Broadway Review: ‘Our Town’ Gets Lost Reaching for the Stars

Whatever else Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (Barrymore Theatre, booking to Jan. 19) is, it isn’t as honeyed a classic as it is sometimes imagined. Kenny Leon’s celebrity-filled Broadway revival is a brisk, tart-toned parable of small-town American life that interrogates, satirizes even, the outwardly genteel setting of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, and cautions us throughout to put down any rose-tinted spectacles we might be tempted to see it through. It also intends to be a more straightforward celebration of community.

As written, the play, first performed in 1938, is a spare and sober anatomy of a community, rather than a cozily sentimental hymnal. In this production its characters are dressed not in the costume (by Dede Ayite) of the early 1900s, but in a curious mash-up of back then and right now: so, jeans, sneakers, and post-Victorian flounce. (Perhaps the intention is to make the play timeless, or self-consciously spanning of many eras, to echo one of the piece’s themes.) Flickering lanterns on stage and hanging from the rafters form an omnipresent constellation of stars designed with dreamy intent by Allen Lee Hughes.

The drama comes to center on the union, then renting asunder, of young couple George Gibbs (Ephraim Sykes) and Emily Webb (Zoey Deutch)—and what it all says about a whole basket of you-name-it: life, death, the universe, time, and community. We see them first as the next door neighbor kids of Dr. Gibbs (Billy Eugene Jones) and Mrs. Gibbs (Michelle Wilson), and Mr. Webb (Richard Thomas) and Mrs. Webb ( Katie Holmes ).

Jim Parsons plays an arch, all-seeing Stage Manager, who narrates what happens on stage. Daily life bubbles along to the big moments of marriage and then death. The play has three acts set in 1901, 1904, and 1913 respectively, and here is played, without intermission, over 1 hour 45 minutes.

In a director’s note, Leon says the play, as well as being about time, is—in a play mainly devoid of props—about “love, daily life, family pain, joy, marriage.” The play reminds us of the good in us, writes Leon, and the community is “inclusive and embracing of the differences among us.” That is an admirably ambitious brace of themes, if not what the play itself seems to propose.

The show comes with another significant addition not in the original text, which unfolds at its outset—its 28-strong company approach the stage via the aisles singing Abraham Jam’s “Braided Prayer,” intended, according to show sources, as a meaningful, “timeless” multifaith celebration of America, the characters “sitting with us as community in all of our diversity…. speaking, praying, talking, asking questions—all of these personal voices culminate in a human voice, only meant as a human cry on a bed of music by Abraham Jam—Christians, Jews, Muslims singing in a world of perfect musical harmony absent of the political…The opening anchors the play in its universality and embraces the country’s diversity.”

In this production’s diversely populated town, the Gibbs are a Black family—the notion of time and community has been expanded, and Leon, without adding a word, clearly wants to bring Our Town if not into the literal modern day, then adjacent to a more contemporary notion of what community and inclusivity should rightly mean and encompass.

On a stage sparsely furnished by Beowulf Boritt is, as tradition has long dictated, not much: some chairs, the odd table, a weather-beaten side of a house with windows. There are no familiar ladders for its young lead characters to climb up to look at each other and the stars.

But intact is the text itself, featuring characters impersonating actions like washing and cooking and eating and delivering milk, and also—at the whim of the Stage Manager—beginning or ceasing actions at his intimation.

This constant meta-theatricality feels too fussy and intrusive for the big theme triumvirate of life, marriage, and death to make a resonant impression—however sharp and perceptive Wilder’s writing is.

For Our Town to land, you have to believe in the embodiment of young love that George and Emily symbolize, and the beats of life their families and community undergo around them. In this production, we are too aware of Parsons’ center-stage telling us everything and harrying the actors to stand here, and do that, to care that much about what they are doing as characters . We spend too much time outside the action, outside them, and when they are in action, that action gallops by.

But the sniffles of some of my fellow audience suggested they were feeling something, and how you respond to this production of Our Town depends—as with any classic—on your sometimes very personal relationship to it.

A show like Our Town can be much-loved, much-performed, and much-lionized. It can float, seemingly eternally, in a culture, especially if it has been performed in schools, the most receptive moment for anything to embed in young minds (especially with parts to compete for and lines to learn). It can have a built-in audience, because so many people know it. It can come with memories—of being first seen, first performed in, of being seen at certain times in one’s life.

The tone and rhythm of Our Town echoes other classics like A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life . Through the focus and filter of mortality and the otherworldly (a person being given the chance to observe their lives and loved ones’ lives from another plane), both squarely come down on emphasizing not just that life is there for the living, but that we should recognize the life we have around us as one to cherish and not take for granted.

There is so much sniffle potential, so what was mitigating against my sniffles?

Right at the beginning, like a scientist with a petri dish or his own overhead drone, Parsons’ wry commentary introduces us to an overview of the community: “Way back there is the railway station; tracks go that way. Polish Town’s across the tracks, and some Canuck families. Over there is the Congregational Church; across the street’s the Presbyterian. Methodist and Unitarian are over there… Here’s the Town Hall and Post Office combined; jail’s in the basement.”

We find out what happened to the characters we are about to meet, who lived, who died, how they died.

Attention to detail, a kind of affectionate taxonomy, seems more of a concern to Wilder than the big stuff of life and death. “I may say it’s some of the oldest land in the world. We’re very proud of that. A shelf of Devonian basalt crosses it with vestiges of Mesozoic shale.”

“In our town we like to know the facts about everybody,” the Stage Manager says, and he continues to be a rigorous register of information that breaks up the scenes he introduces us to. An excellent Holmes, a commanding Jones, and an avuncular Thomas must vie to assert their fleeting presences, making food, kvetching with family, mulling the passing of time and loss, as the Stage Manager sees all, introduces all, sets scenes up, and brings scenes to an end.

In turn, the characters respond to him as actors might to a director, obediently responding to commands; and so we become used to them as characters and actors playing characters. The stage manager himself pops on his own character hats at moments.

It means our responses to the play are on a constant stop-start: lock on to a character for a second, then the lock is quickly broken, or lock on enough to feel as if you are in a play about a small town, and then—quick-smart—you are locked out, and all too aware you are watching a play about the making of a play about a small town.

This production of Our Town feels less drama, more essay. This at least allows you to enjoy the flourish of Wilder’s words. “Very ordinary town, if you ask me. Little better behaved than most. Probably a lot duller,” Mr Webb says of Grover’s Corners.

“Is there no one in town aware of social injustice and industrial inequality?” one nameless woman asks. Another: “Is there any culture or love of beauty in Grover’s Corners?” Answer: “Well, ma’am, there ain’t much—not in the sense you mean. Come to think of it, there’s some girls that play the piano at High School.”

Instead, “…we like the sun comin’ up over the mountain in the morning, and we all notice a good deal about the birds. We pay a lot of attention to them.”

Emily and her mother have a testy exchange over the meaning of beauty (any production in which Katie Holmes gets to play a little sharp and snappy is welcome); we learn of the new bank having a cornerstone showing “the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.”

Mr. Gibbs tells his son that his wife got tired of asking him to chop the wood, so did it herself. “You eat her meals, and put on the clothes she keeps nice for you, and you run off and play baseball”—like she’s some hired girl we keep around the house but that we don’t like very much.”

Mr. Webb makes clear to his imminent son-in-law he ignored all his sexist father’s advice about marriage. Our Town does not pull its punches; it is pointed social commentary and satire.

Yet the play is also heartfelt in its love of the place. Its signature song is “Blessed be the ties that bind,” and someone signs an address with the final lines, “the United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God.”

The stage manager beseeches us, watching George and Emily, to “try and remember what it was like to have been very young. And particularly the days when you were first in love; when you were like a person sleepwalking, and you didn’t quite see the street you were in, and didn’t quite hear everything that was said to you. You’re just a little bit crazy.”

Our Town is as focused in its sincerity as its satire; yet this production fumbles a key scene showing us the moment of George and Emily falling in love over two strawberry ice-cream sodas. This is a moment where the sniffle ducts should be gently manipulated, and where we really invest in this couple—but it is the rushed stage version of a swallowed sentence.

In the play’s final act, set in 1913, death takes a semi-whimsical, semi-surreal center stage. The town’s dead are in front of us, seated and speaking, observing and pondering the questionable wisdom of the living, and the petty preoccupations that keep the living from truly living.

Spoilers are likely unnecessary with Our Town , but the character who bears the emotional burden of this scene—now dead, now wistful about all she has left behind—becomes an unconvincing moral and spiritual standard-bearer, again lessening the production’s impact at an important moment. We have seen this character be so all-knowing and self-possessed in earlier scenes, her sudden naiveté (now years older) seems unconvincing.

The sniffles around me implied others felt differently. But as the character bid farewell to food and coffee, and intoned, “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you,” it felt a little juvenile rather than deep, its heartfelt crescendo thrown away.

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?” the character asks the Stage Manager.

“No, comes the reply. “The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.”

Wilder’s sober indictment of unwitting human failing, the imprisoning limits of what we see and experience, seem in bizarre contrast to the celebration of community the new introduction to the play underlines. In making the play more of a sprint, meanings and nuance—and just the time you need to spend with characters for them to imprint themselves—have been lost. What seems more resonant than a celebration of community is an indictment of how myopically humans chart courses through their lives in the pursuit of propriety and order, passing over so much joy and engagement.

There is, of course, everything right in interpreting anew, and reading for meaning in a narrative’s gaps—but this production of Our Town seems unsure of what those new meanings may be and how the play can be moulded to accommodate them. Still, in the charitable spirit of Grover’s Corners, it certainly shows how open a text Our Town has become—and perhaps why it is such an intriguing, far from simple American classic.

Read more at The Daily Beast.