Susan Granger’s review of “Our Town” (Barrow Street Theater ’08-’09 season)
This tough, timely Off-Broadway production is about as far from Paul Newman’s warm, avuncular interpretation of “Our Town” as one can get – but that’s what makes Thornton Wilder’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play a homespun classic. There are so many different ways once can construe it.
In this intimate, bare-bones production, imported from Chicago and directed by actor David Cromer, 21st century Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, looks more than a bit forbidding. The audience sits on three sides of the tiny Barrow Street Theater stage in the West Village, and the house lights stay up for most of the time, thereby turning spectators into neighbors, some of whom are enlisted to read questions directed at the town’s historian (Wilbur Edwin Henry). And the cast members wear contemporary street clothes, which further blurs the theatrical separation of actors and audience.
With a yellow-pad and cellphone in hand, the Stage Manager (David Cromer) describes the villagers, focusing primarily on the Gibbs and Webb families, the principal players whose children, ball-playing George (James McMenamin) and brainy Emily (Jennifer Grace), are headed toward marriage.
But it’s in the third act, set in the town’s cemetery – where some characters sit in chairs representing their graves – that this production is at its most insightful and relevant. In the pivotal scene, where Emily Webb, who has joined her late mother-in-law, is given a chance to re-live a single day in her childhood, she philosophically asks, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”
“No,” the Stage Manager replies. “The saints and poets, maybe – they do some.”
And that sums up this provocative evening of theater. It’s all about the urgency of living each ordinary day fully and completely, for the here and now.