Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) is a curiously schizoid classic. It first earned critical admiration for its supposedly envelope-stretching, candid theatricality, but it nevertheless dwells in popular memory as a piece of nostalgic realism about wholesome small-town life. Canny as he was, Wilder wasn’t really a radical experimentalist. His great dramas retooled and popularized experimental techniques he gleaned from others in a well-read and enviably well-traveled life. He knew this about himself, writing acutely in 1957: “I am not an innovator but a rediscoverer of forgotten goods and I hope a remover of obtrusive bric-a-brac.”
Watching Kenny Leon’s extraordinarily fresh and vivid rethinking of Our Town (now on Broadway), with its emphatic focus on diversity, I was continually reminded of the distance between Wilder and the actual radical Bertolt Brecht.
Wilder is what was possible on 1930s/40s Broadway in Brecht’s vein: he could get credit for being edgy by showing theatrical strings, as long as he did so in a warm humanist way. Our Town does occasionally mention social inequities, but it never dwells on them. Its godlike Stage Manager, often taken to be a surrogate for the playwright, mentions a few little inequities in Grovers Corners casually—Poles, Catholics and the town drunk are sidelined as “others”—but he never considers structural bias. Nor does the town’s newspaper editor Webb, the most worldly resident, who gives this evasive answer when a ”Belligerent Man” planted in the audience asks him directly about it:
Well, I dunno . . . I guess we’re all hunting like everybody else for a way the diligent and sensible can rise to the top and the lazy and quarrelsome can sink to the bottom. But it ain’t easy to find. Meanwhile, we do all we can to help those that can’t help themselves and those that can we leave alone.—Are there any other questions?
So . . . who exactly can’t help themselves? And why? We’re obviously meant to move on. The sepia picture of turn-of-the-century, small-town life is kept only gently critical so such questions won’t distract us from the play’s larger exhortation: pay attention to life’s daily pleasures—don’t miss the miraculous grandeur of every single one of your passing moments. Who can’t be touched by that?
If he ever thought about whiteness at all, Wilder would have assumed that it was immaterial to his work. New Hampshire small towns were, after all, almost completely white during the play’s 1901-1913 period. And like most privileged and successful white men, Wilder regarded identity as intellectual and spiritual small fish. Bigger fish swam in the Stage Manager’s humbly cosmic comments about dailiness, and in Mr. Antrobus’s reverie about saving his books and “the chance to build new worlds” in The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). The assumption most past authors have shared is that soaring circumspection like that must come from universalizing particular realities drawn from their lives.
But there’s the rub in 2024. White realities have so flooded the market for universals over the centuries that random American crowds have trouble reaching any reliable consensus on buying in again. Kenny Leon plainly doesn’t care to. The Grovers Corners in his Our Town—the play’s fifth appearance on the Great White Way—is as diverse as the country we currently live in. That diversity, obviously, is flagrantly ahistorical, which effectively foregrounds identity in the show, and that shifts the tone toward Brecht, oddly enough.
Leon’s is not a race-blind Our Town—we’ve seen plenty of those—but rather a race-conscious one that conjures an alternative history. The Gibbs family here is Black and the Webb family white. No one ever remarks on that fact (the script is apparently unchanged), but the counterfactual stands as its own provocation. The actors Ephraim Sykes and Zoey Deutch, playing George Gibbs and Emily Webb, have a lovely, tender chemistry that makes their young love palpable, but we can’t help noticing that no feathers in the town are ruffled by their union. In a place as specific as 1904 New Hampshire, that’s as glaring as the weight of mortality in the play’s meta-story.
A similar Brechtian provocation works behind the casting of a deaf actor, John McGinty, as the milkman Howie Newsome. Charming and charismatic, McGinty’s Howie communicates mostly with ASL, which his customers just happen to know. Their ease and familiarity with inclusion is yet another ahistorical touch—as well as an alienation effect since, without foreknowledge, it may take viewers a few minutes to understand what they’re seeing with him. Howie’s scenes call for mime, and when McGinty first entered I thought the actors were performing inept mime. Only when he came back the second time did I clock the ASL and understand the fascinating counterfactual picture of an idyllic world devoid of ableism.
A lot about this production feels referential rather than stated, quoted rather than spontaneously thought and uttered. The action doesn’t begin with the Stage Manager setting the scene as Wilder stipulates, for instance, but rather cacophonously with some two dozen cast members entering and singing Jewish, Christian, and Islamic prayers and songs all at once in a loud, discordant blare.
The set by Beowulf Boritt is not the “empty stage” Wilder called for but rather a generic simulacrum of vintage country architecture: a floor and back wall painted in artificial, gray-white woodgrain like those old McClosky furniture finishes, overhung with dozens of antique lanterns continuing into the house to form a skyscape that the Stage Manager gestures toward when referring to the stars. The lanterns are a lovely assemblage. They do, however, also suggest that the imagination can’t be trusted to evoke something as important as cosmic immensity. For that you need the theatrical magic of man-made instruments.
Then there is Jim Parsons’s performance as the Stage Manager, which is so oddly bland and unassertive that I had to blink to reassure myself this was the same actor who earned TV fame as the hilarious egomaniac Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory. Paul Newman, as it happens, also deliberately underplayed this role on Broadway back in 2002, but I understood that as modesty—a reluctance to overpower a humble fiction with his star wattage. In Parsons’s case, there’s nothing to be gained by withholding. The show would greatly benefit from more Sheldon and less neutrality. It is moving, particularly in the end, but its investment in being interesting pulls its emotional punches.
Watching Leon’s revival, I found my mind occasionally flashing back to another Our Town I hadn’t recalled in years: one I saw in communist Czechoslovakia in 1986. This was at a lavishly subsidized, government-controlled theater in Prague that had scheduled the play to show how unthreatened they were by an American masterpiece, and possibly also to affirm that it was overrated. The actors in it spoke all their lines, in Czech, with American-accented drawls and twangs that the audience found utterly ridiculous. They also moved about in contrived stances and postures that seemed copied from old movies. The set, like Boritt’s, was a replica of an idealized place rather than a bare stage. And the audience left in droves. My American friends and I were practically the only ones applauding in the end.
My applause was sincere. I could not condemn those Czechs for ineptitude or cluelessness because I wasn’t sure that was true. They’d done their best to grapple with material so foreign to them that they felt a need to track down imitative templates to render it at all. To me that was fascinating, even moving in a way. They had made an alienated and searching copy of something we natives to Wilder’s world appreciate, usually, only through a differently distorting veil of familiar sentimentality.
Hats off to Kenny Leon, then, for framing this old chestnut so freshly that we might just see it from a new angle. It's a new spin on what Wilder meant by rediscovering forgotten goods.
Photos: Daniel Rader
By Thornton Wilder
Directed by Kenny Leon
Ethel Barrymore Theatre
Comments