Wilsonville Stage — The Golden Age
Wilsonville Public Library, Wilsonville, Oregon
Saturday, August 29, 2026 | 2pm
I had seen plays in traditional theatres, converted church spaces, schools, and community venues, but this would be a first: a play performed inside a public library.
I arrived early enough to wander through the Wilsonville Public Library before the performance. For a while, it was simply a library—bookshelves, community notices, people reading and browsing. Then I found the Oak Room, where a drawing room had appeared and a theatre audience was beginning to gather.
That afternoon, Wilsonville Stage was presenting A. R. Gurney’s The Golden Age. It would also be my first production by the company, making the unusual setting an especially memorable way to discover it.
The Oak Room Becomes a Stage
The performance took place in the Wilsonville Public Library’s Oak Room. Once I stepped through the doors, however, Wilsonville Stage had given the meeting room another identity.
Wilsonville Stage’s three-person cast featured Phyllis Lang as Isabel, Emma Heesacker as Virginia, and Jeff Gardner as Tom. According to the program, The Golden Age takes place in the front room of an elegant New York City brownstone in 1983.
To create it, director Janet Steiger Carr—who also designed the set, costumes, sound and properties—filled one end of the Oak Room with the accumulated details of Isabel Hastings Hoyt’s world. Gold curtains hung against black drapes. Lamps glowed beside framed paintings and flowers. A pink tufted chair faced a cream-colored chaise, while an old radio, folding screen and drinks cart helped suggest a home shaped by decades of memory and taste.
Up close, the set rewarded wandering eyes. Framed pictures leaned against furniture. Fabrics were layered over tables and around artwork. Flowers and decorative objects filled corners that could easily have been left bare. Nothing about Isabel’s room felt sparse. It looked like the home of someone who had spent a lifetime accumulating objects—and stories.
Yet Wilsonville Stage never completely concealed the room in which all of this had been built. Above the curtains, the illusion ended: ceiling tiles, fluorescent fixtures and an illuminated EXIT sign still belonged unmistakably to a public library meeting room.
That contrast became part of the charm. Wilsonville Stage had not transformed the Oak Room by making the library disappear. Instead, it had built a small theatrical world inside it. For an afternoon, Isabel Hastings Hoyt’s New York parlor existed beneath the fluorescent ceiling of the Wilsonville Public Library.
Period recordings helped establish the mood before the play began. Among the songs drifting through the Oak Room were Isham Jones’s “There’s a Wah-Wah Girl in Agua Caliente,” Cab Calloway’s “St. James Infirmary,” and Louis Armstrong’s “When You’re Smiling.” The music gave the temporary library stage another layer of atmosphere before the actors ever appeared.
Before the performance, director Janet Steiger Carr welcomed the audience and described the weekend as a homecoming for Wilsonville Stage. It had been 77 months since the company had last performed in Wilsonville itself, before the COVID-19 shutdown. Carr pointed out a woman seated in the front row who had been part of that final pre-pandemic production. Now Wilsonville Stage was back at the Wilsonville Public Library.
Carr also described the script of The Golden Age with one word: “delicious.”
The setting became even more appropriate once I looked into the play itself. The Golden Age is a three-character drama involving literary scholarship, memory, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the possibility of a lost chapter of The Great Gatsby. Gurney’s play was suggested by Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, another story concerned with literary reputation, private documents, and the uneasy question of who has a right to possess the past.
Isabel’s Version of History
Isabel’s stories were one of the great pleasures of the play. She seemed capable of reaching into almost any corner of history and producing a personal acquaintance. At one point she recalled traveling in Greece with the Van Dusens, who had supposedly consulted the Oracle of Delphi about the stock market. Isabel’s verdict was characteristically unimpressed: the Oracle had given them all the wrong tips.
Tom approached Isabel’s memories like a scholar, searching for names, documents and connections he could verify. Isabel remembered things differently. When he found an old letter signed only “L,” apologizing for spilled soup, she drifted through possible identities—D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, perhaps Gertrude Lawrence—without ever settling the question. What she remembered clearly was the soup. There had been plenty of it, plenty of spilling, and plenty of drinking. As Isabel explained, they had to drink: the soup was awful.
Tom kept searching Isabel’s past for something definitive: F. Scott Fitzgerald, a lost chapter of The Great Gatsby, a document that might matter to literary history. Isabel’s memories refused to behave that way. She remembered spilled soup, too much drinking, bad food, and half-remembered names.
Tom wanted evidence. Isabel gave him experience.
That was Isabel. The extraordinary became ordinary the moment it entered one of her stories.
But her relationship with the past was not always played simply for laughs.
In the second act, Isabel sat listening to the final act of Verdi’s Aida on the radio. When Virginia reminded her that the Metropolitan Opera would return in the fall, Isabel answered simply, “I won’t.”
For a moment, the comedy receded. Isabel knew that the future everyone else assumed would arrive might no longer belong to her.
Yet even here, she turned toward Virginia. Isabel urged her granddaughter to listen to Verdi because his operas, she said, were about liberation. Then she made the idea personal:
“What good is a woman if she’s not free?”
It was one of the moments when Isabel’s stories about the past became advice about Virginia’s future. She could be wildly unreliable about historical details, but on the question of independence she was remarkably direct. Her later admission that she had not liked marriage reinforced the same idea: whatever Virginia chose, Isabel wanted her to remain capable of choosing for herself.
Naturally, Isabel did not remain solemn for long. She soon claimed that she had met Verdi as a child while traveling through Parma with her mother. When Virginia objected, Isabel reconsidered only slightly. Perhaps the lovely bearded man who had kissed her on the head had been Michelangelo.
During intermission, the Hampton String Quartet’s arrangement of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” played—and at the curtain call, the production switched to the original Eurythmics recording, a particularly fitting choice for a play set in 1983.
Suddenly, seeing it inside a library did not feel merely quirky. It felt almost designed for the occasion.
There are larger theatres, grander stages, and more elaborate productions. But sometimes what makes a performance memorable is the peculiar harmony between a play and the place where you encounter it.
For The Golden Age, a play preoccupied with literature, memory and the ownership of the past, a Saturday afternoon inside the Wilsonville Public Library proved to be an unusually fitting introduction to Wilsonville Stage.
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