Spotlight on the stoplight
Local cast brings 'One Stoplight Town' to life in Toledo
TOLEDO — Technically, Toledo hasn’t been a one-stoplight town for more than 20 years, but there are times artistic license must be taken.
Besides, if you refer to “the stoplight,” the one residents will think of is the one at the intersection of High and Broadway streets by the Tama County Courthouse, the one that’s been there since 1949.
“One Stoplight Town,” by Detroit-area playwright Tracy Wells, wasn’t written specifically with Toledo in mind, but it could have been. It’s full of the types of people you find all across America living in such towns. The play ran Thursday through Saturday at the Wieting Theatre in Toledo in conjunction with the town’s Stoplight Festival on Friday.
Toledo’s stoplight — ground-mounted in the center of the intersection, a setup rarely found anywhere anymore — was faithfully replicated at center stage of the Wieting. That created a unique problem: It’s a character that never moves. Jacob Buchanan, who plays Tom, said the stoplight’s placement created some unique blocking issues for the actors.
Tom is similar to the stage manager in Thornton Wilder’s classic play “Our Town” — a character Buchanan played as a student at South Tama High School — but without directly talking to the audience. Buchanan thought a better comparison was Red Green, from the Canadian sketch comedy show that had a long run on Iowa Public Television. Like Red, Tom is “a little mischievous, causing a little bit of trouble here and there, but it’s always light-hearted and the people around him are never the butt of the joke,” he said.
Tom is the town’s handyman, although anything he fixes doesn’t seem to stay fixed for long. “Maybe what’s he better at fixing is relationships,” Buchanan said. He’s our throughline to the townspeople’s stories.
“If you watch the show, or you read it, you can find people in your life that identify with these characters,” Buchanan said. “I grew up in this community, graduated 21 years ago, came back, and I could tell you the name of Bob in this town.”
Buchanan originally auditioned for Bob, the grocery store owner who’s had it out for the stoplight ever since it was installed. “There aren’t any cars!” Bob says more than once. Instead, Bob is played by Jon Huebner, an assistant principal at South Tama.
Buchanan came out of retirement, so to speak, at the urging of play director and now-retired South Tama teacher Mary Fasse-Shaw.
The play has various vignettes covering about two decades, sparingly connected at best. This passage of time is illustrated most in the story of Sally (Maddalyn Brown/Brianna Morrison) and Jim (Arctix Houghton/Ryden Forcht), who go from classmates to parents of a college student. Sally is a go-getter who would never accept “a measly A-minus” but falls in love with Jim, even if he never learns how to dance well.
There’s also a group of youths who engage in a race that one of them later re-creates for a film project, a restaurant rivalry, and a would-be runaway teenager complaining about the fact the theater is playing “Groundhog Day,” which itself can be seen as a meta-commentary on how it can feel like nothing changes in a one-stoplight town.
Maude (Dixie Forcht) and Clara (Kathy Holtz) are the Statler and Waldorf of the play, slightly-offstage and slightly-offbeat little old ladies who rib both the community members and each other. Holtz didn’t think it was difficult to get into character at all. Just a little bit of work and the family’s reaction was “That’s Grandma Millie!”
One real-life tie-in was missing, though. Promotion for Toledo’s production included the line “In a town with one stoplight the only thing scarier than change … is a roundabout!”
A roundabout is coming to Toledo in the very near future. It’s replacing what has been the town’s second stoplight, at the intersection of U.S. Highway 63 and what’s now Business U.S. 30, southwest of the historic downtown. That stoplight was installed in the early 2000s, and the new four-lane U.S. Highway 30’s interchange later brought the city total to four.
In the play, however, no roundabout is coming. The stoplight remains a constant, telling drivers and residents in a matter-of-fact way when to go, slow down, or stop.
It’s just like its real-life counterpart a block from the theater.
My other work can be found on my website, Iowa Highway Ends, and its blog.
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My dad put in the original base back in 1949. My brother redid the base, matching Dad's original base, in 2009.
What a fun story!