Out Town

By Harlan Jacobson – November 21, 2024

When Our Town opened on Broadway in February 1938, playwright Thornton Wilder had written it 20 years after WWI had ended, nine years into the Great Depression and in a time that probably felt a bit like now, watching the world slide toward another war, and wondering how caught up in it America would be. I checked out the 1940 film starring William Holden and went to see the new stage production at the Barrymore Theatre, and I have some observations about what’s new in Grover’s Corners.

Wilder’s original stage play was a celebration of simple American life circa the early 1900’s, where everyone in town knows everyone else, the milk gets delivered in glass bottles, the paperboy shows up on time, the genial man at the soda fountain will front you the money for 10 years if necessary to treat your best girl to a strawberry soda. It was a reminder: All those folks in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, modeled on Peterborough, NH where Wilder had spent some time in the summer of 1937 working on the play at the MacDowell Colony, were in danger of passing through, getting on, sleepwalking through life until moving on into the cemetery that sits up on a hill in Grover’s Corners and dominates Act 3 of the play. Wake up. Notice where you are, who you’re with.

Wilder won the Pulitzer Prize for the play with that simple admonition. It’s been a beloved American staple of high school repertory ever since. It generated a movie version in 1940 with a 22-year-old William Holden – watching it recently on Amazon Prime, I barely recognized him — as George Gibbs, the lovestruck high school senior next door to junior classmate Emily Webb (Martha Scott), whom he will marry after graduation.

Idyllic small town stories – How Green Was My Valley, National Velvet, Little Women, It’s A wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz, too – were a thing then. They took the sting out of national collapse. Actor Frank Craven recreated the role in the film that he originated on Broadway as the genial, old stage manager, who most famously breaks the fourth wall and walks the audience through the town from Main Street to school to the Court, the town paper and the different denominational churches located socio-economically without ever saying as much. Craven leads us in dropping in on all the ongoing stories around town, most especially the central one of how the awkward boy next door comes to marry the spritely girl next door, raise a family and lose each other too young. Grover’s Corners is a White Christian town in Wilder’s telling, which used to be all a story had to be for everyone, even those who were neither, to imagine their way into what is a universal truth: Wake up, you’ll sleep when you’re dead. Or in the graveyard in Our Town, you might not.

This new production, which runs until January 19 at the Barrymore Theatre, is directed by Kenny Leon, the highly decorated director of revivals over the last decade or so of A Raisin in the Sun, Fences, A Soldier’s Play and Purlie Victorious. What Leon did is to make the story about race in a subtle way, by well not making it about race. Leon cast the Gibbs as a Black family living next to a White family. That’s it. The Black George Gibbs and White Emily Webb fall in love. That’s all. This is no Romeo and Juliet where The Gibbs and the Webb’s are the Montagues and the Capulets, or the Jets and the Sharks, destined to learn the cost of strife. Instead, it’s a reverie about being color blind, where whites and blacks live in some magical Brigadoon, where no one ever thinks about color or culture: they just live inside the dream and get gently reminded in Wilder’s third act, titled Death and Eternity, to love each other and love their lives.

That should be a universal impulse, and I’d like to embrace it as such, particularly by seeing a packed theatre so moved by the message in a very message play. The black and browning of the American Revolution in Hamilton expanded ownership of the Constitution to those audiences; it was in their face. Leon’s Our Town, by contrast, is anything but: There’s nothing to see here. And truth to tell, I’m mostly in agreement with that.

Frank Craven’s original production stage manager laid out the town and the people with a kind of affectionate sadness of a metaphysical ghost who knew how all the stories began and would end. Our Town has been revived with Henry Fonda, Paul Newman, and Spalding Gray as the stage manager, and now with Jim Parsons — Sheldon Cooper on TV’s “The Big Bang Theory” — in the current production, who plays the part like a graduate student doing a golly gee whiz best job ever in his side gig as a kind of tour guide for The Gray Line. He lacks Craven’s sad wistfulness of existence, which is the only thing the play means to bring home.

The strength of Wilder’s writing, the lament, an echo of EM Forster’s Only Connect, the head and the heart, from his novel Howard’s End published in 1910, is so powerful, it asks the supporting cast of Zoey Deutch as Emily Webb, Katie Holmes as her mother Myrtle Webb, Richard Thomas as Charles Webb the local newspaper editor and Emily’s father, Ephraim Sykes as George Gibbs, Billy Eugene Jones as Frank Gibbs, the town doctor, Michelle Wilson as George’s mom Julia and Julie Halston as the town gossip simply to not stand in the way. With one exception, I think at the direction of Leon to give George more confidence than the character as written had, they don’t.

You have until January 19 to only connect to Our Town at the Barrymore.

Tune in here for Harlan’s Review of This Town.