TALES OF LOHR: "OUR TOWN" AT THE BARRYMORE THEATRE
Thoughts on a Broadway Wilder revival; plus, "Factory Roll Call" hails the season of Donovan
Any commentary I offer about Kenny Leon’s revival of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1938 play Our Town, which officially opened last Thursday at Broadway’s Barrymore Theatre, should be taken in with the full knowledge that this was my first experience, in any context, of this piece. I have never seen any previous staging of Our Town, nor have I viewed Sam Wood’s 1940 film adaptation. (I did see the Los Angeles Philharmonic, about 15 years ago, perform a brief suite of Aaron Copland’s bucolic, bittersweet musical score from that film.) Any of my previous knowledge of Wilder’s meta-theatrical, stealthily philosophical work has come to me largely via cultural osmosis, through discussions in other media of the play’s subversion of nostalgic Norman Rockwell cliche and the multi-valent presence of the Stage Manager as chorus, choreographer, and aloof yet not wholly disengaged god figure. Therefore, my review, unlike many others you may have read, will be unable to weigh the virtues and detriments of Leon’s staging against previous Our Towns, either throughout the country or on Broadway itself (this is the first revival of Wilder’s piece on the Great White Way in 20 years). I am giving you Leon’s Our Town straight up, with only the show itself as a reference point. And what I experienced at the Barrymore, thanks to Leon and a gifted, star-flecked 28-person cast, was an intriguing, quietly profound experience, a play that evolves from a nearly myopic vision of small-town American life to encompass the whole of human endeavor and desire…only to arrive at the all-but-inevitable conclusion that, at the end of the day, it is indeed that initial granularity that makes all the rest of it matter.
This theme is established right from the jump, as The Stage Manager (portrayed here by Jim Parsons) breaks down the demographic, architectural, and geological particulars of the New Hampshire hamlet of Grover’s Corners, working on our Shakespearean imaginary forces as he conjures a universe out of Beowulf Boritt’s wood-hewn, sparse-by-Wilder’s-dictates set design. It may at first seem unnecessary, really, to know the exact religious and political affiliations of the just-a-few-thousand residents of the town, or the specific flowers and vegetables that populate the neighboring gardens of the Webb and Gibbs families. But Wilder and Parsons, despite our initial impressions, are not just marking time, even as the play’s first act (the breaks are noted by Parsons in dialogue, as the entire production is presented in an uninterrupted roughly-100-minute skein) keeps the action on such a mundane, one-thing-after-another dramatic keel that it is simply called “Daily Life.” The playwright’s more complex intentions are there in The Stage Manager’s slyly satirical asides (noting, in this fraught electoral year, that women in Grover’s Corners “vote indirect”); in the unexpectedly anachronistic elements of dress and stagecraft that creep into the performance; and in the inexorable mortality that hovers over the characters from the drama’s very first moments. The first character introduced by name, newspaper delivery boy Joe Crowell (Sky Smith), has barely spoken his first lines before The Stage Manager mentions his fated forthcoming death in the Great War, and a similar specter haunts every onstage moment of choirmaster Simon Stimson (Donald Webber, Jr.), whose command of his vocalists belies his entrapment by alcohol and nameless despair. These intimations of the reach of death make the earliest moments of the play, dominated by the burgeoning romance between hale-fellow-well-met George Gibbs (Ephraim Sykes) and self-possessed yet quietly doubtful Emily Webb (Zoey Deutch), vibrate with a hushed, tremulous vulnerability. If we don’t know the plot, we don’t yet know what’s coming. But really, we do, as The Stage Manager reminds us. It’s the same thing that’s coming for all of us. The same thing waiting at the top of the hill, and the top of Act Three, for all of Grover’s Corners.
The second act, focusing on the wedding of Emily and George, balances some sharp comic relief from august off-Broadway legend Julie Halston, as the chatty Mrs. Soames, with the very real, punishingly gnawing pre-nuptial anxieties of George and Emily. The former quails at the impending weight of early-20th-century bread-winning obligation; the latter simply fears she will not be worthy of the unwavering devotion promised (or perhaps threatened?) by George. The love-borne tension that bristles between Sykes and Deutch is surprisingly raw, and likewise countered deftly by Richard Thomas’ avuncular yet clear-eyed words of wisdom as Emily’s newspaper-editor father, and Billy Eugene Jones’ sturdy empathy as George’s town-doctor dad. Meanwhile, the family matriarchs provide their own coolly clear perspectives on motherhood and marriage. Michelle Wilson’s Mrs. Gibbs is fully her husband’s equal in all the most important matters of filial affection and guidance, while Katie Holmes, as Mrs. Webb, conducts the pantomimic action of her kitchen like a domestic virtuoso, but still has enough self-understanding to caution Emily against staking her entire future on her physical beauty. The wedding eventually goes off without a hitch, but before the blush on Emily’s newlywed cheek has even cooled, we’re on to Act Three, where that face takes on a far different pallor. It’s nine years after the wedding, Emily has died giving birth to her second child, but she’s not yet ready to take her designated place among the stones of the town cemetery. Against the advice of her fellow dead, including Mrs. Gibbs (gone several years of a stroke), Stimson (a little-discussed suicide), and, from a burst appendix on a camping trip, her own younger brother Wally (Hagan Oliveras), Emily induces The Stage Manager to let her revisit one previous day of her life. A calm, ostensibly insignificant one, but one whose fullness of detail and sheer dogged life-ness ultimately overwhelms Emily with the weight of all that death steals from us…all that we don’t notice until it’s been taken.
For those more inclined to perceive a drama through a purely plot-driven lens, it would be easy to take in Our Town and fail to grasp what the fuss is about. Wilder’s characters are not world-beaters, paradigm shifters, or exemplars of any Great Man Theory. While they work hard, getting the paper out and running the soda fountain and delivering the milk and such, their labors are not likely to be etched into the annals of history. Indeed, the mountain that looms over the town will likely endure long after all the players that strut and fret upon the Barrymore stage are seen no more. And that, in summation, is more or less the thesis of Wilder’s project. Our Town is a play that finds the enchantment in the quotidian, that makes the smell of bacon and the texture of a lace wedding veil as meaningful, as valuable and essential to living, as the grandest acts of earth-altering brilliance known to humankind. Through the journey of Emily Webb, Wilder directs us to look more closely at the places, people, and events around us daily, those inconveniences and boredoms and frustrations that, in the aggregate, make up the sum total of what can be called Life on This Earth…and to regard them all, as irritating and infuriating as they can sometimes be, as the most precious and rarest of blessings. Emily’s choice of words in her final confrontation of The Stage Manager, and of us, is an astute one: She entreats us not to necessarily embrace or celebrate life, but simply to “realize” it. The implication, it seems, is that in that realization, the celebration will come of its own accord.
The canny blend of desperation and gratitude with which Deutch infuses this final exhortation is the culmination of a performance that, in its unexpectedly edgy intermingling of coltish pride and womanly neurosis, feels within this setting bracingly contemporary, in a positive way. Sykes matches her with an earthier, more earnest take on George Gibbs that would have felt right at home, one surmises, in any Our Town throughout its robust near-century-long history. The young couple’s parents are all embodied with warmth and unwavering fortitude, with Thomas particularly compelling in his unshakable picket-fence presence. Webber never oversells Stimson’s misery while making it palpable in his every gesture, and Halston makes what could have been easy or bad laughs feel solid and well-earned. Amidst the expansive supporting cast, standouts include Bill Timoney, bluff and graceful as the town constable; Shyla Lefner, subtly self-satisfied as a swiftly-ushered-offstage visiting geologist; and John McGinty, a hearing-impaired actor who gives a vivid rendering of milkman Howie Newsome, communicating with his co-stars partly through sign. Parsons, necessarily, is the glue, and he manages the dominating role of The Stage Manager with elegant skill. His jibes at the town’s more hidebound prejudices are shrewd but never nasty; he directs the motions and reversals of his co-stars with offhand wit; and when he is called upon to voice some of Wilder’s more spot-on pronouncements of his play’s point of view, he still comes off, despite the stylized nature of his role, as an individual sharing his own insight, rather than a mere mouthpiece for Wilder’s philosophy.
The best compliment that can be paid to Leon’s direction is that, at the play’s best moments, it feels almost ethereally effortless. He is unafraid to flex his muscles when necessary, as in the play’s shiver-inducing introduction, when the complete cast gathers onstage (some coming right down the intimate aisles of the Barrymore) with a shared multi-lingual religious chant-song. At other moments, he achieves his effects simply, as in the equally breathtaking moment, at the top of Act Three, when Boritt’s monolithic weatherbeaten wood wall rises to the rafters, revealing the denizens of the cemetery, seated behind their stones, on wooden bleachers that represent the grave-dotted hillside overlooking the town. (The subdued yet powerful lantern-borne lighting design, one of the show’s technical standouts, is by Allen Lee Hughes.) Leon’s most assertive positioning of the play as what he has called “Our Town For Our Time” comes via his diverse casting choices. The usually lily-white dramatis personae of Grover’s Corners has expanded, with the Gibbs family, Simon Stimson, and numerous other townsfolk being portrayed by Black actors. Lefner is of Native American descent, and Newsome’s deafness has been previously noted. Leon has not altered the text in any way to reference these choices, but the undeniable reality of these performers, in these roles, emphasizes both the universality of Wilder’s drama and the way such marginalized individuals have often been denied their own purchase on that universality. Not all of Leon’s choices land smoothly. The era-mingling costume design by Dede Ayite never quite coheres, and an early prologue interlude in which characters are taking selfies with iPhones simply clunks against the moment. But by and large, Leon’s moves enhance both Wilder’s thematic intentions and his own.
I do have to wonder if I would have responded to this Our Town as positively as I did had I previously seen other productions, or even the 1940 film. The reviews have thus far been somewhat mixed, with a few well-schooled-in-Wilder critics responding with enthusiasm to Leon’s take, and others finding fault with the director’s modern interpolations, certain elements of stagecraft (particularly Ayite’s costumes), and a few of the performances. There is also the possibility, of course, that I had merely conditioned myself to react positively to the show, as it was the major, or at least highest-priced, leisure activity that I had planned for this latest visit to New York City. But I like to think that when it comes down to it, this Our Town is purely as rich, resonant, and, yes, universal as Wilder intended, and that Leon and his above- and below-the-line talents understood that, tapped into it, and drew out all the passion and affection with which the original text lives and breathes. My visit to Grover’s Corners may not be my last, but it will remain with me…hopefully until I, one day, indisputably, follow Emily Webb up that hill.
Our Town runs in a limited engagement at Broadway’s Barrymore Theatre in New York City now through January 19, 2025. To learn more and to purchase tickets, visit the production’s official website.
FACTORY ROLL CALL
DONOVAN (1946 - )
The Scottish-born musician / songwriter Donovan touched the Warholian universe but briefly, popping by the Factory long enough for the filming, in 1966, of his very own Screen Test. But in his way, Donovan’s folk-inflected music and persona has become as representative of a particular corner of the 1960s as Andy Warhol himself. His sound, with its diaphanous yet emphatic elegance borne aloft by his whispering wisp of a voice, calls to mind visions of psychedelic landscapes, hallucinogen-boosted imaginings, and all the sweet yet cynically compromised promise of the Flower Power era.
Donovan took up the guitar at the age of 14, eventually dropping out of art school to become a fixture on the burgeoning English folk club scene. He inked his first recording contract in 1964, and his earliest offerings were hailed as a strong outgrowth of the Bob Dylan influence (and thus, by osmosis, of Dylan progenitors Woody Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott). The two artists were frequently paired in the British music press, leading to a not inconsiderable amount of rivalrous tension, as portrayed in the seminal Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back. In 1965, Donovan forged a partnership with producer Mickie Most, who would be credited on the majority of the artist’s biggest records, starting with the following year’s successful LP Sunshine Superman.
Throughout the peak of his recording career in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Donovan’s collaborators on record would include a brace of the most celebrated and influential artists of the era, such as Cream bassist Jack Bruce and future Led Zeppelin instrumentalists John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page. Among his most notable hits of the period were the skittery, spectral “Season of the Witch”; the eerily resonant “Hurdy Gurdy Man”; zesty pop track “Mellow Yellow”; and the swelling, anthemic tone poem “Atlantis.” These singles frequently hit the Top 10 on the US charts, with both “Mellow Yellow” and Sunshine Superman’s title track peaking at number two. In 1969, the most beloved of these cuts were collected on a greatest-hits album that made it all the way to number four on the Billboard LP charts in the States. All of the aforementioned tunes have appeared throughout the decades in notable films and TV series, their aesthetic and atmospheric qualities a sure-fire tool for evoking a Summer of Love vibe (or a paradoxical feeling of threat, as in the chilling deployment of “Hurdy Gurdy Man” over the opening sequence of David Fincher’s powerful 2007 serial killer drama Zodiac). Donovan also enacted a number of the psychedelic era’s touchstone hippie-cultural moments, becoming the first major British pop star to be arrested for marijuana possession (in 1966) and joining the Beatles, Beach Boys vocalist Mike Love, and actress Mia Farrow on the legendary-bordering-on-infamous 1968 pilgrimage to the ashram of the controversial Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Donovan’s career began to experience a downturn in the late ‘70s, when his hippie sound and stage presentation fell increasingly out of step with the punk, New Wave, and New Romantic subgenres taking a strong hold over popular music in his native UK. But he still continued to tour and record, and maintained a loyal if somewhat diminished fan base. In 1996, iconoclastic producer Rick Rubin partnered with Donovan for the well-received LP Sutras. Still musically active today, Donovan has continued to attract consistently high-caliber collaborators, such as Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour and filmmaker David Lynch, who produced and directed the 2021 video for the artist’s track “I Am the Shaman.” In 2012, Donovan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with the Songwriters Hall of Fame enshrining him two years later.
Both of Donovan’s children with American model Enid Karl (he likewise has two kids with his present wife Linda Lawrence, who he married in 1970) have enjoyed successful careers as actors. Daughter Ione Skye appears, along with her father’s music, in Zodiac, and son Donovan Leitch plays principal ‘60s Warhol assistant Gerard Malanga in Mary Harron’s 1996 Valerie Solanas biopic I Shot Andy Warhol.