A champagne problem of mine is that, having grown up in a suburb of New York, my knowledge of the theatrical canon is largely confined to the plays that have been revived on Broadway in my lifetime. And since Thornton Wilder’s seminal Our Town was last produced on the Main Stem when I was four years old, I had never encountered it until I saw Kenny Leon’s new revival, opening October 9th at the Barrymore Theatre. My theatre-going companion, hailing from a Midwestern small town not dissimilar from Grover’s Corners, was intimately familiar with the material via multiple high school interpretations. Despite being an oft produced play, Our Town had eluded me for so long that I was floored by the daringness and perceptiveness of the text when I finally saw it for myself. But that was all that floored me.
Remarkably meta-theatrical for a play written in 1938, Our Town is both a play about life in a small town at the turn of the twentieth century and a play about a play about life in a small town at the turn of the twentieth century. The narrator, called the Stage Manager, sets the scene in Grover’s Corners, though the stage is bare and actors pantomime actions rather than use props. Wilder structured the play in three distinct acts, which Leon has condensed into an intermission-less production that runs just under two hours. It is commendable that Leon had the foresight to realize if he could not make the production interesting, he could at least make it short.
What struck me most about the play was how the conceit of being about the lives and loves of a large cast of characters in a small town prefigures the rise of the soap opera genre. Characters fall in love, get married, die, come back. These are the events make up the drama of Wilder’s play. While not nearly as melodramatic as soap operas would be when they debuted on television in the ‘50s, the elevation of the quotidian into worthy subjects of drama is unmistakably present.
The folksy sentimentalism of the play must have felt knowingly cutesy in Wilder’s time, but nearly 90 years later, it can be downright cloying unless tempered by a strong sense of irony. Unfortunately, Leon plays it mostly straight. The biggest swings here are less radical than they are bizarre, such as scoring the end of the play to P!nk’s “What About Us”, a protest anthem protesting nothing in particular. Another choice, destined to be what this production will be remembered for, is for the smell of bacon to be piped into the Barrymore during a pivotal scene late in the play. Smells have been shown to trigger memory and emotions, so it is a cool idea to incorporate the sense into a scene about revisiting the past. But even if the thematic relevance is admirable, the effect quickly becomes nauseating. Hopefully, they have scaled back on the amount of scent used since the preview I attended.
If this production is not a showcase for a strong directorial vision, it’s not a showcase for actors either. Jim Parsons leads the 28 person cast in the role of the Stage Manager, and although his presence is always a welcome one, he’s delivered far meatier performances in the past, most recently in Mother Play on Broadway last spring. Other recognizable names in the cast include Katie Holmes as Mrs. Webb and Zoey Deutch as her daughter Emily.
This is the Broadway debut for Deutch, known for physically comedic performances in films like Zombieland: Double Tap. She imbues Emily with sufficient vulnerability, but not enough depth to carry the final act of the play, which hangs on Emily’s realizations about life and death. The daughter of movie people, Deutch is perhaps not a natural stage actress.
Another actress mostly known for her screen work, Holmes was last seen on the New York stage in Anna Ziegler’s The Wanderers in 2023. She played a Natalie Portman-esque movie star, an awkward fit for the actress, who, despite having been a tabloid fixture, has never been a glamour-puss. But in the maternal Mrs. Webb, Holmes has found an ideal part. She plays her like a grown-up evolution of the girl next door that first brought her fame on Dawson’s Creek. It is she who emerges from Leon’s production looking the best, rivaled only by scene-stealing Julie Halston as Mrs. Soames.
The costumes, by Dede Ayite, mix periods to an underwhelming degree. Beowulf Boritt’s senic deisgn, is appropriately minimal, aside from the gratuitous rows of seats on either side of the stage. The back wall includes two squares that open like windows for a scene in which Emily and George Gibbs, played by Ephraim Sykes, converse from their respective bedroom windows. It’s a simple device that works in the moment, but gains greater significance in the final act, when the image of people living life in boxes is invoked with new perspective. That little moment is the closest this production comes to being genuinely moving.
The only other aspect of the design worth noting is the hanging lights of varying size and style that are suspended from above the stage and above the audience in a continuous flow. It looks lovely, but extending the play beyond the bounds of the proscenium seems unnecessary and misguided, considering Our Town is set explicitly on a stage. Same goes for the on-stage seating and the actors repeatedly entering and exiting through the aisles.
With so many elements that do not cohere into anything compelling, it becomes difficult to see what drew Leon or Parsons or anyone involved to the text in the first place. And I cannot exactly advise people to spend their money on seeing a show when the creators haven’t provided a reason for staging it.
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