Theater Review
Wilder's classic play still provokes

By Misha Berson
Seattle Times theater critic

CHRIS BENNION Tom Skerritt plays the stage manager in "Our Town."

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Is Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" a fond, brooding anthem to American core values? An ode to the preciousness and fragility of human existence?

Or is it a slice of nostalgic Americana, sugared with a dusting of wish-fulfillment and cosmic pretension?

The critical debate about "Our Town" began in 1938, when it debuted on Broadway to raves and dissents. Some 65 years later, one can still have a hearty argument about its merits and meaning.

One thing is inarguable: After countless high-school and playhouse airings, Wilder's drama about early 1900s rites of passage in fictional Grover's Corners, N.H., is now a fixture of our theatrical canon and, to an extent, our cultural identity.

And in a mounting as lucid, graceful and restrained as Bartlett Sher's Intiman Theatre production (which inaugurates the company's five-year "The American Cycle" series of staged literary classics), one can comprehend the play's enduring magic for many — yet wonder about some of its assumptions.

"Our Town" takes a meditative, microcosmic view by zeroing in on two "average" middle-class clans: the Gibbses and the Webbs, soon to be joined by the nuptials of young Emily Webb (fervent Celia Keenan-Bolger) and George Gibbs (likable Joaquín Torres).

Now playing "Our Town," by Thornton Wilder. Tuesdays- Sundays through Nov. 20, Intiman Theatre, Seattle Center; $27-$46, $10 age 25 and younger; (206-269-1900 or www.intiman.org).

And it whisks us back to a time (or a dream of a time) when small-town life meant being civil to all one's neighbors, leaving doors unlocked, going to church as a matter of course and rearing kids in a wholesome, safe environment.

To youths and others seeing "Our Town" for the first time: Christopher Akerlind's spare setting (wooden chairs, ladders and doorframes, a plank or two) is no directorial affectation.

Neither are the actors' mimed motions as they make coffee, sip ice-cream sodas and place flowers on a beloved's grave.

Wilder rejected the cluttered theatricality of his day by stripping "Our Town" down to the essentials of language and performance (enhanced here by Akerlind's mostly subtle lighting scheme and Elizabeth Caitlin Ward's fine period costumes).

	KEN LAMBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES Dominique Duncan, 11, of Seattle plays Wally Webb, and New York actress Celia Keenan-Bolger plays his sister Emily in "Our Town."

And he fused "realism and generality" through an onstage stage manager (played by noted Seattle screen actor Tom Skerritt). This one-man Greek chorus is a narrator as well as a folksy sociologist who imparts scientific and demographic facts about Grover's Corners (in 1901, a solidly Protestant, mainly Republican burg of about 2,600 citizens).

The stage-manager character also prompts and prods other characters, and ponders their ultimate fates and the paradoxes of human existence.

Skerritt's long absence from the stage is evident, and both a minus and a plus here. Opening night, he was still fumbling and ill-at-ease with some of his dialogue. And he was the only actor miked — a helpful device but undercut by a few technical glitches.

On the other hand, Skerritt sure is a genial charmer. One wants to root for him and hope he gains more mastery of his words as the run continues. His droll, conversational, almost off-hand manner (honed during decades before the cameras) makes him good company and helps dispel the sense we're being lectured to, patronized by an all-knowing guide.

Sher makes other intriguing casting choices. Historically Grover's Corners population would be lily-white. But placing black, Latino and Asian actors in key roles is a symbolic expression of what-might-have-been and what-can-be in our nation, and Seattle.

And we're told Mrs. Gibbs (Lisa Li) and Mrs. Webb (Jeanne Paulsen) are satisfied homemakers for their offspring and husbands (Laurence Ballard's crusty Doc Gibbs and Allen Gilmore's kindly Webb). Yet Paulsen projects an ingrained anxiety, her sorrow and distress with maternal and social taboos, including her inability to educate Emily about sex before her wedding. Paulsen bravely makes Mrs. Webb an edgier figure and lifts the acting level beyond the capable but predictable.

So does Larry Paulsen, who captures the subversive agony of town misfit Simon, embodying how one can be the local choirmaster (the hymns he leads are sung beautifully) and a tormented drunk never meant for smalltown life.

Where the play gets stickiest is the third of its three acts, set in the graveyard in 1913. Evoking at first Ophelia's funeral in "Hamlet," the scene becomes a town meeting of the dead, venting frustration that the living don't savor every fleeting moment.

As much as one shares that notion, its lofty bluntness here can come through as self-righteousness, even chauvinism.

Sher's artfully straightforward approach mostly avoids that pitfall. And Emily's famous "Oh, earth! You're too wonderful for anybody to realize you!" speech still moves some to tears.

Whether "Our Town" leaves you sniffling or with some reservations, it certainly leaves you asking who we are, and were, as a national community. A dialogue about that, one hopes, will be a big fringe benefit of Intiman's American Cycle.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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