In the second act of director David Cromer’s production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, currently enjoying an open run at the Barrow Street Theater, the character of the Stage Manager, performed by Cromer himself, interrupts the play’s main storyline to reflect, as he is wont to do, on the nature of love and marriage:
“You know how it is: you’re twenty-one or twenty-two and you make some decisions; then whissh! You’re seventy: you’ve been a lawyer for fifty years, and that white-haired lady at your side has eaten over fifty thousand meals with you.”
As he speaks, the Stage Manager picks up a boot from the floor and whacks it onto the table, thus replacing the ‘whissh!’ specified in the text with a startling ‘wham!’ This emphasis – seemingly intended to shock the viewer into awareness of the dangers of floating through life, asleep – corresponds to the other idiosyncrasies of this surprising production. In Cromer’s hands, Our Town is not folksy or cutesy; it is daring and cautionary. Cromer’s Stage Manager does not wear a top hat, he has no beard, and does not smoke a pipe. He is an everyman, who speaks in ominous tones, wears an untucked button-down shirt and jeans, and tells viewers of the fleeting, unpredictable, often sad nature of life in the same dry, matter-of-fact tone with which he tells us of the physical geography of the invented town, Grovers Corners, New Hampshire.
In addition to the flourishes of this production, the show has a raw, Chicago-style, shoe-string budget feel. The small square-shaped stage area in the room’s dead center is surrounded by five or so rows of chairs on each side. The room’s bright lights remain on throughout the show, which, like the slammed boot, make sure that the audience is awake and aware. Emily and George’s childhood bedrooms are represented by having the two teenagers sit on chairs on top of what are used in other scenes as their families’ breakfast tables. And the theater’s second level, used in other Barrow Street shows as balcony seating for viewers, is transformed in this production into the church in which town drunk Simon Stimson practices with the choir.
There is an exciting innovation at the end of this production, the secret of which has been protected by the city’s critics. I will not reveal it. I will say that, thematically, the surprise towards the show’s end is in line with the other embellishments heretofore discussed. This show is powerful because Cromer makes decisions based on a clear, uncompromised point of view regarding what this play means. This is a lively, exciting and insightful take on Thornton Wilder’s Pullitzer Prize-winning 1938 classic.
