Director David Cromer has put together a mostly exciting rendition of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, now playing at the Barrow Street Theater in Greenwich Village. With the action taking place in and around the audience, we become part of the life in the town of Grover's Corners in the early 1900's in this ultimate Americana play. It's the life of the ordinary, with no surprises. My friend who saw it with me, a lifelong New Yorker, said it was like an anthropological study.
There is no sophistication in this play -- some simple humor, some tendrils of real communication drift into the simplistic realities of the lives of these very average small town people with their very limited communication skills. The sentimentality of the lives of simple rural people gives us an ordinariness that is ultimately quite touching. And there are laughs. Basically people laugh at two things: recognition and incongruity. All the laughs in Our Town come from recognition - the foibles of everyday life.
The large cast is mostly excellent, and best of all is Cromer himself as The Stage Manager; he has a clear, penetrating communication with the audience.
Lighting by Heather Gilbert enhances everything, and the real set by Michele Spadaro, when finally revealed, is terrific. Costumes by Alison Siple are loaded with anachronisms: women did not wear pant suits to weddings back then. Booooo.
Act three where the dead, in the graveyard, speak, doesn't do it for me. The maudlin ramblings about life and death, the moralizing about our need to be aware of and appreciate every moment we are alive turns into a dose of saccharine I could have done without. But that's Wilder's fault, not Cromer's; the totality of his production adds up to the best Our Town I've seen.
