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Inspired production keeps 'Our Town' clever, modern
THEATER REVIEW | Hypocrites create bond with audience
by Hedy Weiss - Theater Critic/hweiss@suntimes.com
Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" comes to the rescue whenever we forget the common post office box for the human race.
The 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play -- which opened on Broadway as the Great Depression lingered and war clouds were gathering over Europe -- reminds us of our shared address when one young girl delights in the way a letter has been addressed to a resident of her town: "Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover's Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God." The play also serves as a wake-up call to anyone who might have forgotten that any address is only temporary, as death will eventually claim each of us and remove us from what Wilder saw as the quiet divinity of everyday existence.
David Cromer has brought a true touch of genius to the Hypocrites' new production of "Our Town," which he has directed, and also stars in (with a wicked brilliance) as the Stage Manager. And in the black box environment of Chopin Theatre's basement -- with no decor but two sets of worn kitchen tables and chairs (until a profound and stunning moment of reversal in the play's third act) -- he has created a bond between the audience and his perambulating actors with such (seeming) effortlessness that they all become residents of the very average New Hampshire town of Grover's Corners without even knowing it. Cromer has magic up his sleeve and it involves capturing the unbridled truth.
If this sounds a bit mysterious, well, it is. For there is a wondrous simplicity and nakedness about this production as it spins a blazingly intense yet sharply satiric story of two small-town, middle-class American families whose destinies become intertwined through the rituals of daily life, love and marriage and death.
A cast of 19 (plus a few terrific "ringers") is altogether remarkable. The young lovers -- Mark Fagin as George Gibbs, the town doctor's youthfully feckless son who quickly morphs into a man, and Jennifer Grace as Emily Webb, the brainy, insightful editor's daughter -- are heartbreakingly real. Stacy Stoltz and Samantha Gleisten do exquisite work as the respective mothers, with John Byrnes and Tim Curtis the drolly philosophical dads. As for musical director Jonathan Mastro, who plays Simon Stimson, Grover's Corners' alcoholic choir director, he nearly steals the show as the artist- outsider.
This production should travel the globe. It would be a far better ambassador of "American values" than any stiff-necked consular official.
Originally posted May 2, 2008
David Cromer has directed some distinguished
Chicago productions in his career: “Orson’s Shadow” at Steppenwolf; “Come
Back Little Sheba” at Shattered Globe; and Next Theatre’s “The Adding
Machine,” for which his direction snagged a bucket-load of prestigious award
nominations this week in New York. But I think Cromer’s brilliantly
revisionist and generally astounding new production of Thornton Wilder’s
“Our Town” at The Hypocrites is his masterwork to date. It’s better than any
of the above. And it all takes place in a Wicker Park basement for 20 bucks
a ticket. In the jaw-dropping third act,
which makes some truly shocking and inspired conceptual choices that are
best experienced without foreknowledge, I found myself speaking the words
“Oh, my God” to no one. And despite eccentricities, I’m not that given to
inappropriate interjections. It’s just that this “Our Town” hit me that
hard. If your tastes run to shows that
make you stare right in the face of your own mortality and inability to
prioritize what and who really matters in life, your own petty obsessions
and jealousies, then cancel whatever you’re doing tonight and go and see
this show. And, to save you an e-mail after, you’re welcome. “He’s going on like this about
Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town?’” you must be thinking. “That hoary small-town
staple of the high school repertory?” Ah, but you’ve never seen it done like
this before. Here is what Cromer (who plays
the stage manager along with directing) does: He removes every last shred of
sentimentality from the piece, replacing it with a blend of cynicism and
simple human truth. But—and here’s the rub—he does so without removing the
vitality and sincerity. Like many great revivals (the current “South
Pacific” at Lincoln Center is in my mind), it’s neither archly conceptual
nor a subversion of a great American play, but an explication for the modern
age. I’m telling you, it’s that
revelatory a show. Wilder, of course, deserves much
of the credit. I kept thinking of the last episode of “Six Feet Under,” when
Alan Ball whisked us forward to learn the mostly undignified fates of the
characters we’d come to love. Wilder did much the same in 1938, and he was
smart enough to do so in the middle of the play. In Cromer’s hands, it’s as if
you’re being whisked in and out of your own grave. His modern-dress “Our
Town” is staged in and around the audience. You spend two hours thinking
about communities and what we’ve done to them, as well as about how parents
in small towns risk imbuing their children with the tyranny of low
expectations. The performances aren’t flashy,
or the work of hugely experienced actors, but most of them are pitch
perfect, nonetheless. Tim Curtis does superb work as Mr. Webb; Stacy Stoltz
is a deeply emotional Mrs. Gibbs; Jennifer Grace is a yearning, believable
Emily. In the third act, the actors seem to come out of the floor and
surround you with their sadness and stoicism. Cromer calibrates “Our Town”
with clear-eyed intelligence. You see the beauties of small-town America and
its limitations, laid out before you as directly and powerfully as the
Chicago theater can muster.
David Cromer's utterly astounding 'Our Town' hits home, but hard
~Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune
Our Town (4 of 6 stars)
I’ve always been partial to the sinister reading of Remembrance of Things Past as an elaborate phantasmagoria: Proust’s narrator remembers nothing, his sprawling belle epoque reminiscence being, in reality, just the feverish dreams of a bedroom-bound invalid (like Proust himself). There’s a similar take on Our Town that upends the conventional sentimental treatment familiar to what’s likely the most-produced-in-high-school-theater play ever. Like a nonmusical Spoon River Anthology, this reading makes ghosts of all the turn-of-the-century characters, not just the conscious dead of its last act—benign shades endlessly re-creating a perpetually fading time and place.
It’s a stretch, of course, but Wilder was the screenwriter on Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, which took an equally jaundiced view of “evil” and “good,” contrasting Joseph Cotten’s black-heart charisma with the everyday suffocation of the prim little burg where he hides out. There’s a proto-Lynchian, twilit ambiguity running through Wilder’s brand of Rockwelliana, something sympathetic yet cool: He’s come to praise and bury this vision of small-town America, as testified by his two “outsider” surrogates—the metatheatrical Stage Manager and the suicidal, alcoholic organist Simon Stimson—especially in their elegiac closing remarks.
Director Cromer—who also deftly plays the empathetic/dispassionate narrator—teases out muted, wistful notes, bringing things closer to the gently spectral style Wilder arguably intended than what you may’ve been conditioned to expect from this “nostalgic” chestnut. Outside one audacious—and brilliant—bit of set-design excess, things hew close to the bare-bones staging the script dictates. Leads Grace and Fagin are winning without stooping to aw-shucks cuteness; but it’s Byrnes and Curtis, as their golden-lit fathers, who deliver the show’s signature performances.