Our Town is Incredibly Moving at Lyric Arts in Anoka, Do Not Miss This One

The picture above is the view from the front row where I am seated for Lyric Arts production of Our Town by Thorton Wilder. It’s about an hour before the scene displayed in the photo, in just a few minutes the show will begin. Behind me is a theatre full of folks as different from one another as any group of people, and yet in many ways we are all the same. We all have hopes and dreams, have experienced love and loss. Just like the characters in the play, who in the specific details are different from you and I. But, in the non-specific, even though they live in a time over 100 years ago, they are surprisingly like us. Off to the side is an actor I recognize, Rick Wyman, in a few minutes he will get up and participate in the production. A few rows back is m’colleague Jill who writes Cherry and Spoon, she will not be joining the actors on stage. In the specific different, but they’re both here because they love theater and in that way, are similar. In the lobby the smell of popcorn grabs you as soon as you walk in the door. Is there anything more enticing that the smell of freshly popped corn? I think not. So of course I have succumbed to the aroma and am settled in next to my wife with popcorn and a diet coke to see what I’m told is the most frequently produced American play, not just in the U.S., but in the world. It’s the play you’ve seen performed in countless TV shows and movies, every school district has performed it, it’s nearly impossible to avoid it in some form or other. For me it has always been the other, aware of its existence thanks to references in pop culture from Father Knows Best, The Wonder Years, and the X-Files. Like Rick, Jill, and I love theater, how is it that this is my first exposure to the actual play itself? Another production just closed at Open Window Theatre the opposite side of the Twin Cities in Inver Grove Heights. I chose Lyric Arts to experience Our Town for the first time, I have a fondness for this theatre that we discovered the weekend my wife and I got engaged. Quiet now, It’s 7:30pm. The Stage Manager has taken to the stage to announce the cast and prepare us, the play is about to begin, or has it already?

The cast and crew of this production of Our Town, nailed it.

Some time has passed, it’s now about 10:00pm. We have spent most of that time in a little town called Grover’s Corners. In those two and a half hours, we’ve seen the town and a sampling of its people through twelve years, from 1901 to 1913. We’ve learned about the town, it’s geography, geology, and it’s genealogy. We have met many residents of the town to be sure, but our focus has been drawn to the Gibbs and the Webb families. I recently read that all theater is about life and by extension death. Our Town would seem to be the perfect play to support that thesis. It’s divided into three acts, Act I: Daily Life, Act II: Love and Marriage, and Act III: Death and Eternity. The most moving and beautiful human emotions are our response to love and death. Watching people give themselves over heart and soul to another person is one of the most joyful things in the world, watching them grieve for a loved one is one of the most sorrowful. When a production finds the emotional truth in either of those events it connects and results in an emotional response from the audience. I spent most of the second and third Acts with wet cheeks. The cast and crew of this production of Our Town, nailed it.

I have no frame of reference to judge this production by, it’s what I expected, and it isn’t. I knew there would be a narrator, I thought it would be old fashioned, it did premiere in 1938 after all. Thornton Wilder won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for this play, one of three he won over the course of his career. My previous exposure to Wilder was for writing the first draft of the Alfred Hitchcock film, Shadow of a Doubt, which is about what happens when a malevolent force comes to a small town such as Grover’s Corners. Here Wilder allows the drama of life and death to unfold without an antagonist other than nature and life itself. He shows us a small town that could be any small town in the world, for most audiences Our Town becomes synonymous with my town by the end of the play. Thornton gives us details including dates that set the era but they all fade into the background because he wisely makes the character interactions universal. They’re not bogged down in current events or other things that might date them. They come from relationships between the characters: parent and child, husband and wife, young men and women. It’s amazing as one takes it in how little has changed in those dynamics over the 85 years since the play was written. Or perhaps it was the Directors and performers and the way they staged and performed the show. Either way, this doesn’t feel like a show that was written in the 1930’s.

It’s the simplicity of the setting that allows us access to the characters souls.

The show is directed by Scott Ford, there is a decidedly minimalist approach to the productions design which is fine. The character of the Stage Manager makes no pretense that this isn’t a play. We have some chairs and tables that move about depending on where a scene is set. Ford emphasizes the meta vibe of the play and yet effectively creates a sense of reality in the firmly artificial setting. It’s the simplicity of the setting that allows us access to the characters souls. Ford lets the play speak for itself, his stylistic choices never distract from the characters emotional truth. Even the beautifully evocative dance that two ensemble actors Andrew Newman and Rae Wasson perform in the background while the young man and woman who will marry in Act II begin to fall in love doesn’t pull us out of, but rather deepens our connection to the underlying emotions of the scenes. A mention here of the music, Ben Emory Larson has composed a score for the play which is perfectly in synch with the tone of the production. Featured in the musicians is Jenny Liang who plays an instrument called an erhu, sometimes referred to as the “Chinese Violin”, has an amazing sound that seems to carry the souls of the characters along on it’s notes.

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Production Photo: Noah Hynick, Kendall Kent Photo by Molly Weibel