REVIEW: 'Our Town' at Theater Latte Da

In the program for Theatre Latte Da’s new production of Our Town, the director, Peter Rothstein, apologizes to Thorton Wilder for his youthful attitude toward the play. Back in college, Mr. Rothstein tells us, he wrote his final paper attacking the play and its author from a political point of view: Our Town as nothing more than the usual testament to white male privilege. Mr. Rothstein’s belated apology is interesting both for its honesty and the way it points to the peculiar idea of an American classic. Wilder is nowhere near as far back as Shakespeare or even Ibsen – but he’s historical enough that many (if not most) of us have grown up with his play. In fact, Ibsen is a bad example – Shakespeare may be the only other playwright youngsters trapped in the U.S. school system (public or private) in the second-half the 20th Century could not escape. Miller and Williams were solid maybes, but Our Town and Romeo & Juliet – guaranteed. I first studied Our Town in high school, and, unlike Mr. Rothstein, was taken with it immediately, mostly because (as it must have been for the majority of its original Broadway audience) Our Town remains my first experience with Breaking The Rules. Not just its brazen lack of props and scenery, which was a big enough deal, but the amazing incarnation of the Stage Manager. He or she (we’ll stick with “she” since that’s how it is for this production) is not meant to represent, or signify a person, or even an idea – she simply is. She exists solely on the stage. She’s aware of the play as a play, and speaks openly to the audience not only about the actions of the characters, but about the past, the future and the themes of the piece. She’s like a Greek Chorus except that she’s not – there are glimmers of a personality underneath all that narration – a very specific one. There’s nary a hint, however, of divinity (though she speaks of it) – that would point us clearly to a Secret Identity. No, the glory of the Stage Manager is her complete lack of Secret Identity. She’s not real and she knows it. I was writing and staging plays myself by then and this strange creature entranced me (perhaps Our Town is like that game people used to play with The Beatles – who you most readily identify with reveals a lot about the kind of person you are). Mr. Rothstein, of course, was in graduate school, whereas I was barely into my teens. I’m not surprised he took a more gimlet-eyed view of the piece, and I’m not so sure he was wrong. Our Town is very, very white. In his new production Mr. Rothstein counters this with a non-traditional casting that, unsurprisingly, causes nary a ripple – but that’s after the fact. At its core, isn’t the play ultimately a corny and nostalgic evocation of a world that never really existed? For all I loved the piece, I thought so myself. My usual Our Town spiel ran along the lines of “It’s so corny it’s incredible he gets away with it!” But upon each successive viewing – I was lucky enough to catch David Cromer’s landmark production in New York City just a few years ago – the piece reveals itself to be a little something more. No, that’s not right. What’s revealed is Wilder’s ambiguity about Grover’s Corners – where at first it may seem he’s presenting these folks as a showcase of normality – that is, in a “positive” light – the more you listen to the piece the more you realize it would be closer to the truth to say he’s simply presenting them. During one of the interruptions in Act One that so delighted my high school self, the Stage Manager stops the play and asks a few of the town worthies to give us some backstory we might find interesting. Mr. Webb, the editor of the local paper (the usual fine work from Dan Hopman) does a brief presentation of the town’s political structure – and then takes a few questions. A plant in the audience asks him about “culture” and his answer is a shrug: no, we don’t do “culture” here in Grover’s Corners – we like to watch sunsets and nature and that kind of thing – we’ve not much music past Handel and not much reading other than the Bible. By the time he wrote these words for Editor Webb, Mr. Wilder had been writing professionally for over a decade and had already won his first Pulitzer Prize – it’s hard to imagine he was trying to sell his audience on Webb’s cultural views. Especially since his fictional Grover’s Corners is reportedly based on Peterborough, New Hampshire, a beautiful town just downhill from The MacDowell Colony, where for a hundred years or so artists of every stripe have been invited to spend a month (or two) doing nothing but practicing their craft. Wilder wrote great chunks of Our Town at MacDowell, surrounded by culture – was he fascinated or repulsed by Editor Webb’s proud lack of it? Then there’s the subplot of the choir director and not-so-secret town drunk, Mr. Stimson (an eerie Tod Peterson). First we hear the women of the play defending him against gossip, then we hear these same women fretting over the extent of his drinking, then we see the men-folk make a lame attempt to help him out – finally, we discover he’s killed himself – the worst possible answer to the refrain of “how will this end?” the characters repeat every time his name comes up. How on Earth did a play like this every come to be thought of as anything but dark? Maybe because Wilder sometimes struggles with the language for his more poetic concepts, Our Town is often granted a sentimentality it doesn’t have. The “message” of Our Town may well be Every Moment of Life Is Precious – but that message is delivered to us by the Dead. In yet another thrill for this high school boy, Wilder brings us to a graveyard in his third act, a graveyard where the “tombstones” are the dead citizens of the town – some of whom we recognize – without make-up or ghoulish trappings, sitting simply in simple chairs. A painfully young character joins their ranks, and through her innocent attempts at acclimation, we realize Wilder’s Dead vacillate between a weary bitterness toward the living (because they refuse to see the beauty right in front of them), and a slow forgetfulness of their own mortal lives. There’s a vaguely Christian whiff – the dead are waiting for some obviously eternal event – but they don’t seem very happy about it, and even the briefest return to the land of the living causes them great suffering. I just finished watching the self-consciously “dark” HBO Series True Detective and while I basically enjoyed the story (some of it is just plain lazy), for our purposes here, the celebrated darkness, like that of the Batman retread, seems almost adolescent in its conception—literal, baroque—a kind of nihilistic drag. And, like a teenager, when push comes to shove, True Detective chickens out of its own bleak world view, settling for a mawkish sentimentality that would make Wilder blush. Our Town does not chicken out. The late Mrs. Gibbs may admit her time on Earth was lovely, but only after her memory of giving birth evokes a chipper, “Wasn’t life awful?” Mr. Wilder refuses to give us one without the other, and the final image, of a new husband prostrate on the grave of his young wife, is about as dark as it gets. But it’s a darkness steeped in empathy and compassion – decidedly adult emotions, without which all art veers toward pornography. But what about Mr. Rothstein’s production? Is there some reason you’re avoiding the actual play you watched? Not consciously, no. As anyone who read my review of Cabaret recalls, I’m a big fan of Mr. Rothstein’s work. His production of Our Town is gorgeous – simple, as Wilder requires, but also beautiful, which is a more individual choice (and one I support). Rothstein packs the stage with live music – as we walk in, during intermission, and throughout the play as underscore. And while watching actor-musicians cavort with a hipsterish band playing American Roots Music is not the revelation it once was, it’s well done and exciting, and, for once, actually appropriate to the play. But something was missing. And while you could say it’s the entirety of my job description to articulate exactly what I mean by that — I’m not sure I can. In his apology, Mr. Rothstein talks about how close the play comes to being universal. I have to agree. While geographically Brooklyn is not that far from New Hampshire, in another sense it’s worlds away – and certainly the people do not behave like New Englanders. Yet the anthropological cycle of Our Town – youth, education, love, marriage, death – is hard to escape. If we equate “learning about the culture you were born into” with formal education, it’s pretty nigh impossible to escape. But maybe what I felt lacking in this production was the opposite. Maybe “universality” is a hard thing to play, and the emphasis on that quality leeched some humanity out of the piece. But that’s reading Mr. Rothstein’s mind, picking a single word out of his lovely essay and using it to end mine. Better to say that while I enjoyed almost everything about the production, in some sense it was like a little snow globe of a play – pretty, expertly done, and trapped under glass.