Our Town

As any number of high school theatrical butcherings attest, Our Town, by Thornton Wilder, is a difficult play to stage well. The text calls for directors and actors to set their bearings right between the Scylla of hokey sentiment and the Charybdis of anemic cynicism. Wilder's distancing moves --- the absence of scenery, the Stage Manager's repeated interruptions of the scenes, the flat statements about the fates of the characters --- cut against the folksy nostalgia of the setting and action, pushing the audience away just as he brings them closer. Too often one side gets emphasized over the other, which makes the play either an academic exercise or a Thomas Kinkade painting come to life.

David Cromer's transfixing production at the Barrow Street Theater in Greenwich Village, however, takes Wilder's tightrope and runs an electric current through it. Cromer ups the stakes on both sides: he pushes us away by dressing his characters in contemporary clothes and using his own cell phone to mark off the passage of time, but he also pulls us in by putting the audience right on stage with the cast, so close you can hear joints pop and see the tremble of eye muscles. The affable naturalness of the actors --- James McMenamin is particularly winning as George Gibbs --- underscores the interchangeability of cast and audience produced by the staging.

It's rare, in 2010, to see people get teary-eyed at the theater; to sit across from other audience members and cry together, to hear a grown man two rows back let out a guttural sob when George collapses at Emily's grave, is so astonishing you half-doubt the emotion you're witnessing. And that just reinforces Wilder's hope: the mind says, "None of this is real and these characters are naive," while the heart says, "But life feels just like that."

Photos: thanks and thanks

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