'Middletown' Hopes to Strike a Chord of both Loneliness and Hope

For her last project as a student director at Harvard, director Ally M. Kiley ’15 will transform the Loeb mainstage into the aggressively average, small-town setting of “Middletown.” The play, which opens April 24, is an avant-garde drama that seeks to explore a confusing, unlikely, and short-lived relationship between two strangers.

"The thing that I really wanted to focus on is this feeling of loneliness,” Kiley says. “I think that this show is particularly resonant here because I think Harvard can be a lonely place for a lot of people. We as students at this age are constantly making these connections with other people, and sometimes they turn out to be really meaningful connections, and sometimes they just sort of dissipate.”

Cast members say that Kiley’s directing style revolves around giving her actors the freedom to explore these feelings of loneliness before she steps in to guide their portrayals. “Ally as a director is wonderful because she always has an answer but will only give it if you need it,” says Taylor Kay Phillips ’15, who plays protagonist Mary Swanson. “She can have been quiet for the entire rest of the [rehearsal], but as soon as you ask [a question], she has two or three answers ready to go…which makes you realize that she has answers to everything that you haven’t asked too.”

What’s more, Kiley says that her decision to apply for the Loeb mainstage—a space that is significantly larger than any other she had worked in before—was shaped in part by her desire to highlight this theme of loneliness. “The expansiveness of this theater is something that serves [“Middletown”] really well,” Kiley says. “In previous years I’ve seen a lot of shows try to bring the seats in and make the theater more intimate, but I really do want to emphasize the empty space here.”

Even more innovative and unusual is Kiley’s decision to add a score to the originally dialogue-only script. “I have always loved [music] as a storytelling device, and knew I wanted to incorporate it in some way,” Kiley says. This instinct led to the musical collaboration between Kiley and Sam C. Pottash ’16, the show’s composer.

“After talking about it a lot, [Ally and I] decided that the band could play lots of different roles,” Pottash says. “I call it a dramatically integrated band, at the risk of sounding like a total liberal arts student.” Not only will the three-piece band play snippets of popular songs in scene transitions, but it will also provide sound effects—like that of a phone ringing or a radio being tuned—in creative ways.

Why go to the trouble of composing a score and enlisting a band for a play that doesn’t call for these things? “The thing about Middletown is that it’s so real that it’s hilarious—but heartbreaking—because you cannot help but instinctually see yourself in the characters onstage,” Pottash says. “It’s just so human and visceral and to me; I don’t know what could give a more visceral reaction than music.”