American Players Theatre Produces a Languid and Loving "Our Town"
Photo by Liz Lauren.
In American Players Theatre’s current production of Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town, the beginning of the play sneaks up on you. One moment APT doyenne and core company member Sarah Day is welcoming the audience to the show and asking everyone to turn off their cell phones and the next minute she’s slipped into the play’s main character, the Stage Manager. An omniscient narrator who gently leads the audience through the story, she invites us to spy on the citizens of the quaint hamlet of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, on a summer day in 1904.
Like a wistful former mayor of a quintessentially American small town, Day’s character speaks fondly of the community. She knows each citizen intimately and is equally proud of their quirks and eccentricities and forgiving of their shortcomings. She sets the scene for each act, fills in the blanks on the stage’s traditionally bare set, ushers actors on and off the stage and even invites a few distinguished townspeople to expound on the town’s history, geography, politics and predilections. Slipping into the background during scenes that focus on the townspeople, her gray blouse blends in seamlessly with the weathered gray wood of the set. But when she needs to guide our attention to the next part of a deceptively pointed story, her clear voice cuts cleanly through the air of nostalgia and rings out over the crowd.
According to the Stage Manager, Grover’s Corners is a world of milkmen, horses and buggies, soda fountains, doctors who make house calls, and neighbors who don’t lock their doors at night. Many of its citizens are born, marry, have families and die without ever venturing further than the city limits. But this story is much more than a museum piece. As our guide says eloquently in act three, “We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars...everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.”
This explains the evergreen appeal of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which has enjoyed nearly continuous productions since its premiere in 1938. Of course the large cast and Wilder’s demand for a hyper-minimal set that will not get in the way of the story has also made it a favorite of community theaters and high school drama departments. It’s a good guess that many of those productions never got underneath the play’s folksy charm to expose the playwright’s plea for being fully present, alive and connected to our fellow travelers, even in the most mundane and ordinary days. Rest assured that this production does.
The cast is excellent across the board, with many actors relaying tremendous depth, nuance and texture within very few lines. James DeVita is particularly good in the small role of Simon Stimson, the frequently drunk choir director who has encountered too much sorrow. His frustration at his inability to communicate meaningfully with the choir members is painfully clear, and his unsteady gait as he walks home speaks volumes. Similarly, Nate Burger infuses his character of milkman Howie Newsome with many layers, including a very entertaining relationship with his horse, Bessie. As neighbors Mrs. Gibb and Mrs. Webb, Teri Brown and Tracy Michelle Arnold illustrate the quiet desperation of women who cannot fulfill their dreams, cannot have frank conversations with their children or their husbands, and cannot stop moving because their labor makes the family function.
In the larger roles, Ronald Román-Meléndez and Samantha Newcomb play George and Emily, the couple at the center of the story who grow up next door to one another, fall in love, and marry over the course of the play. Instead of a typical, silly young girl, Newcomb’s Emily is often bookish and serious, giving her revelations at the play’s end more weight. And Román-Meléndez brings a strength and real earnestness to the role of her beau, George, who learns to put others’ needs before his own, just as he learns to put his beloved baseball aside in favor of love.
Tim Ocel’s direction is mostly traditional, with a few variations — such as putting townspeople in modern dress as they emerge from the audience, which feels unnecessary and forced. Tim Gittings provides practical sound effects for a few actions in the play — emulating the satisfying sound of a rolled up newspaper hitting a Grover’s Corners front porch, or running metal thimbles over a washboard to simulate the sounds of an old fashioned lawn mower. It’s puzzling why this incredibly effective device isn’t used more consistently throughout the play.
As is prescribed in the script, the cast mimes all kinds of business, from snapping beans and tending a garden to delivering milk and cooking breakfast, but some actors are much more adept at this than others. Burger made his character’s faithful horse plainly visible in the mind’s eye, and Day concocted delicious-looking strawberry phosphates in the soda fountain for example, but much of the mothers’ kitchen preparations were a jumble of hands grabbing the air.
It’s a long journey to the play’s central message, made longer by the first two acts’ achingly slow pace as the scenes meander over details that Emily Webb will wax poetic about in the final moments. This contrasts sharply with the lightning quick third act, where Newcomb’s Emily walks the knife edge between passion and melodrama. The audience is amply rewarded in the production’s final image however — Day’s Stage Manager walking away from the stage until she practically disappears into the woods. It’s simply stunning.
Ultimately, this Our Town is a great play done very well, a languid and loving portrait of ordinary people living unremarkable lives, punctuated by brief and brilliant moments of connection. And great plays speak to you differently each time you see them. When I first encountered Our Town as a freshman in high school, I felt a connection to the tentative teen Emily Webb, on the verge of beginning her adult life. Much later, when I saw a production as the mother of two children, I paused to wonder how many days I was too busy making breakfast and getting them off to school to really see them growing up. And now, I wonder if Simon Stimson might be the tragic hero of Our Town; a man who felt so much that he could not survive in this world for long.