DANCE / CHRIS PASLES : Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ Learns a New Step : Ballet Version of the Classic Play About Love, Loss in a Small Community Comes to Irvine

Choreographer Philip Jerry spent eight months trying to get permission from the Thornton Wilder estate to turn the play “Our Town” into a ballet.

“I had to prove I was not going to degrade it,” Jerry, 36, said in a phone interview last week from Princeton, N. J., where he is in his first semester of undergraduate work. “I wrote several letters and made several phone calls and finally decided a personal visit was best.”

The ex-Joffrey dancer must have been persuasive in pleading his case to Wilder estate representative Thelma Luttinger, for he was given permission to create the ballet, which premiered in 1989.

“Our Town” will be danced by Ballet Pacifica on Friday and Saturday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. Works by Diane Coburn Bruning, Colin Connor and Rick McCullough will complete the program.

Those who want to stick with the original stage version can still catch it at the Gem Theatre in Garden Grove, where the play is being presented as part of the Grove Shakespeare Festival through Nov. 2.

The ballet tells the story “pretty much as in the play,” Jerry said. “There are all the Gibbses and the Webbs. . . . But there is no stage manager. That is a major difference.” Jerry said he cut the part because the stage manager has “a purely verbal role.”

“I’ve known the play forever,” Jerry said. “The curse of ‘Our Town’ is that it’s taught in high school. Nobody ever goes back to read it as an adult. Right before the 50th anniversary of the play (in 1988) in New York, the attitude was that it was syrupy and saccharine. Then when they mounted it in the Lincoln Center production, people discovered it was searing, not some fluffy little piece of Americana they seemed to remember from high school. . . .

“Wilder writes about the depths of human love and yearning and loss, and I think that speaks to everybody.”

Jerry created the work for the Grand Rapids (Mich.) Ballet. He compiled a score from several works by Aaron Copland, including his music for the 1940 United Artists movie of “Our Town” and the composer’s famous “Fanfare for the Common Man.” The ballet also has been danced by the Berkshire Ballet in Jerry’s hometown of Albany, N. Y., and by the Ft. Wayne (Ind.) Ballet.

Jerry recalled precedents for transforming stage plays into ballets. He cited “The Moor’s Pavane,” a stylized account of Shakespeare’s “Othello” for four dancers created by modern dance pioneer Jose Limon in 1949.

“That’s also a distillation of that long, huge play,” he said. “I’m not going to put my work in the same league. But in the same sense, I like to think this is the essence of something, that I’m not just trying to mime a production of ‘Our Town.’ ”

Jerry began dancing in Albany when he was about 8, then moved to New York City after graduating from high school.

“I got into Joffrey Two right away,” he said, referring to Joffrey’s junior company. After three years in that group, he joined the main company and danced until 1988.

He decided to leave the Joffrey because “I really wanted to do ‘Our Town.’ I had this ballet in me,” he said. “I had it in me for a long time and wanted to get out and get going.”

It was hard to give up the ballet world and support system in it, he said. “But I had the support of everybody close to me. When one retires, it’s a point-blank thing. You don’t retire gradually. It feels like an ice plunge.

“What do you do afterward? Do you pick up your bags and start all over again? In my case, I voted to do that. I was determined to take steps early on, that if I’m not going to be a director of some huge company, then I wanted to train to do something challenging.”

So he applied to Princeton.

“I felt a certain gap in myself, in my academic side,” he said. “An academic background and credentials are something I missed and wanted.”

So far, though, he hasn’t declared a major but is taking general education courses such as French, Shakespeare, American studies and geology. He admitted to having some problems with the science course.

“Rocks are not something that figured prominently in my life,” he said. “The only rocks I’ve dealt with before are prop rocks.”

* Ballet Pacifica will dance Philip Jerry’s “Our Town” and other works on Friday at 8 p.m. and on Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Tickets: $15, general; $12 for students and seniors. Information: (714) 854-4646.