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 audience, swirling toward the stage like a question mark.) By the end, Our Town has revealed itself to be a devastating, frighteningly profound meditation on moments that are at once insignificant and infinitely full.
Our Town | Photograph: Courtesy Daniel Rader
Two families are at the story’s center. Dr. Gibbs (a gently good-humored Billy Eugene Jones) and Mrs. Gibbs (a compelling Michelle Wilson) have a son and a daughter, as do their neighbors, newspaper editor Mr. Webb (the reliable Richard Thomas) and Mrs. Webb (Katie Holmes). The first act takes place in 1901 and the second act three years later, when the teenage George Gibbs (Ephraim Sykes) and Emily Webb (Zoey Deutch, adding a dash of neurosis to her pertness) couple up; they pop through windows to talk to each other, Laugh-In style, on the back wall of Beowulf Boritt’s gray and weathered wooden set. Other townsfolk of note include the excitable gossip Mrs. Soames (a marvelous Julie Halston) and the choir director Simon Stimson (Donald Webber), the bitter town drunk. “Some people ain’t made for small-town life,” says Dr. Gibbs of Simon, without elaboration.
Our Town | Photograph: Courtesy Daniel Rader
Our Town is designed to be staged simply, and it seems at first like director Kenny Leon might be on the wrong track. To emphasize the universality of Wilder’s take on the human condition, the casting is diverse: the Gibbses are played by Black actors, as are many of the town’s other denizens, and the dairyman Howie (John McGinty) is deaf. That all works fine, but the production’s opening sequence is tricked out with needless affectations: The actors, costumed by Dede Ayite in a mix of modern and period wear, take selfies with their phones; an opening song, Abraham Jam’s “Braided Prayer,” presents a blunt interfaith message. And the bells and whistles don’t end there. Taking a page from David Cromer’s unforgettable 2009 production, the show pipes a whiff of bacon into the theater in Act Three; earlier, less effectively, it employs aromas of flowers and vanilla. (I wasn’t even sure what I was smelling when it happened; I just thought someone near me must have used too much perfume.)
Our Town | Photograph: Courtesy Daniel Rader
As this 100-minute production moves toward its finale, though, it finds a surer footing and the extras fall away. The first act, the Stage Manager tells us, is called “Daily Life,” and the second is “Love and Marriage.” As for the third: “There’s another act coming after this: I reckon you can guess what that’s about,” he says. And yes, you can: Death has haunted the play all along. But if you don’t know Our Town already, you could never predict how Wilder chooses to take the question on. The third act is a discussion held in a cemetery—not among the visitors, but among those buried there. Wilder pulls off a neat trick: The Stage Manager has been so matter-of-factual and unsentimental throughout that when he lays out the play’s idiosyncratic vision of the afterlife, as if it were common knowledge, we go along with him. (“You know as well as I do that the dead don’t stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they lose hold of the earth…”) Tears were streaming down my face for much of the last half hour of this revival; perhaps you will feel the same way. But while we in the audience might weep, Wilder's view, though always sympathetic, stays clear and dry. He has an eye on the eternal.
Our Town. Ethel Barrymore Theatre (Broadway). By Thornton Wilder. Directed by Kenny Leon. With Jim Parsons, Zoey Deutch, Katie Holmes, Billy Eugene Jones, Ephraim Sykes, Richard Thomas, Michelle Wilson, Julie Halston, Donald Webber, John McGinty. Running time: 1hr 40mins. No intermission.
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Our Town | Photograph: Courtesy Daniel Rader
