Our Town (February 2009) 

I am pleased to report that another gap in my cultural literacy has been filled. Today I finally saw a performance of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, now in a deconstructed revival—and its first ever Off-Broadway incarnation—at the Barrow Street Theatre. Conceived by David Cromer (who also plays the meta-role of the Stage Manager), the production made a big splash last summer when it premiered in Chicago—and got some of the best reviews of the year in that theatre-savvy city.

In David Cromer’s vision, Grover’s Corners—a small burg in rural New Hampshire, just off the northern Appalachian Trail—is inhabited in 1901 by 2642 residents (including the twins born that morning), mostly of lower-middle-class standing. The men have roles in town—the doctor, the newspaper editor, the milkman—and the women support them without complaint. All go about their daily lives with the sort of mundanity to which we can all relate—and without ever really appreciating what they have in an explicit way. Their lives are simple, yet rich; though they are missing out on what New Yorkers would consider “culture,” they take uncomplicated pleasure in the beauty of the sunrise, in the scent of the heliotrope, and in the change of the seasons.

Wilder’s play, which celebrated its 70th birthday last year (and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1938) was eerily prescient. In the Stage Manager, we find what would today be considered a blogger: someone who chronicles and explains the daily goings-on of a particular community, encouraging others to take note, comment, and consider what is going on. Under Cromer’s direction, the Barrow Street Theatre has been completely transformed, and the audience is in the middle of the action. As the actors move about the rows, the houselights are never dropped. We are encouraged to envision the town as the characters see it, and we are also watching our fellow-theatregoers experience the piece. It’s all very meta, and it works, especially for a play that is all about the documentation of regular life. After all, it’s called Our Town, not Their Town.

The play moves swiftly through its three acts, with a running time of just about two hours (and with two intermissions). Wilder wanted to snap us out of our everyday complacency, and Cromer and his cast understand this. As we are carried through the life cycle of a town over two decades, the everyday is made riveting, and an old play finds new life in this stunning new production.