What most surprised me about director Kenny Leon’s production of “Our Town” were not his distinctive touches.
What most surprised me is how emotionally I reacted to this “Our Town” – not just the intensity of the feelings, but the variety, and, sometimes, the incongruity.
But yes, for better or for worse, Leon’s directorial choices do stand out, which I suppose is an accomplishment in and of itself, given how familiar the play is. This is the sixth production of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play on Broadway, and, more to the point, one of more than forty productions running over the next three months in North America alone, in high schools and colleges from Prattville, Alabama to Brattleboro, Vermont.
Although “Our Town” is set in the fictional – now mythical – town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire from 1901 to 1913, most of the townsfolk in this latest “Our Town” on Broadway know American Sign Language. In Act I, which presents a typical day in the town from morning to night, we see the characters one by one communicate in ASL with Howie the milkman, who is portrayed by the Deaf actor John McGinty.
This is one of several aspects of the production that one could call anachronistic, but Leon prefers we see as in line with a sense of time that is expansive and (as he writes in a program note) inclusive.
As with time, so with demographics: The courtship and marriage that’s the focus of Act II, between Emily Webb and George Gibbs is now an interracial one. And, although the Stage Manager (Jim Parsons) tells us the town is comprised of “eighty-five per cent Protestants; twelve per cent Catholics; rest, indifferent,” this “Our Town” begins with the (alcoholic) choirmaster Simon Stimson (Donald Webber Jr.) playing the piano and leading the chorus in a composition called “Braided Prayer” which features musical prayers from the Muslim and Jewish faiths as well as from Christianity, followed by a soloist singing a gospel tune. This happens in front of Beowulf Boritt’s set of wooden planks that soar up to the sky, resembling perhaps the altar in a modern church, while a constellation of old-fashioned lanterns in mid-air suggest the heavenly stars.
And then there are the audience members who are seated on stage, which led the show’s marketers to label it “immersive,” and the different scents pumped into the Barrymore Theater during each act – the smells of heliotrope from Mrs. Gibbs’ garden in Act I; of vanilla when Emily and George fall in love in Act II; of bacon when Emily rises from the grave to revisit her family back on her 12th birthday in Act III.
But, as I said, all these distinctive directorial choices did not register as strongly as my own emotions, some of them extreme. That prayerful preamble made me feel positively exalted, and palpably excited about what was to come. The ending left me disappointed (while others wept): Zoey Deutch’s Emily just didn’t move me the way past Emilys have when she delivered probably the best-known line in the play: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?” (“No,” the Stage Manager answers. “The saints and poets, maybe – they do some.”)
Some of my reactions were a normal response by a theatergoer to a standout performance: Julie Halston’s gossipy neighbor Mrs. Soames amuses; Ephraim Sykes’ George Gibbs charms.
But I was baffled by a mild but persistent sense of distress through much of the play. Of course, some of this may be understandable, arguably what Wilder intended. The Stage Manager introduces some of the characters not just by their name and occupation, but when they died, and even sometimes how they died, occasionally before they even say a word. When he’s the minister, he says: “I’ve married over two hundred couples in my day. Do I believe in it? I don’t know. M…marries N…millions of them.The cottage, the go-cart, the Sunday-afternoon drives in the Ford, the first rheumatism, the grandchildren, the second rheumatism, the deathbed, the reading of the will…Once in a thousand times it’s interesting.” (“M marries N,” by the way, was Wilder’s original title for the play.)
But why on earth would I find unsettling the answer that the town’s newspaper editor Mr. Webb (Richard Thomas) gives to a question about the town’s culture by saying: “we’ve got a lot of pleasures of a kind here: we like the sun comin’ up over the mountain in the morning, and we all notice a good deal about the birds.”
It’s occurred to me that one reason for my unease might be that I felt left out – left out of the old-timey country life, the Christian life, the family life; left out when Mrs. Gibbs (Michelle Lewis) says “People are meant to go through life two by two,” or the Stage Manager tells us, “most everybody in the world climbs into their graves married.” This could mean that Leon’s guiding directorial principle of inclusion can go just so far — perhaps by his trying to broaden the “our” in “Our Town,” he unintentionally emphasizes the limits to the “we” in the script.
I don’t know if the production deserves exclusive credit (or blame) for my reactions, but I do not remember having the same sort of complicated emotional involvement when I saw the Off-Broadway production of “Our Town” in 2009 directed by David Cromer, who also played the Stage Manager. I do remember simply finding it extraordinary, and I wasn’t alone: It became the longest-running production of “Our Town” ever in New York. This is famously the one where we see Mrs. Webb in Act III cooking actual bacon on an actual stove – clearly an inspiration to Leon (although it’s another reason why I might feel left out, since I don’t eat meat.)
The working oven wasn’t what won me over. On the tiny stage with (as Wilder instructed) no props or scenery, the ensemble in 2009 somehow created a turn-of-the-century New England town for us. Not a single cast member was a famous actor (Cromer wasn’t especially well-known then either); their relative anonymity might have helped in the mirage.
The contrast with the current Broadway production is unavoidable. When now I think of Wilder’s comment about how his play presents “the life of a village against the life of the stars,” it unfortunately conjures up the old MGM motto: “More stars than there are in Heaven.” The theatergoers crowding the stage door after each performance at the Barrymore could be waiting for autographs from any of half a dozen celebrities in the cast. Katie Holmes is a good actress. It’s not her fault that, as Mrs. Webb, she was greeted with a star’s entrance applause, nor that we were similarity jolted out of the reality of her character when Emily asks this svelte movie star “Mama, were you pretty?”
Jim Parsons as the Stage Manager fares better, but might have the opposite problem: How to judge somebody in a role previously portrayed by Henry Fonda, Paul Newman, Spalding Grey and Thornton Wilder himself (and that’s just on Broadway.) Parsons is fine – efficiently narrating while keeping the “dryness of tone” that Wilder wanted, effectively guarding against the maudlin, which seems to be an occupational hazard for thespians who mount this show.
If ”Our Town” at the Barrymore is not a production for the ages, it’s as good an introduction to the play as any for somebody who has never seen it – and surely there are such people, even in America. And for the rest of us, it offers something to think about, and to feel.
Our Town
Ethel Barrymore Theater through January 19, 2025
Running time: 100 minutes with no intermission
Tickets: $74 – $321. Digital lottery: $49. General rush: $45. Student rush: $30
Written by Thornton Wilder
Directed by Kenny Leon
Scenic design by Beowulf Boritt, costume design Dede Ayite, lighting design by Allen Lee Hughes, sound design by Justin Ellington, hair, wig & makeup design by J. Jared Janas, casting by Jim Carnahan, with Kate Wilson as the dialect coach.
Cast: Jim Parsons as the Stage Manager, Zoey Deutch as “Emily Webb”, Katie Holmes as “Mrs. Webb”, Billy Eugene Jones as “Dr. Gibbs”, Ephraim Sykes as “George Gibbs”, Richard Thomas as “Mr. Webb”, Michelle Wilson as “Mrs. Gibbs”, Julie Halston as “Mrs. Soames”, Donald Webber, Jr. as “Simon Stimson”, Ephie Aardema Sarnak, Heather Ayers, Willa Bost, Bobby Daye, Safiya Kaijya Harris, Doron JéPaul, Shyla Lefner, Anthony Michael Lopez, John McGinty, Bryonha Marie, Kevyn Morrow, Hagan Oliveras, Noah Pyzik, Sky Smith, Bill Timoney, Ricardo Vázquez, Matthew Elijah Webb, Greg Wood and Nimene Sierra Wureh.
Photos by Daniel Rader
