Thornton Wilder has been quoted as saying of his most famous and most produced play Our Town, set in fictional Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, “This play is about everywhere.” What he means to convey, if explanation is necessary, is that artistically and succinctly Our Town demonstrates that by closely examining the extremely particular, a universal truth is revealed.
The Thornton Wilder Society, where statistics are carefully monitored, reports that something like 400 Our Town productions appear annually, and be assured they’re not all showing up in New Hampshire. They’re done across the country—not just in high schools—and around the globe for the simple reason that spectators on whatever continent are regularly convinced that Grover’s Corners is no more nor less than a replica of their town.
Wilder was that prescient and remains so in the latest Broadway revival (five previously, since the 1938 opening just about exactly 86 years ago). This time the director is Kenny Leon, who’s taken a few liberties with the script—all happily acceptable and certainly approved by the vigilant Wilder Estate. It could be said that Leon is offering an Our Town “for our time,” as the saying goes, a time when a seriously threatened democracy has generated a nation-wide longing for unity across racial lines.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
From the outset, stateside casts have always been white, in recognition of the likely population of any equivalent Grover’s Corners at the time Wilder sets the ground-breaking play, 1901-13. Leon mixes Black and white when what used to be called non-traditional casting has become the predominant traditional casting. Another way to phrase it is that he’s made Wilder’s implicit quite visibly explicit.
His choice is beautifully achieved. This time out, the Webb family is headed by Grover’s Corners Sentinel editor Webb (Richard Thomas, whose John-Boy in The Waltons of rural Virginia all but predicted he’d one day take on this role). He and Mrs. Webb (Katie Holmes), children Emily (Zoey Deutch) and Wally Webb (Hagan Oliveras) are white, whereas Dr. Gibbs (Billy Eugene Jones), Mrs. Gibbs (Michelle Wilson) and their children George (Ephraim Sykes) and Rebecca (Safiya Kaijya Harris) are Black.
This means, of course, that when George and Emily marry—after playing the exquisite soda fountain scene wherein they first pledge themselves to each other—they represent a mixed marriage. This is hardly surprising in 2024 when television commercials frequently feature interracial marriages.
Leon depicts them with care on a Beowulf Boritt set that is not the space Wilder describes as “an empty stage in half-light.” Seen upstage is a high and weathered gray wall that suggests the side of an old barn. On it are hung several gray chairs. Under the Allen Lee Hughes lights, sit a few other aging furnishings.
The entrance of a stage manager, another change in Wilder’s order, is delayed while 27 members of the cast stroll in and around a piano where Donald Webber, Jr. begins playing what’s identified in the program as “Braided Prayer,” for which Abraham Jam includes prayers from Muslim, Jewish and Christian faiths. The complex composition, movingly delivered, is another instance of the literal and figurative harmony Leon wants underlined in his interpretation.
Only when the prayers are finished does Stage Manager (Jim Parsons in his second Broadway appearance in the last six months and marvelously at ease in it) enter through an upstage door in the wall and introduce the play and Grover’s Corners. (Would Wilder have okayed Leon’s revise? A good guess would be yes.) Incidentally, there are audience members sitting in a few rows, stage right and left, as if in church or court.
Once Stage Manager arrives, Leon guides the cast through a scrupulously rewarding version of the text. To a man and woman, they are commendable, including Julie Halston as gossipy wedding-lover Mrs. Soames and Webber as heavy drinking, deeply depressed Simon Stimson. Bill Timoney, Doron Jépaul, and John McGinty as the town milkman—hearing-impaired in Leon’s take—also snare their scenes more than handily.
The Gibbs and Webb broods are impressive emotionally, Sykes and Deutch especially effective over their strawberry ice cream sodas. If anyone is taxed beyond the call of duty, it’s Holmes. Throughout, the actors, deprived of props, are required to mime activities such as sipping ice cream sodas. It often looks as if Holmes, tied to her kitchen apron, has entire meals to prepare. No easy pantomiming task, so bows to her for extraordinary effort.
Leon unfolds Our Town without intermission (Wilder might not have gone for that), but the director does have the Stage Manager indicate act starts and finishes, as the untrimmed dialog states. It used to be said (perhaps it still is) that average small-town citizens only have their names in the paper three times—birth, marriage, death.
Accordingly, in act one Dr. Gibbs returns from delivering twins. In act two George and Emily marry. In act three Emily has died young and joins other deceased Grover’s Corners citizens in the graveyard. An argument could be made that Wilder’s third Our Town act is the best ever written for a 20th-century American play. Moreover, it may boast the best single line—delivered heart-searingly here by Deutch’s Emily—“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”
At Kenny Leon’s very welcome Our Town, patrons are guaranteed to appreciate Thornton Wilder’s genius every, every minute.
Our Town opened October 10, 2024 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre and runs through January 19, 2025. Tickets and information: ourtownbroadway.com
