Theater: “Our Town” with Jim Parsons
We’re born. We grow up. We get married. We have kids. We die.
For the residents of Grover’s Corners,New Hampshire, life is as simple as that. The time is 1901, so there’s no TV to watch or smartphone to check. As Mr. Webb (Richard Thomas) admits, the town doesn’t have a lot of culture going on either. “Although I’ve heard three young girls in town play the violin pretty well,” he adds.
The matters of everyday life are what makes “Our Town,” Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play so universally appealing, whether you grew up in a big city or a small town (like I did). And Kenny Leon’s direction (he also directed “Topdog/Underdog”) goes for the chuckle rather than the sentimental.
The main event driving “Our Town” is the budding attraction between young George Gibbs (Ephraim Sykes from “Ain’t Too Proud”) and Emily Webb (Zoey Deutsch from Netflix’s “The Politician”). George wants to be a farmer someday. Emily, who’s a serious-minded HS student, asks her mother (Katie Holmes) if she’s pretty. Once they graduate high school, George decides to forego agriculture school in order to marry Emily. As the Stage Manager (Jim Parsons) wryly puts in, “Most everybody in the world climbs into their graves married.”
Everyone else’s lives in Grover’s Corners are fairly uneventful, but charming to observe nonetheless. That includes Howie the milkman (played by the hearing-impaired John McGinty); the inebriated church choirmaster (Bobby Daye); and the local gossip, Mrs. Soames (Julie Halston), the overly enthusiastic wedding guest. Then we reach Act III, “Death,” the devastating denouement.
The setting is the town’s cemetery, and the dead (including characters we’ve come to love in Acts I and II) are seated on bleachers behind their headstones, welcoming the latest arrival, young woman who has died in childbirth.
She initially wants to return to the living, which her fellow cemetery residents warn her against. But the Stage Manager grants her wish and she does return, to a happy date of her choosing: her 12th birthday when she sees her mother “so young,” she remarks.
The young woman eventually returns to the cemetery, saddened and waxing philosophical. “Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?” If your eyes do not well up at this point, you are made of stone.
Most of us have seen “Our Town” at least once in our lives—I’ve now seen it with Spalding Gray, David Cromer, and Paul Newman as the Stage Manager. This latest staging is a worthy interpretation of what Edward Albee called “the greatest American play ever written.” If you haven’t seen it, time to catch up on your American classics. YOLO. Through January 19.
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