"OUR TOWN:" All We Need
We live Our Town every day, though we’re unaware of it, of course. If we were aware of it, then it wouldn’t be Our Town.
The play infuses our lives, and our lives infuse this play. That’s why Our Town remains the most penetrating American play ever written, and the most elemental. It still can make me cry, especially in the wake of this election. “How would these characters have voted?” I found myself thinking, watching the new Broadway revival. But I decided not to go there.
Do I love the characters of Our Town? No, I realize, I love their play. Not their world. Not their country. Not even their town. Never have. I love the way Thornton Wilder deploys them in his creation; how he uses them to conjure existence itself. They are America’s characters, i.e., the character of America, captured in Thornton Wilder’s perfect encapsulation.
Director Kenny Leon’s new Broadway production gets one thing very right. His color-blind casting mends Our Town’s most glaring absence — the absence of characters of color. Effortlessly and eloquently, they are here.
Mr. Leon has also, I’m sorry to say, tampered with Our Town’s structural essence in a way that is not okay. I’m sure he meant well, further motivated by a spirit of inclusion, but an opening prelude that he has wedged atop Thornton Wilder’s precisely carved script, to me, constituted a kind of vandalism.
Before the play has even begun, director Leon sends his cast out in a cacophonous Babel, a polyglot of multi-ethnic prayers — sung, shouted, murmured. The effect is quite powerful, even simmeringly beautiful, as an aural and visual tapestry, but it belongs on another stage, in another play.
As the first thing we see and hear in Our Town, this fiercely vocalized opener shatters the intentions of the playwright as literally delineated in Wilder’s infamous prologue to his Our Town script, headed: “Some Suggestions for the Director:”
It is important to maintain a continual dryness of tone — the New England understatement of sentiment, of surprise, of tragedy. A shyness about emotion.
Prayer is a part of Our Town but via very specific hymns chosen by Thornton Wilder. They are sung in church by his congregation, “very soft,” and much later in the action.
For anyone absorbing Our Town for the first time (and I know personally two such people for whom this was their maiden Our Town), Mr. Leon’s prayerful, attention-grabbing kickoff leaves his audience in the dust. Nothing that follows resembles this keening curtain-raiser, rendering everything that follows it slightly incomprehensible. And that is a crime.
The production itself is fine otherwise — well acted, less “dry” than I would have liked (and, for all I know, Thornton Wilder would have liked), but Our Town shines through. The cast strives for clarity more than transcendence; understandably, given the opening incoherence. I found Jim Parsons an apt Stage Manager, suitably omniscient but not quite able to lead us back from the show’s opening detour. A very tough job.
As ever, I latched on and was transported by this Our Town, but I knew where we were headed from the get-go. My two newbies never caught up. The disassociation between an Our Town howling in actual supplication and an Our Town of ineffable magical realism, could not coalesce.
To make the ineffable your own, Our Town tell us, all you have to do, with all your heart and soul, is inhabit it. That’s all you need.