Hoyt Hilsman [Courtesy photo]
Sixty-three years after that day, on Friday, March 13, 2026, his son Hoyt Hilsman watched the curtain rise on the world premiere of Essex Corners, a play that traces a century of American life through one family in a fictional New England town — and that owes more than a little to the extraordinary history Hilsman inherited. The production opened last night at Pasadena City College’s Center for the Arts Theater, with four additional performances running through March 21.
Essex Corners moves through four time periods — a scene from “just the other night” (the present), 1963 with the Vietnam War looming, 1937 before the outbreak of World War II, and 1913 — following the fictional Beale family in Essex Corners, New Hampshire. By the play’s end, some characters return only as spirits, arriving at the realization that time is irrelevant: things change, and things repeat, over and over, as they always have.
“I thought about a house that my family had that was built in the 1790s,” Hilsman said in an interview during the intermission of the play’s first staged reading at Parson’s Nose Theater in Pasadena in February 2025, “and I thought about all the generations of people that had lived there.”
He also said: “I’m everyone in the play.”
A Father’s Shadow, a Son’s Stage
To understand what Hilsman means, it helps to understand the life he grew up inside.
Roger Hilsman Jr. graduated from West Point in 1943 and was sent to the China-Burma-India theater, where he was wounded in combat serving with the legendary Merrill’s Marauders. He then volunteered to lead a guerrilla battalion of roughly three hundred local partisans and irregulars operating behind Japanese lines in Burma for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime precursor to the CIA. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, the elder Hilsman parachuted into Manchuria on a mission to liberate American prisoners held in a Japanese POW camp — and among the prisoners he found there was his own father.
Roger Hilsman went on to become one of the most consequential — and controversial — foreign policy figures of the Kennedy era. As Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and later as Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, he was involved in deliberations during the Cuban Missile Crisis and became the most outspoken advocate within the administration for a political rather than purely military approach to Vietnam. David Halberstam, in The Best and the Brightest, wrote that Kennedy valued Hilsman precisely because he was unafraid to challenge the military establishment. His clashes with the Pentagon, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara were legendary.
After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson — who reportedly disliked Hilsman’s brashness — effectively forced him out. Hilsman resigned in early 1964 and spent the rest of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he became professor emeritus in 1990.
He died on February 23, 2014, at age 94.
Hoyt Hilsman grew up in Washington, D.C., during the years his father was shaping Cold War policy, and later in New York, while Roger taught at Columbia. Hoyt himself earned both a bachelor’s degree and a law degree from Columbia — a two-generation thread of connection to the university that mirrors the multigenerational sweep of Essex Corners itself.
“So I wrote the play to honor all the people from present all the way back to the turn of the century,” Hilsman told Pasadena Now at the February 2025 reading. “And to me it’s so important, within the history of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, and all the changes that our country has been through.”
The Critic Crosses the Footlights
Hilsman, who has been a Pasadena resident for more than two decades, comes to playwriting by an unusual path. For years, the Los Angeles theater community has known him primarily as the man in the seat with the notebook. He has been a working theater and television critic for Daily Variety, HuffPost, and Backstage, and currently reviews for Cultural Daily, and Riot Material. He has been a member of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle since 2000, has served as its president, and currently serves as its treasurer. He also chaired the PEN West Drama Awards.
The playwright reviewing plays is not unheard of — but the critic stepping onto the stage he has long evaluated is something rarer. With Essex Corners, Hilsman is submitting himself to the same scrutiny he has applied to others for a quarter century.
His Hollywood credentials, meanwhile, are substantial. His screenwriting credits include work for Sony, Disney, New Line Cinema, NBC, ABC, and CBS. He co-wrote Father and Scout, a 1994 ABC television movie starring Bob Saget, and wrote seven episodes of the daytime drama Santa Barbara in 1984. He is the author of several fiction and non-fiction books, including the novel 19 Angels, a political thriller in development as a feature film. His plays have been produced in the United States and internationally.
A Bold Theatrical Gambit
Hilsman has called Essex Corners his own “loose re-imagining of Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town.’” Wilder’s Our Town was first produced in 1938, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama that same year, and is set in the fictional Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. It remains one of the most frequently performed plays in American theater. The comparison is deliberate and audacious. Where Wilder set his play in Grover’s Corners, Hilsman sets his in Essex Corners — “a town of his own invention.” Where Wilder covered roughly a dozen years at the turn of the twentieth century, Hilsman spans a full century, pushing forward into the present.
The play is described in promotional materials as “a humorous and poignant exploration of the past century of American life, seen from the perspective of several generations of one family in a small New England town in a rapidly changing America.”
“And then of course, the fact that history repeats itself and those who don’t live and appreciate history are doomed to repeat it,” Hilsman said at the February reading. “And then it has some larger elements of family, and what it means to have your family going back generations and sort of inheriting the culture and the values.”
He also noted the play’s demands on its performers: “It’s a wonderful challenge for actors.”
From Sold-Out Reading to World Premiere
The road to the premiere ran through fire — literally.
In January 2025, devastating fires in the Los Angeles area forced Parson’s Nose Theater to postpone its production of The Madwoman of Chaillot after members of the company were affected. “It’s just too soon,” the company said at the time. The theater announced it would proceed with its February schedule, which featured a staged reading of Essex Corners as part of its New Play Readers Series. Proceeds from the reading were donated to a fire relief fund.
Two performances were scheduled at the intimate, 50-seat Parson’s Nose — a 501(c)(3) nonprofit housed in a circa-1922 Marston Van Pelt–designed building on North Marengo in Old Pasadena that was formerly the Turner-Stevens Mortuary Chapel. The first, on Sunday, February 16 at 3 p.m., sold out. The second followed on Monday, February 17 at 7 p.m. Tickets were $20.
The reading was directed by Lance Davis, the theater’s co-founder and producing artistic director, who also performed in it. Davis’s own resume includes membership in the Tyrone Guthrie Theater Company in Minneapolis from 1970 to 1975, more than 100 productions on and off Broadway, a role in the Palme d’Or–winning film Barton Fink and the Oscar-nominated Anna, and television credits including Twin Peaks, Roseanne, Picket Fences, and Night Court. Hilsman serves as Resident Playwright and a board member at Parson’s Nose, now in its 26th season.
The reading drew a warm response. One reviewer described the play as “a sweet and smart telling of a family tale dating back to the early 1900s.” The success of the reading helped pave the way for a full production.
The PCC Production
The world premiere is jointly presented by the PCC Foundation and PCC’s Performing and Communication Arts Division Theater Department. It is directed by Suzanne Hunt-Jenner, an adjunct assistant professor in PCC’s performing arts department since 2011 who also teaches at California State University, Northridge. Hunt-Jenner holds an MFA from Cal State Long Beach, has made more than 100 appearances in network television, commercials, and stage plays, and won Scenie Awards for Outstanding Direction and Outstanding Production for the world premiere of Finding Fossils by Ty DeMartino at the Road Theatre. She has directed numerous productions at PCC, including Three Sisters, Eurydice, The Laramie Project, and The Great Gatsby. She is a certified teacher of the Michael Chekhov Acting Technique and has had work produced in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Paris.
The production doubles as an academic exercise: the performances satisfy course requirements for several PCC theater classes, including Technical Theater, Theater Rehearsal and Performance, Stage Techniques, and Fundamentals of Stage Lighting.
“Things Change, and Things Repeat, Over and Over”
Friday’s premiere arrives at a moment when American theater is hungry for new works that grapple with national identity and the long arc of the country’s story. That Hilsman has chosen to do so through the lens of a single family — in a fictional town whose very name echoes the most famous small town in American drama — is a wager on the power of the particular to illuminate the universal.
It is also, unmistakably, a personal reckoning. The son of a man who parachuted into Manchuria, stared down the Joint Chiefs, and helped set in motion the chain of events that would define a generation’s understanding of Vietnam has written a play about what it means to inherit a family’s history, to live inside the weight of what came before, and to ask whether any of us ever truly escape the past.
“And then of course, the fact that history repeats itself and those who don’t live and appreciate history are doomed to repeat it,” Hilsman said. “And then it has some larger elements of family, and what it means to have your family going back generations and sort of inheriting the culture and the values.”
IF YOU GO
“Essex Corners” by Hoyt Hilsman
Directed by Suzanne Hunt-Jenner
When: March 14, 19, 20, and 21, 2026. Where: Center for the Arts Theater (CA-135), Pasadena City College, 1570 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91106
Tickets: $10–$15, available on Eventbrite
Runtime: Approximately 2 hours
Presented by: PCC Foundation and PCC Performing and Communication Arts Division Theater Department
