Weekly Margin 2025, W1: Our Town

1/02/24: Our Town

What: Kenny Leon directs a Broadway revival of the Thornton Wilder classic.

And? Well, that was pretty bad. I don't believe the director--or anyone--did any work to coach the actors through their monologues, and unfortunately it shows. But even more troubling is this production's display of a fundamental lack of understanding of some pretty core themes of the play. A sense of place is vitally important--there's a reason the play opens with the Stage Manager describing in minute detail the layout of a town whose real structure we never see. The other way that sense of place needs to be constructed is in the company's use of mime: it needs to be precise, specific, and so real we can almost feel it ourselves. Again I wonder if anyone coached the cast on this. Instead these mimed items float in a nowhere-space, being laid down in one place and collected from another. 

Another major theme of this play is that we need to breathe and take in the moments we have, appreciate them, because they'll be gone in another moment. That's rather hard for the audience to take away from this production, whose Stage Manager throws away moments like packing peanuts, and rushes the cast from scene to scene like he's got a train to catch. While I was grateful for an early reprieve from a production I was not enjoying, this isn't the way to do Our Town. God, it made me miss the David Cromer production so much.

Oh and hey to return to specifics, or rather specific vs. universal. I think unfortunately this production didn't learn the lesson from David Leveaux's misguided Fiddler on the Roof, which aimed for universal by somehow making a story about a shtetl less Jewish. This production opens with overlapping prayers in various languages, starting with the Sh'ma, a Jewish prayer. I noticed also during the third act that one of the gravestones has a Jewish star on it; another I believe had the crescent moon, an Islamic symbol (I'm not as positive on this second one). And just, no. Grover's Corner isn't a magical utopia of religious diversity. It's a Christian town. It's such a Christian town that part of the Stage Manager's opening monologue lists all the churches. No temples, no mosques. Let Grover's Corner be Christian. Let this play be Christian. It's fine. I'm not asking for Jews to be in this story. We have a profoundly different relationship to death than Christians have.

I liked the lanterns.

The cast of Our Town. Photo by Daniel Rader.