Stage, Managed: A TV-Star-Driven Our Town

Jim Parsons in Our Town at the Ethel Barrymore. Photo: Daniel Rader

Sometimes — very rarely — a director does something so striking with a play that interpretation seems to fuse with bone structure, and it’s damnably hard to clear the board for future explorations. “Definitive” is a pompous, silly word, and at the same time, it’s very difficult for me to parse Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade from Peter Brook’s production. Likewise, though the comparison would probably embarrass him, David Cromer did something with Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in 2009 that manages, to this day, to keep haunting a play that’s as canonical as Romeo and Juliet, as curricular as To Kill a Mockingbird. Wilder called Our Town “an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life,” and in the play’s third act — when Emily Webb, having died young in childbirth, revisits her girlhood home on “an unimportant day” only to be overcome with the beauty of life’s minutiae, unnoticed by the living — Cromer revealed a working kitchen at the back of his formerly prop-less, stripped-down stage. Mrs. Webb cooked bacon on a griddle; the smell filled the little theater. Wilder’s intentionally blank space was suddenly and overwhelmingly suffused with the real as Emily asked her famous question: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”

Wilder might have objected (“Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind — not in things, not in ‘scenery,’” he wrote of his play), but a wallop was packed. And Cromer himself has spoken of the choice emerging not from a desire to “subvert Our Town” but from a drive to rediscover its inherent potency, unavoidably sentimentalized and sanded down over the years. That fundamental drive — that feeling of questing clarity, of the necessity of returning to an old play to excavate its glowing, undiminished heart — is what Kenny Leon’s new Broadway production lacks. It’s not painful, but it’s far from revelatory. In certain ways it treads safely down the middle of the road — gets in, gets on with it, gets it over with, and gets out. But Leon (like many post-Cromer directors of the play) also seems to be reaching for gestures to make this visit to Grover’s Corners new and different, and the flourishes wind up feeling tentative or hodgepodge-y, never coalescing. At the end of the show, he goes so far as to pipe the smell of bacon into the auditorium — the Cinnabon version of Cromer’s innovation. Wilder was adamant that his play needed “only five square feet of boarding and the passion to know what life means to us.” The man knew what he was about. Start adding icing and you’d better know, too.

Here, the icing comes before the cake. Leon’s production begins not with the stage manager (Jim Parsons) but with the town organist, the suffering alcoholic Simon Stimson (Donald Webber Jr.). Stimson walks solemnly across Beowulf Boritt’s monochrome timber monolith of a set (planks, planks everywhere) and plinks out a few notes on a piano. Gradually, he’s joined by the production’s whole ensemble, who enter singing a piece called “Braided Prayer” by the interfaith musical trio Abraham Jam. Everyone reaches a unison “amen,” but the singing continues — for some reason, into cell phones? A pair of actors holds out a phone selfie-style and sings another religious tune while cheesing and flashing peace signs. Another (Willa Bost) stares more serenely into her phone and sings “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” Bost has a lovely voice — and also, what are we doing here? There’s a strange, “Hey fam! ’Bout to do Our Town! Hit that like button!” vibe to the proceedings, along with a heavy helping of the explicitly sacred.

Admittedly, Our Town already contains plenty of references to faith as a central aspect of small-town American life. More significant still, part of Wilder’s brilliance lay in his incredible grasp of the long zoom. The play, he said, shows “the life of a village against the life of the stars,” and the climax of its first act sees young Rebecca Gibbs (Safiya Kaijya Harris) excitedly telling her older brother George (Ephraim Sykes) about a letter her friend Jane has received: “It said: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America … But listen, it’s not finished: the United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God.” That’s the play, right there. But in his opening sequence, Leon latches onto the “God” part of that construction with a literalism that, paradoxically, keeps the scale of things all too human. The entire play is suddenly framed as a prayer, which feels like a misreading of Wilder’s cosmic vision. It may be a fine line between holy reverence and universal awe, but it’s still a line.

The upside of this Our Town’s prologue is that it allows Parsons’s stage manager to sneak into the action, mercifully beginning his first speech without applause. What does it mean to put well-known television celebrities in Our Town? Whose town does Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire become? There were times when I felt as if the “town” on display here was, in fact, the weird bubble of contemporary Broadway, where TV stars like Zoey Deutch (playing Emily Webb) and Katie Holmes (as her mother) rub up against old hands like Richard Thomas — who first acted on Broadway in 1958 when he was 7 years old — or natural-born stage performers like Sykes and Billy Eugene Jones. As the play’s two fathers, Dr. Gibbs and Mr. Webb, Jones and Thomas are unsurprisingly a high point. They both ride Wilder’s rhythms and personalize them, nailing the “continual dryness of tone” the playwright asked for in his notes. Holmes, meanwhile, feels a little lost and awkward as she’s constantly asked to mime putting on an apron and preparing breakfast, and a little too well-scrubbed for a scene where her daughter asks her, “Mama, were you pretty?” Deutch is more in control of Emily, but without any particular depth of insight. Her voice is high and bright as a bell, and neither it nor her performance ever drops.

Then, at the center of it all, there’s Parsons, reining himself in a bit, wearing a serious beard and a blue suit (Dede Ayite did the costumes, which have a collage-like, time-hopping quality that feels intelligible as an idea but not additive in the execution). His Stage Manager is, more than anything else, brisk — he keeps things moving, and ain’t nothing wrong with that. Like Thomas and Jones, Parsons also gives the mawkishness that can be Wilder’s death knell a wide berth. His eyebrow is always half-raised, and he pointedly underplays potentially freighted moments like the Stage Manager’s description of the town’s Civil War graves: “New Hampshire boys … had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than fifty miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name, friends — the United States of America. The United States of America. And they went and died about it.” Like Deutch, Parsons doesn’t ever quite ring the great gong that lies inside the part’s New England tartness, but he’s a good companion and a wry, steady guide. Watching him, I thought about how much Wes Anderson owes to Wilder. Then I started dreaming of that production.

That may be bad criticism: A critic is supposed to review the production that’s there! But with a play like Our Town — where its enduring miracle is both its granular mundanity and its immensity — the imagination is going to start firing. The mind is going to stretch with the material: “Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind.” Whether a production stretches fully to meet the play is another question.

Our Town is at the Barrymore Theatre.