Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town has endured for nearly a century because of the power of its simplicity: from its propless staging to its plain, homespun language to the commonplace themes of life, love and death in a prototypical American town that has stubbornly resisted the allure and pitfalls of urbanization. “By stripping the play of everything that is not essential,” The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson wrote in his 1938 review of the first Broadway production, “Wilder has given it a profound, strange, unworldly significance.”
That simplicity has made the play a staple of community theaters and high school drama departments over the years, of course, and those virtues can be hard to achieve on a Broadway stage — especially since the audience expects a certain bang for the considerable bucks they plunk down for tickets. One avenue is to cast some stars, particularly in the key role of the Stage Manager who serves as narrator of the whole shebang. Paul Newman brought a certain twinkly eyed gravitas to the part in the last Broadway revival, in 2002. Director Kenny Leon’s luminous but flawed new version of Our Town, which opened Thursday at Barrymore Theatre, taps the Emmy-winning Jim Parsons. The Big Bang Theory alum, who’s become a regular on Broadway in recent years, nails the laconic, conversational rhythms of Wilder’s prose, even coaxing laughs out of throwaway lines where no discernible joke exists.
The rest of the cast is equally strong, with nods to 21st-century diversity and inclusiveness that only occasionally jar with the Stage Manager’s references to a traditional New England town whose Catholic Church is “over beyond the tracks,” not far from “Polish Town,” while the Baptist church is “down in the holla’ by the river.” Grover’s Corners is a town that in Wilder’s telling seems to want to keep its non-WASP immigrants safely on the outskirts, at a comfortable remove from the good families. Leon reimagines the town as a far more diverse place, where the milkman is a Deaf man (John McGinty) whose acceptance in the community is signaled by the fact that everybody in town seems to have picked up a little American Sign Language to communicate with him on his morning rounds. More tellingly, the Gibbs family is now a Black family, led by Billy Eugene Jones as the local physician and the marvelous Michelle Wilson as his gardening-loving wife, who gives a degree of sass to her line readings without ever dipping into caricature.
The casting lends a different flavor to the romance of the eldest Gibbs child, the jockish George (Ephraim Sykes, wide-eyed and earnest) and his bookish next-door neighbor (Zoey Deutch, underplaying nicely), the daughter of the town’s newspaper editor (Richard Thomas, stolidly paternal) and his doting wife (Katie Holmes, gently understated). Sykes and Deutch have a natural onstage rapport that reads as puppy-dog romantic, as if they’ve been plopped into a classic ’60s sitcom where the subject of sex must never be broached. But why cast the Black actor as the jock and the white actress as the goody two-shoes? Similar questions arise over casting a Black actor (Donald Webber Jr.) as the Congregational church’s choir director, whose alcoholic benders are gently tolerated (if gossiped about) although they later prove his undoing. (It helps that the mesmerizing Webber imparts the sense of a man who can still function in his vocation but just as easily sink into a world-weary resignation to his disease.) Race-blind casting that reinforces certain cultural stereotypes isn’t much of an advancement.
There’s a certain push-me-pull-me element to Leon’s approach to this undeniably old-fashioned material, which he both wants to respect and update for a modern perspective. The dichotomy leads to some other curious choices, like Dede Ayite’s period-blending costumes, which sometimes appear to be suitable for the early 20th century and sometimes like garments that the modern actors might have worn off the street. (Sykes’s bicep-tattoo-revealing tank top can distract you from his retro and demure attempts to flirt with Emily.) And the opening moment, where the cast walks on stage jointly reciting a prayer in different languages that represent a wide array of religious faiths (including Islam and Judaism), is a signal of an admirable inclusiveness that’s broader than Wilder ever imagined — or that the rest of the production fulfills. (The Stage Manager certainly is mum on the location of the synagogue and mosque in Grover’s Corners.)
For the most part, though, Leon finds ways to honor the play’s stripped-down approach while gently souping it up for contemporary Broadway theatergoers. Beowulf Boritt’s set design features a clapboard back wall, which reveals two shuttered windows for George and Emily to exchange evening conversations. It also rises in the final act to expose risers representing a gently sloped hillside cemetery rendered with simple headstones and chairs. A galaxy of hanging lanterns and floating bulbs extends out into the auditorium (lighting by Allen Lee Hughes), maintaining the spirit of Wilder’s intended simplicity while elevating it into an artfully modern objet. Leon also lifts an ingenious element introduced in David Cromer’s 2009 acclaimed Off Broadway revival — piping in the smell of bacon in the final scenes, as Emily’s mother prepares breakfast for her daughter on her wedding day. (The fact that there are no props or visible evidence of a stove or frying pan only adds to the wondrous effect.)
Our Town is a show that has endured because it revels in everyday pleasures that are all too easy to overlook. The sound of a train whistle. The smell of bacon. The brush of your true love’s hand against your skin. These are sensations that are worth remembering, and preserving, and celebrating. And this is a thoughtful, well-crafted production that captures that spirit, and nudges it forward a bit for an American public that Thornton Wilder could never have envisioned.
OUR TOWN
Barrymore Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through Jan. 19