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The first act of “Our Town” takes place in Grover’s Corners on May 7, 1901. Nothing much happens in the fictional New Hampshire village that day, except that two local teenagers, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, fall in love completely unaware that they do so under the shadow of the granitic pillars of time.
But we are aware. Even in an act entitled Daily Life, the playwright, Thornton Wilder, quietly batters us with the news that we are mortal. Immediately upon introducing George’s parents, he has his mouthpiece, the Stage Manager, convey as if it were part of their names a detail of their deaths: Doc Gibbs’s in 1930, his wife’s on a visit to Canton, Ohio. He blithely jumbles together, like their bones, the joining and splintering of human lives. “Most everybody in the world climbs into their graves married,” he comments without comment.
So if you think of the play as small, sweet or old-fashioned, and Grover’s Corners as a twin town to Bedford Falls or Hooterville, I respectfully offer that you have the soul of a rock. In any good enough production, “Our Town” is titanic: beyond time and brutal.
The revival that opened Thursday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, the fifth on Broadway since the play’s 1938 debut, is more than good enough. To use this word in the only positive sense I can imagine, it’s unbearable: in its beauty, yes, but more so in its refusal to offer beauty as a cure when it is only, at best, a comfort.
And though some of the effectiveness of the revival is clearly the result of Kenny Leon’s swift and unsentimental direction, and of a fine cast led by the mercilessly acute Jim Parsons as the Stage Manager, we must begin with wonder and admiration for the play itself. In its portrait of “the life of a village against the life of the stars,” as Wilder described it, the monumental is always expressed in the miniature, and the miniature is always crushed by the monument.
That effect is achieved by writing that is ingeniously mitered, doweled and sanded until it seems as plain as old furniture. Briskly, almost cursorily, we are shown the two main families and told the work they do: Doc Gibbs (Billy Eugene Jones) is the local physician, Mr. Webb (Richard Thomas) the editor of the Sentinel. The lack of outside opportunity for their harried, homemaking wives — Michelle Wilson as Mrs. Gibbs, Katie Holmes as Mrs. Webb — is summed up in a typically pithy, bone-dry quip: “All males vote at the age of twenty-one. Women vote indirect.”
The exposition, of which there’s a lot in the first act, from the prehistoric to the 5:45 train, is always doing double duty fast. When the Stage Manager hurries a geologist offstage once he starts talking about the region’s “unique fossils,” we get the joke about blathering academics but are also left with the suspicion that he’s referring to us.
In Act II, set three years later, every potentially heartwarming premise — the act is called Love and Marriage — is dowsed with the cold water of cynicism. The wedding of George (Ephraim Sykes) and Emily (Zoey Deutch) counterposes the groom’s conventional nervousness, the bride’s existential panic, the ecstatic dithering of the besotted Mrs. Soames (Julie Halston, hilarious) and Mrs. Gibbs’s judgment of the whole ritual as a “perfectly awful” farce. Huge as all these sentiments feel to the characters, the play’s structure objectifies them and, in so doing, makes them small. You are left to sort out the scale in your seats.
Those seats don’t feel so far away; the production, despite its Broadway proportions, does much to shorten the distance. Beowulf Boritt’s set, as Wilder requires, is minimal — mostly weather-beaten siding — but also features a nebula of lanterns that extends into the orchestra. (The spectral lighting is by Allen Lee Hughes.) Also connecting you to the action is a wafting scent-scape matched to the action: heliotrope in Act I for the flowers the women grow, vanilla in Act II for sweetness and bacon in Act III for the longings of memory. (The bacon is a nod to David Cromer’s powerful 2009 Off Broadway production.) Up to 30 audience members are seated onstage, blending playgoers into the community.
Leon suggests that less literally too: The Gibbses are Black, the Webbs are white, the townspeople both and neither and more. Dede Ayite’s costumes freely mix formal period styles with contemporary casuals. (At one point, George wears a tank top.) The first thing you hear, in a prelude, is the Hebrew word “Shema,” part of an interfaith medley of Jewish, Muslim and Christian prayer. And with music that also includes BeBe and CeCe Winans singing “Lost Without You” for the wedding — the sound is by Justin Ellington — the production reaches forward in time and taste as well.
These might feel like anachronistic intrusions in a play bound tighter to its own age. In this timeless one, though, they feel like a mission statement: The “our” in the title means everyone.
That’s completely congruent with Wilder, as Act III, nine years further along, brings home. Boritt’s set undergoes a simple yet breathtaking transformation to deliver us to the cemetery we’ve heard much about, but now some of the characters from the earlier acts are in it. They do not seem unhappy or uncomfortable as they dully chat about the weather, trying not to think too hard about the living.
If only the living could return the favor! But this is where the play goes for your guts. The philosophical extremity to which Wilder has been leading now emerges in a scene of Shakespearean imagination, hubris and regret. His thought experiment is this: What would happen if one of the dead, ignoring the advice of her cohort, sought to return for one day to life? The answer is that she could not endure it. And neither could we.
I would tell you more about what was happening onstage but by that point I could no longer see it. Perhaps if you have lost a loved one, or feared losing yourself, you will feel the same way.
In other words, you will feel the same way.
The effect is almost geological: Push down long and hard enough here, watch an explosion happen there. It depends on the deep repression of emotion that deeply emotional people must master to survive — something that Wilder, a closeted homosexual, knew in his bones. Parsons seems to as well. With his light touch and cynical sang-froid, and the comic timing he has honed for years on television, he makes an ideally shrewd and withholding Stage Manager, placing you just where he wants you during the banter to achieve the greatest vulnerability to the blows.
Ultimately, that’s the trap of “Our Town.” Whether you are an Emily — apple-cheeked and wild-souled in Deutch’s gripping performance — or a cheerful George, a dizzy Mrs. Soames or the dour, alcoholic choirmaster nailed by Donald Webber Jr., you sooner or later wind up at Act III. If you are lucky, you will have valued “above all price” (as Wilder says in the play’s preface) “the smallest events” of daily life so that you will not feel cheated when forced to give them away. In that sense, “Our Town,” a unique fossil itself, is just another small event. But it’s one of the biggest smallest events the theater has produced.
Our TownThrough Jan. 19 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; ourtownbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
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