I see a lot of theatre but not as much that’s out there, and a lot less than I used to when I worked for a theatrical law firm that represented many of the major Broadway musicals.
I’ve thought a lot about this production and although it got good reviews, I think it misses on several levels.
It chooses to be multi-cultural as you can clearly see from the program, but it’s confusing in the way it’s chosen to be multi-cultural. There is a white family and a black family, but I couldn’t tell (and it’s not in Wilder’s script anyway) whether this was meant to be non-traditional casting or whether they were actually white and black families.
Opera, oddly enough, doesn’t have this problem of non-traditional casting because singing is basically color blind. So with opera, you can have, for example, Leontyne Price singing Madama Butterfly — and no one blinks an eye.
But in this piece — and I read the director’s note carefully — he decided that it shouldn’t be “our town,” but “our universe,” or “our world.” Cast in a way that reflects the audience of today. I don’t object, but it created confusion — primarily because the Gibb family was all black actors and the Webb family were all white. So then I was thinking that the relationship between George and Emily was an interracial one rather than simply non-traditional casting. That, in itself, creates another tension that I don’t think really reflects the play’s theme — which leads to my other problem with this production.
The huge wall at the back. Our Town, though it’s like about 100 years old, is considered avant garde because it’s usually produced on either a bare stage or a blackened stage — with almost no props at all. The opening monologue by The Stage Manager (Jim Parsons) goes on and on about what props and sets you would be looking at if this were a traditional play. But Wilder was a genius, perhaps, and he knew that if he put anything on that stage for the actor to play with or for the audience to look at — other than the actors themselves — you would completely misunderstand the powerful 3rd Act where Emily tries to “relive,” like Scrooge, a moment from her past life. And that’s exactly what happened. Your eye kept being drawn to the massive back wall, which was painted to look like a barn wall. And in one of the most critical scenes — I believe it’s the end of Act I — where Emily says she wrote or received an envelope addressed to, so and so, on such and such street, in the town, in the United States, on Earth, in the Galaxy, in the Milky Way and the Eye of God — this hugely important speech was spoken through a whole in this wall, like the tv show Laugh-In. It’s one of the reasons, in fact, that the production has “partial view” seats, because the side seats, where I was almost sitting, can’t see that far back.
That scene, which establishes the relationship and love between George and Emily, needs to be tender and full blooded and right up front — as close to the front of the stage as possible. They are ostensibly talking to each other from the upper floor windows of their homes, which are next to each other. But there was no chemistry in this production between those two. And they are, ultimately, the main characters — at least the ones we are prone to follow.
The other (probably not the final or only) problem, was the choir master who is meant to be a stand-in for Thorton Wilder himself: an outsider and a homosexual who has probably never acted on his feelings, like Henry James. It’s there in the script, when (I think) Mr. Webb (Richard Thomas) says, “A small town is no place for a man like Mr. Stimson.” He is talking about the reason that almost every young gay man heads to a city. But in this production, the Stimson character is just enraged that his church choir can’t sing. At least that’s all I was able to pick up.
I’ll have to look through all my old Playbill programs — (I have every single one except “Scapin” by Moliere) — to see which of the revivals I saw before. I’ve seen “Our Town” at least 4 times, including my high school production. I won’t say this was the worst, but in my opinion, it was the least coherent and one that completely lost sight of Wilder’s insight: that human beings are too alive to know what life is; that we spend every moment taking it for granted; and that we can only understand life through death; and even after, that we must spend eternity trying to forget it.