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"Why, Our Town?" the director of the San
Francisco Playhouse production asked out loud in an introductory speech to the audience
before a performance began. Indeed, the same question may have arisen in the minds of many
of the critics and members of the audience in attendance. The Thorton Wilder play, which
won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938, has become, in many people’s experience, a
non-musical version of Oklahoma,
ground-breaking in its day only to become, over the decades, a high school drama
department classic, a rite-of-passage, part of the American young-person’s syllabus,
right up there with the poetry of Robert Frost or a short story or two by O’Henry.
Bill English, the aforementioned director, answered his own question by
proclaiming a desire to revisit simplicity in our very complicated times. That’s
fair. Even Oklahoma has made its way back onto Broadway recently. But this
production of Our Town lacked the kind of fresh look that English seemed to be
promising. Someone should do an Our Town set in Baghdad, or present a Stage
Director who is a convicted pedophile come to Grovers Corner, New Hampshire because every
other town in New England has run him out. As it is, the only nod to modernity here was
the casting of a female as the crusty Stage Manager. Things were simple, all right.
Wanda McCaddon, the only Equity actor in the cast of 21, lent a flavor
of Katherine Hepburn and On
Golden Pond to her portrayal of the Stage Manager. She was convincingly crotchety
and had her New England persona down, but her portrayal lacked the kind of authority that
makes the play seem like a puppet show in her hands. Everything hinges on the distance
between past and present offered by this character, and McCaddon too often came across as
a townsperson, sitting in on supper rather than maintaining a separateness and
energy-force that causes the mundane nature of most of the scenes to stand-out in relief
by her presence on the periphery.
The role of Emily, the young girl whose soliloquy from the afterlife is
pivotal to the essence and power of the text, was played by Lauren English. She did a good
job of acting, developing a convincing before-and-after performance, creating a girl who
turns into something bigger than life after leaving it. Still, her scenes with suitor
George Gibbs, played by Ashkon Davaran, were stilted and unconvincing, mostly because of
the inability of Davaran to sound like anything other than a California kid with
aspirations to the stage.
Our Town is not yet 100 years old, but the irony in presenting
the play today comes with a realization of how quickly things are circling backwards, in a
big, Republican rush to traditional values and small-minded politics. America, in 2004,
seems more and more like one big Grovers Corners. Nothing in this production, however,
offers any suggestion that that’s sad. Wilder’s intent may have been far
different, about the little things in life and the depth of connection between basically
boring characters, but it’s hard not to sit through three acts of this today without
getting a little furious.
November 20, 2004 - Michael Wade Simpson
