The fifth Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s classic “Our Town” opened Thursday, and outside the Barrymore Theatre, the show’s producers have very wisely posted rave blurbs about the play. What makes these very upbeat words different from the usual huzzahs delivered by critics is that they come from two famous playwrights. Edward Albee and David Mamet are both quoted as calling “Our Town” the best American play ever.
My opinion of “Our Town” is somewhat less rapturous, and it’s because I’m something of an expert on the subject of small towns, which Albee, Mamet and even Wilder are not. They were born in, respectively, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin. I was born and raised in a town that had an even cornier name than Grover’s Corner and under half its population. I grew up in Nora Springs, Iowa, and the Catholic church wasn’t “across the tracks,” as it is in Wilder’s play, but 10 miles away in another town. The local school board wouldn’t even hire a Catholic to be a teacher in my hometown until after JFK had been assassinated.
The famous graveyard scene that is the third act of “Our Town” also strikes me as a little too bucolic despite its dark intimations about eternity and its lesson that we need to embrace life fully. A walk through the cemetery at Nora Springs always brought back a story my maternal grandmother used to tell, and there was no more Catholic a woman in the world than Ida M. Hofler. When she moved to town off the family farm that was land stolen from the Osage Nation, the old country doctor there told my grandma that she’d be shocked to learn how many women laid in the cemetery because they died from botched abortions. This was 1911, two years before “Our Town” ends and 27 years before Wilder wrote it.
In “Our Town,” the big scandal is that one corpse in the cemetery got there by offing himself. We’re told people don’t talk much about this suicide in Grover’s Corner. Strange, the ultimate moral sin was always a hot topic of conversation in Nora Springs, right up there with all those young women who had babies six or seven months after their wedding day.
Small towns hold no nostalgia for me, and I’d bet they don’t hold much for the director of this “Our Town” revival. Kenny Leon begins the play with three songs of worship, one of which is “Braided Prayer,” sung in Hebrew even though the word “Jew” is never mentioned in Wilder’s play. Under Leon’s direction, one of the two families that are neighbors in Grover’s Corner is Black, and when their son marries the other family’s white daughter, there is not a race riot. The biggest scandal in town remains an alcoholic preacher. I wasn’t aware of a Black family living in Nora Springs until 2013 when I went back there for my father’s funeral.
That these thoughts ran around in my head while I watched Leon’s production is a credit to what his direction brings to “Our Town.” Best of all, I enjoyed watching Jim Parsons play the Stage Manager and how he came off even gayer than he did in “The Boys in the Band.” His queerness is especially appreciated when, in “Our Town,” he talks about everybody getting married at a certain age as if by clockwork. He reminded me of so many bachelor ministers, priests and preachers who were queer as could be and the townspeople didn’t have a clue.
Wilder’s play has always captured the by-rote quality of life in small-town America and its citizens blindness to controversies they don’t want to confront. These characters are dead long before they end up in the cemetery. That’s my very personal take on “Our Town,” having lived for 18 years in one of these tiny hell holes — and no, I don’t consider it as the best American play ever. Not by a long shot.
“Our Town” plays best with city folk, like Albee and Mamet, who find its initial sunniness charming and think its characters are such simple souls that it takes no effort to feel superior to them. For me, Wilder’s faux sunlight in the first act just makes my skin crawl. When the Stage Manager tells us how the population of Grover’s Corner has gone from around two to three thousand, all I can think about is the lack of opportunity and diversity. Yes, Wilder is speaking to a greater human condition. But if that’s the case, why didn’t he set his story in Brooklyn? Because set in a city, the playwright wouldn’t charm anybody by scattering kernels of corn all over his act.
This latest Broadway revival of “Our Town” doesn’t sink Wilder’s reputation the way Lincoln Center Theater’s 2022 revival of “The Skin of Our Teeth” did. As I wrote in my review of that disastrous production, I hadn’t seen that many people walk out during intermission since the Met Opera last performed Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aaron.”
Leon’s “Our Town” solves that problem, in part, by not having an intermission. The Stage Manager now simply informs us that Act 1 and then Act 2 have finished, the audience applauds, and we’re off to Act 3 without a break. “Our Town” now runs 100 minutes without intermission, and I have to ask this: Would you do that to any three-act play that normally runs around two and a half hours if you were a director who considered it the best American play ever?
In addition to Parsons’ pitch-perfect Stage Manager, Billy Eugene Jones and Richard Thomas bring real authenticity to the play’s two fathers, as does Ephraim Sykes in the role of the groom-widower George Gibbs. An extreme condescension, however, enters into the picture with several of the female actors’ performances thanks to the costumes, by Dede Ayite, which are dreadful. Katie Holmes’ mother wears earrings that are diamond studs. Michelle Wilson’s mother wears gold drop earrings. Zoey Deutch’s daughter wears a lace miniskirt. And Julie Halston’s town gossip hasn’t changed her coif or clothes since she last played Bitsy von Muffling in “And Just Like That.” If there’s a dramatic logic to these displays of money, it escapes me. Halston somehow manages to escape the burden of her appearance to deliver a credible performance.
Holmes, on the other hand, also makes a mess of her kitchen, especially when her mother character prepares breakfast and the Barrymore Theatre is suddenly invaded with wafts of frying bacon. We get to smell the bacon, but since everything is mimed, we don’t see the bacon or the frying pan, spatula, plates and glasses. I think Holmes cracked the eggs into the orange juice.
