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NEW YORK — Forget about excessive folksiness. It's pretty much gone.
Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" has been astonishingly reinvented by director David Cromer in an intimate yet unsentimental production that resonates with a clarity that breathes new life into one of the 20th century's great American plays.
At off-Broadway's Barrow Street Theatre, the audience has been placed right in the middle of the action. In this case, that means the daily activities in the small New Hampshire town of Grover's Corners, circa early 1900s.
Theatergoers sit on three sides of the tiny playing area as the cast re-enacts the residents' ordinary lives and, eventually, many of their deaths. At times, "Our Town" is almost Beckett-like in its depiction of the tenuousness of the human condition. It's no accident the evening ends in the graveyard on a hill outside of town.
Yet over the years, the bleakness of "Our Town" has been obscured by reverential treatment, not to mention the homespun, genial quality of many of its stories — its fond recollection of the good ol' days that probably weren't all that fine.
Cromer, who also portrays the Stage Manager in this revival, will have none of this saccharine nostalgia, although the evening has its moments of well-earned sweetness and a modest laugh or two.
This "Our Town" is a mostly minimalist revival, even more minimalist than the dictates set down in Wilder's script which admonishes "No curtain. No scenery." At Barrow Street, the house lights never dim, and the audience watches the show in full view of the other theatergoers. In effect, we all become residents of Grover's Corners, particularly since cast members appear in modern dress and look as if they came into the theater with the rest of us.
Cromer's Stage Manager has the efficiency and personality of a factory foreman. He doesn't do avuncular. As the show's narrator, he's there to recite the facts about Grover's Corners, which Wilder supplies in abundance, and get on with the story.
Cromer's production, first seen last year at Chicago's Hypocrites Theater Company, proceeds at a lightning pace. For a three-act play, this "Our Town" clocks in at a little more than two hours — and that includes two intermissions. Yet nothing appears missing from the story, which mainly focuses on two families and the eventual union of their two children, George Gibbs and Emily Webb.
The unshowy performances by the large ensemble cast don't undermine the play. But there is noticeably fine work by Jeff Still and Ken Marks as the patriarchs of the Gibbs and Webb clans. And James McMenamin has several affecting scenes as George Gibbs, the young everyman whose journey to adulthood occupies a great deal of the evening.
The production includes one revelatory director's conceit that won't be disclosed here. Let's just say the moment brilliantly pulls the theme of "Our Town" into focus and makes the audience appreciate the genius of Thornton Wilder and what he was trying to accomplish in this hymn to small-town America.
