The cast of OUR TOWN, Daniel Rader
OUR TOWN is widely considered not just one of the greatest American plays, but one of the greatest plays ever written. Experimental for its time, Thornton Wilder's piece, written in 1938, uses an all but bare stage and mimed action to examine the very nature of human existence. Divided into three "acts" (in practical terms the show is an hour and a half with no intermission... these "act" breaks do not denote actual breaks...) "Daily Life", "Love and Marriage" and "Death and Eternity", a Stage Manager takes us through the everyday lives of the citizens of a small New Jersey town, Grover's Corners, between the years of 1901 and 1913, transforming the boring and mundane into deeply powerful statements about eternity and the meaning of life. You could have someone walk in off the street and read the text as if they were reading a phone book and there would still not be a dry eye in the house. Even with bad acting and no technical elements (none are required anyway - the show is meant to be performed with a couple of chairs, tables and a ladder) it is nearly impossible to screw up this show.
Yet, somehow, director Kenny Leon has just about managed it.
One can't help feeling that Leon is scared of the text itself. It's as if every decision has been made to blast the audience over the head with "See?! It's about YOU! This story is meant to be UNIVERSAL! Do you get it? DO YOU GET IT?!" and desperate to "counteract" anything in the now almost hundred year old text that might in any way possibly offend.
Part of what makes OUR TOWN so brilliant is how it walks the line between specificity and universality. Lean too hard into overt universality and you land squarely in boringly generic. Get too bogged down in specificity and it is possible to shut out a large portion of your audience. But Wilder makes it very clear that this play IS about everyone, and part of the way he does that is in getting specific about the lives of the specific people and place he's talking about. His specificity adds to the universality... far from shutting people out it makes us all think about the specific things in our own lives. Seeing a church choir rehearsal in this play doesn't offend because "I'm not a Christian", instead it makes us think of the institutions that are part of our own lives, the places we may have been dragged to as children, etc. And ignored in this production is how Wilder does, ultimately, treat the idea of the center of religion (what is eternal?) as almost not religious at all. It's fascinating that, for all that church plays a significant role in the lives of those in Grover's Corners (who have the wide ranging religious options of the Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church and even...the Catholic Church...) when they actually do die their existence is sitting and waiting...for what comes next. No one finds themselves in heaven or hell (or even purgatory), but simply in a state of being weaned off of life...
But instead of trusting Wilder's genius, and our intelligence as an audience, Leon is like a bad magician trying desperately to misdirect us. The show now opens not with the simple statement by the Stage Manager: "This play is called "Our Town", but with an original song written for the show and performed by the cast that weaves together Muslim, Jewish and Christian prayers. At the graveyard in the third act the headstones are marked with symbols from just about every religion in existence. And Leon has pushed diverse and representational casting to an almost comic place. Think of as many demographics as you can, then add five more and you approach what Leon has done with casting this piece. It's as if he's trying to shoehorn a utopia into simple, flawed Grover's Corners. The Scientist brought on by the Stage Manager to talk about the history of the land on which Grover's Corners is built is a Native American woman. The beloved milkman is deaf and, apparently, everyone in the town signs brilliantly (I must add that the Milkman (Howie Newsome) is played by the always wonderful John McGinty who you may remember from CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD. I am always happy to see him onstage and want to be clear that while I am thrilled by his casting, I am not thrilled by the pandering, shoehorned way a deaf actor/character was included in this production). Grover's Corners is a specific place in a specific time... and this has nothing to do with diverse casting (in the potential sense, as it should be, of casting the best actors for the roles regardless,) I am not saying in any way that OUR TOWN should only ever have an all white, abled cast... but it's in HOW you do it. Grover's Corners, and the people in it, are flawed (just look at the jabs made towards Polish people in the text) and it seems the desire here is to turn it into a utopia where everyone is enlightened and inclusive all the time...
One might think that the costume design is trying to clothe each character as if they're from a different era - Emily is in a dress that's something between an 80's prom dress and a Shirley Temple outfit, with large earrings added for good measure, some are dressed in period appropriate clothing, some in modern clothing, etc. But it's so randomly put together and of such low quality (many of the cast members look like they had thirty seconds to grab literally anything at the local Goodwill) that it's hard to buy into that as a deliberate concept...
And that's not to mention the overt - the Stage Manager saying "all of the lights are out now" and suddenly every light on stage comes on. Minimalism and imagination are replaced with the very literal... the Stage Manager says "dawn is breaking" and we get beautiful, rosy "sunrise" lights. George and Emily's iconic ladder - representing the small gap between their windows, is replaced by two, very literal, large windows that they peek through on the backdrop. In the heartbreaking last scene when Emily, now dead, goes back to earth to relive her twelfth birthday, and begs her mother to "look at me just once", and later decides to go back to her grave because "it goes so fast, we don't even have time to look at one another" - her mother spends practically the whole scene making intense eye contact with her. She even freezes at the end of the scene... looking intensely at Emily. And in a moment where Emily is supposed to be overwhelmed by the beauty of her old, ordinary life, the few set pieces and props that had been present are taken away. In the section where the Stage Manager takes "questions from the audience", what are traditionally audience plants don't make any sort of pretense of being a part of the audience (though the Scientist does?) instead simply walking onstage in a line and stating their questions. Simon Stimpson, the alcoholic choir director here has no indication that he drinks at all... except for when the rest of the town talks about him...
I am always happy to see a production of OUR TOWN and want it to be revived as much as possible... but, with the exception of getting to hear Wilder's great words, I can't think of a single reason why this production exists. Inevitable comparisons to the last major commercial production (starring Helen Hunt as the Stage Manager) throw this incarnation into an even more negative light. That production of OUR TOWN was a revelation - and it was because, in an effort to serve the text as honestly as possible, they found heretofore undiscovered possibilities within the direction. One of the most incredible elements of that production, one that brought gasps from the audience at every performance, was their handling of the third act. Having stayed faithful to Wilder's vision for the first two acts to be largely mimed with only a couple of chairs and tables, this time when Emily reentered her life, seeing it in all it's overwhelming complexity and beauty for the first time, the back wall of the set was raised and we were suddenly in a completely realistic kitchen - where her mother was actually cooking onstage. Suddenly WE saw everything that had been missed, along with Emily... the colors, the shape of the stove... even the smells... yes, we smelled Mrs. Webb cooking bacon onstage and no smell has ever felt more like a miracle.
The cast as a whole is...not good. Much of this I have to chalk up to what is clearly a weak (to put it mildly) concept for this play - this is most evident with Jim Parsons as the Stage Manager. Parsons is not an immediate, obvious choice for this role, but he acquits himself better than one might think... in the hands of a great director I think he could have soared in this role. The best actors by far are Billy Eugene Jones as Dr. Gibbs, Ephraim Sykes as George and Richard Thomas as Mr. Gibbs. Katie Holmes as Mrs. Webb is...ok?
I don't like to single out bad performances but I was flat out mad at Zoey Deutch as Emily. I don't know if it was a result of direction, her lack of stage experience, or just who she is as an actress, but just as this production made pretty much every wrong decision in the interpretation of the play, Deutch is hitting just about all the wrong notes as Emily. Emily is innocent, smart, brave, creative, passionate and stalwart. Deutch is jaded, worldly wise, superficial, and at times almost manically hyper. I was unfamiliar with her work and so, after the performance I looked her up on YouTube. In her film performances she is charming, but incredibly contemporary in a specific, worldly way - she gives strong early career Elliot Page vibes (if JUNO were made today Deutch would 100% be cast in the Page role.) Those are all fine qualities, but Emily they are not. I have no doubt she is a fine actress but, at least given her interpretation/the direction of her performance in this production, this is not the role for her.
There is a paradox that, for me, sums up a lot of what was problematic in this production. At the end of the show, during the Stage Manager's final speech, the whole cast drops character and watches him. There was a tiny, almost imperceptible moment between Deutch and Sykes (now out of character) that was far and away the most honest and beautiful thing I'd seen onstage all night. Sykes, as George, had just been crying at the foot of Emily's grave. The moment they dropped character, Deutch pulled out a kleenex and handed it to Sykes. He took it, and then gave her a little squeeze on her knee. The camaraderie between the two actors was more potent than anything else I'd seen all evening. If that was a staged moment then it is the one beautiful decision made all evening... but I have a feeling it wasn't.
If you want to see an interpretation of OUR TOWN that, I think, does all the things this production is TRYING to do, check out the fantastic documentary OT: OUR TOWN. The film follows a group of teachers in a troubled, underprivileged American school, who are trying to uplift, help and connect with their students through putting on a production of OUR TOWN. What the students first find boring, they soon find deeply impactful - for example, many students connect the tragedy of the death of so many young people in the play with all their friends and siblings who have died due to gang violence. It is a powerful film, and the production the students put on does everything this Broadway production can't seem to.
John Davis
OUR TOWN is running in a limited engagement at The Barrymore Theater on Broadway
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