The fictional setting of “Our Town” is meant to represent an Anyplace, where audiences can imagine themselves lost in the comforts of routine until they’re confronted with the realities of death.
Review by Naveen Kumar
Invigorating classic texts with fresh electricity is a specialty of director Kenny Leon, whose recent productions of “Topdog/Underdog” and “Purlie Victorious” crackled with timely insights on contemporary culture. Here, Leon does beautiful and evocative work updating the everyday Americans “Our Town” appears to reflect. But even widening the definition of ordinary suggests there is such a thing.
The salt-of-the-earth families in Grover’s Corners belong there indelibly, and it’s perhaps no small statement (as much as I wish it weren’t) that one of them here is Black. Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs (Billy Eugene Jones and Michelle Wilson) are the firm but doting parents of George (Ephraim Sykes) and Rebecca (Safiya Kaijya Harris). The contours of their lives are mirrored next door, where Mr. and Mrs. Webb (Richard Thomas and Katie Holmes) are raising Emily (Zoey Deutch) and Wally (Hagan Oliveras).
Over the course of three acts (slightly trimmed here to run an intermission-less 1 hour 50 minutes), we watch George and Emily fall in love, get married young and realize how precious all that was when time yanks it away. Sykes and especially Deutch do sweet and charming work with tricky parts that see them age from school chums to young lovers. Led by Parsons’s slightly cheeky but mostly matter-of-fact narrator, the cast strikes a delicate balance, lending a lived-in quality to characters who sometimes speak in golly-gee tones. That’s aided by emotional transparency, which Holmes and Wilson deliver exceptionally well as the neighboring mothers.
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The demographics of Grover’s Corners — population just over 2,500, majority lower-middle class, Protestant and Republican — could refer to any number of today’s swing districts. Though Wilder’s description of the place remains unchanged, Leon layers in diversity in the casting, and by opening the show with a multifaith recitation (known as “Braided Prayer” by the group Abraham Jam) that suggests a spiritual bind that surpasses differences in belief.
The production’s haunting and seductive design aims to envelop the senses. The wow factor comes from Allen Lee Hughes’s lighting, which includes a swirl of lanterns suspended from the soaring ceiling like a procession of ascending souls. The gray-washed wood of Beowulf Boritt’s set evokes a weathered durability, in reference both to Wilder’s play and the human condition. You may even catch the scent of heliotrope piped in on the air-conditioned breeze.
Wilder’s reminder about the fleetingness of life will always pack a slug to the gut; you don’t have to behave or identify any certain way to be struck by the inevitability of mortality. The mundane details the play emphasizes are meant to strike us, in the end, as the stuff of life we’re fools to take for granted. But those details are still hopelessly bound to conformity — the refrain “people are meant to go through life two by two” is just one example — which leaves a broader question unasked.
Leon’s staging is lovely, but I found myself craving a daring challenge to the idea of convention rather than simply an inclusive version of it. Why should the picture of a “typical American life” remain so narrow? Why stuff it with more types of people rather than pull it apart? That’s a job for other storytellers — whose repudiation of norms will hopefully become the new one.
Our Town, through Jan. 19 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York. 1 hour 50 minutes with no intermission. ourtownbroadway.com.
correction
A previous version of this article incorrectly said Richard Thomas plays Professor Webb; he plays Mr. Webb. The article has been corrected.
