Our Town
Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Our Town has one foot in the grave from the start. Thornton Wilder’s 1938 masterwork begins with a monologue from its narrator—the omniscient Stage Manager, played with brusque flair by Jim Parsons in the play’s latest Broadway revival—who tells us where we are: the hamlet of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, at the turn of the 20th century. But the first actual townsperson to speak is a paperboy named Joe, who chats with a customer while on his morning route. It’s all very anodyne, but no sooner has their small talk ended than the Stage Manager offers a piercing annotation. “Joe was awful bright—graduated from high school here, head of his class,” he says. “Goin’ to be a great engineer, Joe was. But the war broke out and he died in France. All that education for nothing.”
A staple of high school drama programs for generations, Our Town is a lot darker than you may remember—and weirder, too. One reason it doesn’t seem dated after nearly a century is that it still feels experimental: All the props are pantomimed, and the Stage Manager orders the actors around in front of us, setting and interrupting scenes to offer a wide-screen portrait of small-town life as rendered in a series of representative vignettes. The wholesome ordinariness, even blandness, of these depictions is purposeful. In his preface to the play, Wilder described juxtaposing “the life of a village against the life of the stars.” (In this production, lanterns hang above the...