WHOSE TOWN IS IT ANYWAY?
Long before there was a Sheriff Taylor and a Mayberry (google it) there was a Stage Manager and a Grover’s Corners. Thornton Wilder’s classic paean to small-town life centering on that bucolic New Hampshire enclave first premiered on Broadway in 1938. Since its initial run, Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town has been performed by amateur groups, community theaters, high schools, colleges and on the professional stage. On some level, the show probably helped to encourage the national mythology of what it means to be a “real” American — stalwart, hard-working, Christian, friendly, heterosexual and homogenous.
Donald Webber, Jr. and the Cast
Donald Webber, Jr.
Currently enjoying a polished if uninspired Broadway revival at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Tony Award-winning director Kenny Leon (Purlie Victorious) attempts to showcase a multi-cultural Grover’s Corners that’s inclusive of everyone, even though it’s 1910. Starring Jim Parsons as the Stage Manager, Katie Holmes as Mrs. Webb, Richard Thomas as Mr. Webb and Billy Eugene Jones as Dr. Gibbs; it’s a well-intentioned if muddled effort to bring diversity and 2024 awareness to turn-of-the-century New England. Leon’s direction seems less interested in the lessons of the play and more on this overriding concept, which makes us wonder why we’re, again, taking this very familiar trip. Even with reliable performances and Wilder’s heartfelt writing, this new production doesn’t so much bring the play into the present as underscore why it might be best admired as an artifact of the past.
Ephraim Sykes, Katie Holmes, Richard Thomas
Ephraim Sykes, Richard Thomas, and Zoey Deutch
It’s 1910 in a rather innocuous town in New Hampshire. What’s remarkable about this town is just how unremarkable it is. Grover’s Corners could be any small town. Its inhabitants are just regular folk — the kind of plain-spoken, good-hearted, no artifice people that can be found in any small town, in any region, in any part, of these grand United States. First, we meet the Stage Manager, who steps in and out of the world of the play while serving as guide and narrator for our visit (the show, as with Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, is very meta).
Jim Parsons and the Cast
Julie Halston and the Cast
Soon we meet next-door neighbors, the Gibbs Family and the Webb Family. Dr. Gibbs is the local doctor and Mr. Webb runs the local newspaper. Their wives are friends. Their children grow up together. The Gibbs’s son, George, and the Webb’s daughter, Emily, fall in love and get married right out of high school. Up on the hill, dead folk in the cemetery talk of losing connections to being alive (see? meta). It’s better this way. Because now they know something about being alive that the living don’t. If only the dead could go back and tell the living this important realization. Then living would be so much more enjoyable. But they can’t do that. Or can they?
Zoey Deutch
There is something lovely and heartwarming that still resonates in Wilder’s fine writing which foregrounds the humanity within and our relation to the Universe. Unfortunately, in the attempt to make this “An Our Town for all of us” — as the promo materials state — the creative team didn’t seem to go much deeper than surface considerations. For instance, the wonderful deaf actor John McGinty is cast as the town milkman, Howie Newsome. Both he and the cast use sign language to communicate with one another. There’s a Star of David on one of the tombstones in the cemetery scene. Professor Willard is now a woman, lecturing on the geological make-up of the land. Joe Cromwell, the teenage paper boy and WWI soldier, is Asian. The Gibbs family is black while the Webb family remains white. There’s a Latino undertaker. These obvious changes create an immediate visual aesthetic that is lovely and, indeed, inclusive. Yet Dr. Gibbs, a Black man in 1910, is an avid Civil War buff who enjoys visiting spots of famous Civil War battles in the South, repeatedly bringing his Black wife along. How and, more importantly, why would this happen at this time?
Sky Smith and John McGinty
John McGinty and Michelle Wilson
Well, perhaps it’s possible because this production takes place in the present, at least according to the program. Yet the Stage Manager clearly states it’s 1910, even removing cell phones from a few cast members to make the point during Leon’s signature added-on prologue scene. This time the director opens the show by bringing the entire cast onstage, singing and reciting prayers from different religions, before the text of the play begins. It’s an interesting if confusing few minutes. Costumes by Dede Ayite offer an eclectic mix of time periods — which only adds to the confusion because they at least seem to start in 1910, then go all the way to George wearing an open baseball jersey, tank top undershirt and gold chain. If time is malleable and not defined, the creative team did not clearly make that point. And while a multi-cultural Grover’s Corners is a great idea, the challenges of laying that perspective onto this throwback piece of writing do not seem to be fully conquered.
Anthony Michael Lopez, Safiya Kaijya Harris, Shyla Lefner,
Billy Eugene Jones, Michelle Wilson, Jim Parsons, Katie Holmes
Cast of Our Town
As the Stage Manager, Jim Parsons delivers a reigned-in version of the enjoyable snark and dismissiveness that’s made him a star. He’s certainly entertaining, but does his Stage Manager even like small towns, specifically Grover’s Corners? If he’s not sure if he wants to be there, you can imagine how an audience might feel. However, as young Emily, the heart of Wilder’s tale, Zoey Deutch shines. Her growth from sincere schoolgirl to scared bride to questioning corpse is quite moving. And her moment of resigned acceptance at the end of the play is oddly uplifting yet still sad.
Cast of Our Town
Billy Eugene Jones and Michelle Wilson
While the underlying message of Our Town has value for us all, perhaps a script first performed on January 22, 1938 is just too set in its ways to change. Because there seems to be an uneasy relationship between this inclusive framing and this decades old scenario. But maybe it’s not so important to bring the play itself into the 21st century as it is to bring the championing of life and appreciation that the play espouses. Because those timeless values are welcome in any period of time. Even 2024.
photos by Daniel Rader
Our Town
Barrymore Theatre, 243 West 47th St.
one hour, forty-five minutes; no intermission
limited engagement through January 19, 2024
for tickets, call 212.239.6200 or visit Our Town Broadway or Telecharge
