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Our town
Getting the dirt on Wigfield



Small-town life never had it so bad. In the new Wigfield: The Can-Do Town That Just May Not (Hyperion, 224 pages, $22.95), the title town is being threatened by the state-planned destruction of a dam. The book’s fictional author, Russell Hokes, chronicles the lives of the city and its residents, and their feelings about the impending disaster that will submerge their town forever. What does he find? A strip of road that’s little more than used auto-part stores, porn shops, and strip clubs. He interviews three self-declared mayors, various sex-industry workers, two women both vying for the title of oldest person in town, and the town Wiccan. So when the stage adaptation of Wigfield comes to the Somerville Theatre on June 13 and 14, don’t expect Our Town.

" ‘Nice people, know what I mean?’" quotes Stephen Colbert from the Thornton Wilder classic. Colbert is on a conference line from New York with his co-authors, Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello. The three originally met as part of the Second City comedy troupe and later developed the Comedy Central show Strangers with Candy. Sedaris is, of course, the sister and occasional writing partner of humorist David Sedaris, and Colbert is currently a regular on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In the staged Wigfield, they’ll all be playing various roles from the book, with Colbert as a stage-manager-like Hokes introducing the evening. Although Wigfield was first conceived as a book, with photos by Todd Oldham illustrating the characters, an author tour with three authors would have been problematic. And anyway, when you’ve got three performers plugging a character-driven humor book, why not just perform it?

"We decided to turn it into a show," says Colbert. "And the show is a series of character monologues that, when read in order, also tell a narrative."

Although Wigfield is imaginary, Colbert says that it was in fact inspired by a real place. "For The Daily Show, I once went to a place called Jefferson in West Virginia. Jefferson had existed for three years and had been created as a town by some local club owners as a tax dodge. They didn’t really want to be a town, it was just an unincorporated stretch of highway two miles long and 200 yards wide. And it was just the worst place in the world. They didn’t pay their bills, so the town’s power got shut off. They had two different police chiefs because the town council appointed one and the mayor appointed another, and these police chiefs would run each other off the road and arrest each other for impersonating the police chief. So when we started to write the book, I suggested that we use that town as a sort of touchstone, or like a matrix — that’s a hot word these days — as a matrix for Wigfield."

Pondering their disputatious, sometimes violent ways, and the town’s impending demise, the collection of lowlifes and various dysfunctional characters that populate Wigfield deliver bons mots such as "Nobody is thinking about justice. That’s just not the small-town way." One of the town’s strippers, Cinnamon, tells journalist Hokes, "I just think it’s sad that one day there might come a day when a small-town girl like me won’t have a place she can take her clothes off in front of truckers." Says the town taxidermist, Lenare, "People from the city travel miles to get to places like Wigfield. A quiet rural place where they can relax and kill animals, and now the government wants to flood the place. It just doesn’t make any sense."

One other thing: is it okay to mention Jefferson, West Virginia, by name in print? "Absolutely!" says Colbert. "They don’t read!"

Wigfield will be performed at the Somerville Theatre on Friday, June 13 at 8 p.m., and Saturday, June 14 at 7 p.m. and 9:30. Tickets are $30. Call (617) 931-2000. Colbert, Dinello, and Sedaris will also appear at Borders Books and Music in the CambridgeSide Galleria, 100 CambridgeSide Place, on June 14 at 12:30 p.m. Call (617) 679-0887.

Issue Date: June 6 - 12, 2003
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