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Jimmy Bohr Comes to
Our Town
Jimmy Bohr is, shall we say, adjusting to life in Columbus. After all, the three-decade New Yorker thought he'd stay in the Big Apple for the rest of his life. But... opportunity and OSU came knocking. "It was a big move, to go from New York City to the largest college campus in the US," says the new assistant professor in theatre at Ohio State. "But life offers opportunities, and I've always believed you have to accept them."
Bohr, who had worked as a casting director for daytime TV—including As the World Turns and Another World—and as an Off-Broadway theatre director, had recently made the move to education by teaching at the New York School of Film and Television. He says the OSU position was too plum to pass up. "Here, I am asked and challenged to be creative every single day and that is one of the enticements—to be completely creative in teaching and directing and in all the other areas of being part of a big university," he says. "Plus, the students are incredibly committed and responsive to serious acting. They want to be challenged."
This quarter, Jimmy Bohr directs his first play at OSU—a production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, a tribute to the late Roy Bowen, professor emeritus. The play, one of Bowen's favorites, will be presented in the theatre in Drake Performance Center that was named for him.
Bohr is excited about directing a strong and powerful production of a play that often gets misinterpreted as merely sentimental. "Our Town is one of the great American plays, a masterpiece of dramatic literature," he says. "I want to do a production that has the stature the play demands and deserves. It is often reduced to its sentimentality but that's not the point. The searing truths and the profound influences, those are what's important."
In addition to undergraduate and graduate theatre students, he is hiring children and actors from the community to add a dose of realism to the cast. OSU Theatre alumnus Glenn Peters is coming back from New York to take on the lead role as narrator.
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Roy Bowen, Illustration by John Crawford
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