Our Town (Play)

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    ‘Our Town,’ ‘McNeal’ and 4 More Shows Our Critics Are Talking About

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    The fall season is underway, and our reviewers think these productions are worth knowing about, even if you’re not planning to see them.Critic’s PickIdentity politics, funny at last.Daniel Dae Kim as the playwright David Henry Hwang’s stand-in in a revival of the play “Yellow Face” at the Todd Haimes Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Yellow Face’David Henry Hwang’s 2007 satire, directed by Leigh Silverman, arrives on Broadway starring Daniel Dae Kim as an Asian American playwright who protests yellowface casting only to inadvertently, and hilariously, cast a white actor as the Asian lead in his own play.From Jesse Green’s review:A smart thing about “Yellow Face,” aside from the authorial self-defamation, is that as it gets more hopelessly tangled and thus funny it also gets more serious and thus damning. The questions of identity considered as cultural matters in the first half become personal and political in the second.Through Nov. 24 at the Todd Haimes Theater. Read the full review.Critic’s PickA brutal classic with an ideally shrewd Jim Parsons.Jim Parsons as the Stage Manager in “Our Town” at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Our Town’Kenny Leon directs Jim Parsons, Katie Holmes and others in a revival of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 classic about two families whose ordinary life events, from birth to death, are consecrated by a kind of communal love.From Jesse Green’s review: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.Through Jan. 19 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. Read the full review.Critic’s PickAlive with the sound of music.Laura Donnelly, far left. Clockwise from top left: Nicola Turner, Nancy Allsop, Sophia Ally and Lara McDonnell as her daughters in the play “The Hills of California.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘The Hills of California’In Jez Butterworth’s dying-parent drama, directed by Sam Mendes, four sisters trained by their determined mother (Laura Donnelly) to sing close harmony reunite 20 years later as acrimonious adults.From Jesse Green’s review:We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: ‘Our Town’ Starring Jim Parsons Is Still Avant-Garde After 86 Years

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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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yesterday’s Broadway Warhorses, Saddled With Today’s Concerns

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      Revivals of “Romeo and Juliet,” “Our Town,” “Gypsy” and “Sunset Boulevard” aim to show that rethinking for the present is what makes classics classic.Two cheers for new voices! Of the 16 productions scheduled to open on Broadway between now and the end of the year, 12 are new to the Boulevard of Broken Budgets.But I’d like to reserve a third cheer for the fall’s four revivals, which may get less attention, having been this way before, but are likely to earn their keep if history holds true. Old voices are, after all, where new voices come from. And though 240 years separate the Broadway debuts of “Romeo and Juliet” and “Sunset Boulevard,” with “Our Town” and “Gypsy” in between, they all have much in common, at least in their continued haunting of theatergoers’ imaginations.That haunting arises, in part, from our memories of past stars who hover alongside the new ones. In “Our Town,” Henry Fonda and Paul Newman will be whispering the Stage Manager’s lines to Jim Parsons. Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury and Patti LuPone will no doubt watch over Audra McDonald as she takes on the role of Rose in “Gypsy.” LuPone will also be looking over Nicole Scherzinger’s shoulder in “Sunset Boulevard”; presumably keeping a safe distance, so will Glenn Close. And though few are likely to remember Robert Goffe, the original Juliet, he too will be felt on Broadway this fall. However long ago, the part was built on him.But revivals of shows like these have more to offer than ghosts. There’s a reason, aside from name recognition, that they keep coming back. Though products of vastly different times and cultures, they dig so deep into their specific truths that they reach a common, eternal one, from which many others may spring.Perhaps that’s most evident in “Our Town,” Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play about two families whose ordinary life events, from birth to death, are consecrated by a kind of communal love. The director Kenny Leon said that in his production, “1936 runs into 2024,” allowing the story to serve “as a metaphor for our world, for our country, even our time.”Paul Newman in a 2002 production of “Our Town.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHenry Fonda in a 1969 production of “Our Town.”Everett CollectionWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      28 Broadway and Off Broadway Shows to See This Fall

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      New York stages are welcoming Robert Downey Jr., Adam Driver, Audra McDonald and more this season.New York City stages are gearing up for a starry fall, with Robert Downey Jr. making his Broadway debut, Marisa Tomei and Jane Krakowski doing new plays, Adam Driver and Kenneth Branagh leading revivals, and Audra McDonald and Nicole Scherzinger stepping into two of the juiciest roles that musical theater has to offer. The overall abundance — on and Off Broadway — is cheering: Even away from the sparkle of celebrity, there are plenty of tempting shows by plenty of artists we’d be lucky to be in the room with.Broadway‘McNEAL’ Robert Downey Jr. makes his Broadway debut in this new drama by the Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar (“Disgraced”), playing an esteemed novelist with a potentially dicey interest in artificial intelligence. This Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Bartlett Sher, has a cast that includes Andrea Martin and Ruthie Ann Miles; Downey appears both live onstage and in a two-dimensional “metahuman digital likeness.” (Sept. 5-Nov. 24, Vivian Beaumont Theater)‘THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA’ Jez Butterworth and Sam Mendes had a hit with their last Broadway collaboration, “The Ferryman.” Now they’ve teamed up for this time-toggling Butterworth play about four English sisters whose mother raised them in the 1950s to have showbiz dreams, and who return home in the 1970s as she is dying. Laura Donnelly, a star of “The Ferryman,” leads the capacious cast. (Sept. 11-Dec. 8, Broadhurst Theater)Laura Donnelly, at the piano, leads the cast of Jez Butterworth’s “The Hills of California.”Mark Douet‘YELLOW FACE’ David Henry Hwang’s 2007 satire stars Daniel Dae Kim (“Lost”) as a fictional version of the playwright, navigating anti-Asian racism in the theater and culture, while — whoops — mistakenly casting a white actor in an Asian role. In 2018, The New York Times named this comedy one of the 25 best American plays of the previous 25 years. Leigh Silverman directs this Roundabout Theater staging. (Sept. 13-Nov. 24, Todd Haimes Theater)‘OUR TOWN’ Kenny Leon brings Thornton Wilder’s microcosmic drama back to Broadway, starring Jim Parsons (“The Big Bang Theory”) as the Stage Manager. Zoey Deutch and Ephraim Sykes play the young lovers, Emily Webb and George Gibbs, with Richard Thomas and Katie Holmes as Mr. and Mrs. Webb; Billy Eugene Jones and Michelle Wilson as Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs; and Julie Halston as Mrs. Soames. (Sept. 17-Jan. 19, Barrymore Theater)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Being Emily in ‘Our Town’: Readers Share Why the Role Mattered

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBeing Emily in ‘Our Town’: Readers Share Why the Role MatteredEmbodying the Thornton Wilder character “helped heal something inside me that I hadn’t even realized had been broken,” says one.Barbara Andres, right, as Emily in a production of “Our Town” in which the young lovers were played by older actors.Credit…Heidi GrunerFeb. 17, 2021Prompted by the publication of “Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ in the 21st Century,” Laura Collins-Hughes interviewed eight actors who’ve portrayed the tragic young newlywed Emily Webb. Then we asked readers to share their own experiences playing the part in a drama that continues to be produced in schools and on stages throughout the world. Edited responses follow.I was a small town Texas high school Emily in 1966. I had to talk the speech teacher — we had no drama teacher — into doing it because I loved it and so wanted to be in it. On the Monday after the weekend production, the toughest “hood” in school, a big burly guy complete with cigarettes rolled up in his T-shirt sleeve, came up to me and said I must be a “real good actor” because I’d made him cry. I was so touched, and two years later he was dead in Vietnam. BETHANY PHENEGER, HoustonI played Emily in a summer stock theater in a former barn in the ’80s. There was not a dry eye onstage in the third act. My grandmother could not speak to me due to tears at the end of the show. Now I am facing a life-threatening illness, after living a very full life. The other Emilys I’ve seen — and mine — come back to me. GRETCHEN KEHDE, BrooklynI have often been asked how it felt to be 64 playing 18 in the 2002 Transport Group production. With six decades of life under my belt, I had the advantage of already knowing most of Emily’s thoughts, words, and relationships. Even in her remembering, I could walk through it all, reawakening in my own heart my present tense reality at the same time. My very age brought a resonance to the simplest, most profound thoughts. BARBARA ANDRES, New YorkI read “Our Town” in elementary school but didn’t really understand it at the time. Years later, right after college, our family had to unexpectedly sell my childhood home. It was the first of several deep losses I experienced in early adulthood. When I moved to Los Angeles a few years after, one of my first jobs was to play Emily at Sierra Madre Playhouse. When I came to that speech where she says goodbye, I finally understood what it meant to say goodbye to something and someone you will never see again. And when I said those words every night, I finally said goodbye to my childhood home — the rough red bricks of the front path, my favorite hidden tree which I would climb to read and write in solitude, the sun-dappled kitchen where I first learned to cook. Emily’s words, Thornton Wilder’s words, helped heal something inside me that I hadn’t even realized had been broken. LILA DUPREE, Los AngelesMy mom played Emily in her private high school’s production of “Our Town” — it had to have been about 1953-54. Her family always said she was amazing in the part. The same year as the play she became pregnant and had to leave school. The baby was put up for adoption; my mom returned to school, but life was forever altered. She eventually wed the father of the baby, never graduated high school, had two more children (I’m the youngest) and didn’t appear in a play again until she was in her late 40s when she was cast as Esther Franz in “The Price.”She always talked about “Our Town,” made sure I read it, saw the movie and shared her memories of performing that role often. When she was dying very prematurely in her late 60s, she discussed with her sister what she wanted read and sung at her memorial service. I was surprised to find out after she’d passed that she wanted me to somehow work into my eulogy Emily’s speech from “Our Town.” Of course I did, and for a brief second there, at the lectern in the Episcopal Church of East Hampton, I did get to “play” Emily — conjuring up those stories of when my mom played that part and realizing just why she wanted it read at her memorial. ELLEN DIOGUARDI, Sag Harbor, New YorkAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More