The Treat: Simon Helberg

0:00KCRW sponsors include Netflix, presenting Big Mistakes. Emmy Award-winning creator Dan Levy and Taylor Ortega star as two deeply incapable siblings blackmailed into the world of organized crime. The Telegraph gives it five stars and hails it a glorious comedy. For your Emmy Awards consideration. Welcome to The Treat. I'm Elvis Mitchell. For 12 seasons, Simon Helberg was part of our lives on the sitcom The Big Bang Theory. He's currently leading a different kind of life in the AMC series The Audacity. and for The Treat. He talks about a play that looked at the nuances of small-town life and how it rendered intimacy in an epic way.

0:36Hi, this is Simon Helberg, and you're listening to The Treat.

0:50I am a huge, huge lover of the play Our Town.

1:01This, like most people, was a play that I kind of dismissed, saw a lot of high school productions of it, and was like, eh, it's a little kind of cheesy. But when I first actually saw this play done, I was very bored for the first two acts. And then the last act came along, and it absolutely slayed me, and I have not stopped thinking about this play literally since I saw it. So I think about this play probably every day, and I'm not kidding.

1:32It feels very much because it takes place in the early 20th century. So it feels a little bit like you're watching Waiting for Guffman in the beginning. Like, wow, welcome to Grover's Corner. It can have that, which I think actually they're making fun of in Waiting for Guffman. But if you see a good production, it will just knock you on your ass. The name of the town is Grover's Corners. New Hampshire, just across the Massachusetts line. Latitude 42 degrees, 40 minutes. Longitude 70 degrees, 37 minutes. The first act... There's three acts, and the first two acts are very quotidian and very, very mundane.

2:13I think the first act is called, you know, Daily Life or something. You know, you're really just watching people. Bare stage, two ladders. And then the last act, the main character dies in childbirth, and she comes back. She wants to go back and just witness a day from her life. And she goes and witnesses. I think it's her 12th birthday. Mama, am I good looking? Yes, of course you are. All of my children have got good features. I'd be ashamed if they hadn't. Mama, that's not what I mean. What I mean is, am I pretty? I've already told you yes. Now that's enough of that. You have a nice, young, pretty face.

2:54She just watches all this mundane, quotidian, boring stuff that we sat through in the first two acts. Shouldn't necessarily be mind-numbingly boring, but it's kind of supposed to be. She sits there and watches this regular day, and it is the most moving, profound moment that I have really, that I've witnessed in theater. She just sits and watches herself and her family go through this day. that was kind of a regular day, just having breakfast and talking. And at the end, she has this line that she says, you know, does anyone ever realize life while they're living it?

3:43It's one of those things that I guess before I get out of bed in the morning, sometimes I try to think to myself, well, you know, like, let's realize life today. If I was coming back and this morning was all I had or this morning was what I could kind of relive, I would relive it with so much vigor and passion and feeling. And it just reminded me of the beauty of that daily life that sometimes we dismiss as being boring.

4:21The Audacity star Simon Helberg on Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize winning play Our Town The Treat is produced by Rebecca Mooney and mixed by Katie Gilchrist I'm Elvis Mitchell It's The Treat of love and delight. When true simplicity is gained, to bow and to bend, we will not be ashamed. To turn, to turn, twill be our delight, till by turning, turning, we come round round.

5:18My heart