Lewis’ attempts to improve racial relations in Duluth could be seen as misguided, his intentions were pure. In a similar fashion to Carol Kennicott’s efforts to beautify the streets of Gopher Prairie, Lewis tried to make a positive impact on race relations in Duluth. In essence, his flawed protagonist was born from an equally-flawed writer. From a twenty-first century perspective, Lewis could easily be depicted as a white savior. In the 1940s, any novel about the betterment of the African-American community was seen as a win for social justice even if Lewis’ research tactics may seem self-serving to a modern audience. But at the end of the day, Lewis tried. He really did try throughout his entire career to create an honest portrayal of twentieth-century America. Duluth was one stop on that journey.

Isabelle Hopewell

Historical Context of Main Street 

• World War I started in 1914

• The event that “caused” WW1 was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand 

  • Beyond that, however, not a ton of agreement

• A Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip and co-conspirators chose to celebrate Salvic nationalism by assassinating Franz Ferdinand

• Franz Ferdinand wasn’t well liked due to his moderate standings on most issues

• Franz Ferdinand’s uncle, the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, decided to take action to avoid the expansion of Serbian nationalist territory at the expense of Austria-Hungary’s empire

• Austria issued an ultimatum to Serbia

  • Intentionally made demands harsh so Serbia would be forced to go to war

• Austria talked with Germany to make sure Germany has their back

• Austria and Germany = First to declare war on Russia

• Russia was already to begin fighting before Serbia rejected Austria’s ultimatum

• France mobilized in support of Russia

  • Germany mobilized and declared war of Russia

• By August 4th, 1914 all the major players involved in WW1 have declared war on one another

Major Players of WWI

Over 30 nations declared war between 1914 and 1918. The majority joined on the side of the Allies, including Serbia, Russia, France, Britain, Italy and the United States. They were opposed by Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, who together formed the Central Powers.

So... What was the big deal?

• War to “change all wars”

• Normalized cynicism and irony

• Created economic and social conditions that made WW2 possible

• First major war of the 20th century began with an act of terrorism … a trait that would later become commonplace in many wars throughout the 20th century and beyond. 

• 15 million people were killed and 20 million were wounded

• Many civilians died especially in the Ottoman empire

• Disease was rampant in WW1

• New tech and outdated tactics made for a particularly deadly war

  • Machine guns and barbed wire (both American-made)

• Trench warfare

• Wet and Smelly. Like. Super wet and smelly.

  • Letters proved that war was not, in fact, glamorous

• Treaty of Versailles ended WW1 and blamed Germany for the war

  • Proved ruinous to German economy and destructive to its political institutions 

• Facilitated the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia (aka rise of totalitarian communism)

WWI's Impact on Art and Literature

• Shifted art away from Romanticism to modernism

  • discarded romantic views of nature and focused on the interior world of characters.

• “World War I devastated continents, leaving some 10 million soldiers and 7 million civilians dead. But writers responded with profound and groundbreaking work as they and the rest of the world grappled with the war’s upheaval.”

• Flowery poetry was blown apart by WW1

  • Left a cynical vantage point of how the world operates 

Production Crew

Staff Technical Director: Sean Dumm

Assistant Technical Director: Nelson Wennberg

Shift Crew: Tessa Baker

Scenic Design Faculty Advisor: Curt Phillips

Dresser: Kylee Paar

Makeup/Hair: Kathryn Boster

Costume/Makeup Design Faculty Advisor: Caitlin Quinn

Costume Shop Supervisor: Laura Piotrowski

Light Board Operator: Louis Thiessen

Sound Board Operator: Devyn Harris

Lighting/Sound Faculty Advisor: Ethan Hollinger

Scenery / Props Construction Crew: Figensia Alcenat, Mackenzie Ammon, Abby Aune, Moriah Babinski, Cody Burgoon, Robert Carlson, Jager Christenson, Maggie Clark, Sheridan Cornett, Isabella Hopewell, Matthew Lamers*, Madeline Nave, Gavin Orson, Regan Peterson*, Luke Pfluger, Archie Reed, Izzy Roy, Lisa Scott*, Jack Senske, Abby Swanson, Jessica Thanghe, Nelson Wennberg*

Stagecraft Practicum Instructor: Katie Cornish

Costume Construction Crew: Ava Balciunas, Moriah Babinski, Deklan Boren, Alyssa Brennhofer, Shea Callaghan, Emmalyn Danielson, Lou Divine, Lydia Dupre*, Ro Feitl*, Kade Gau*, June Haider, Cindy Hansen, Jeannie Hurley, Finn Jackson, Tanner Longshore, Eric Mendoza, Sydney Nelson, Cadence Neste, Regan Peterson, Jake Pulkrabek, Jordyn Rodriguez, Oliver Swimley, Aristotle Taylor, Olivia Zastrow*

Costume Practicum Instructor: Alice Shafer

Light & Sound Crew: Ryan Armstrong, Kian Arnold, Madison Froehle, Ryan Hamilton, B Kelly, Elizabeth Kleis, Courtney Larson, Jake Mathey, Mackenzie Moe, Rhea Nair, Madelyn Nave, Olivia Nelson, Hunter Ramsden, John Toven, Aura West, Olivia Zastrow

* UMD Theatre is proud to acknowledge our paid student staff.

Other Information

Main Street runs approximately 100 minutes without an intermission.

Videotaping, audio recordings, and photography of this production are strictly prohibited.

Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival

The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, part of the Rubenstein Arts Access Program, is generously funded by David M. Rubenstein.

Special thanks to The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust for supporting the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. 

Additional support is provided by The Honorable Stuart Bernstein and Wilma E. Bernstein; and the Dr. Gerald and Paula McNichols Foundation. 

Kennedy Center education and related artistic programming is made possible through the generosity of the National Committee for the Performing Arts. 

This production is entered in the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF). The aims of this national theater education program are to identify and promote quality in college-level theater production. To this end, each production entered is eligible for a response by a regional KCACTF representative, and selected students and faculty are invited to participate in KCACTF programs involving scholarships, internships, grants and awards for actors, directors, dramaturgs, playwrights, designers, stage managers and critics at both the regional and national levels. 

Productions entered on the Participating level are eligible for invitation to the KCACTF regional festival and may also be considered for national awards recognizing outstanding achievement in production, design, direction and performance. 

Last year more than 1,500 productions were entered in the KCACTF involving more than 200,000 students nationwide. By entering this production, our theater department is sharing in the KCACTF goals to recognize, reward, and celebrate the exemplary work produced in college and university theaters across the nation.