New York City Theater

"Our Town"
Barrow St. Theater

“Our Town,” is so familiar that theatergoers would be forgiven if they spoke the dialogue with the actors. But its latest reincarnation is so fresh, so involving, that it may as well be a new work.

Direction is all, or almost all. Of course, this Pulitzer Prize play stands sturdily at the peak in the canon of American drama. Thornton Wilder’s interwoven stories of the fictional Grover’s Corners, N.H., are as familiar as the American flag.

What director David Cromer does, however, is strip away sentimentality and show townspeople who, like us, struggling with everyday life. With himself as the ubiquitous Stage Manager, Cromer matter-of-factly sketches in the town’s landmarks as cursorily as he does its inhabitants. Here are the churches, there’s Doc and Mrs. Gibbs’ house. Here are the grocery and drug stores, there’s where Mr. and Mrs. Webb live.

Nothing much seems to happen. People live, people die. People get married, have children, go off to war, while the stars criss-cross in the skies. “Scientists . . . seem to think there are no living beings up there,” says the Stage Manager. “Only this one is straining away, straining all the time to make something of itself.”

The play is, of course, tender, beautiful and heartbreaking. What makes this production unique is Cromer’s decision to leave houselights on throughout. The audience sees not only the actors but each other, all participants in the quotidian events. Towards the end, Cromer executes a startling coup de théâtre that stabs the heart although its climax is rushed.

What happens in New Hampshire may seem ordinary. But “Our Town” is very much of the moment, asking, as its most famous line puts it, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it – every, every minute?”

-- David Rosenberg
March 15, 2009