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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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      Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ to Return to Broadway Next Fall

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      A new production, directed by Kenny Leon, will feature a diverse cast and will aim to speak to contemporary America.“Our Town,” one of the most revered and enduring American dramas, will return to Broadway next fall in a new production directed by Kenny Leon.Leon has become among the more prolific directors working in New York. Just this year he has directed a revival of “Purlie Victorious,” currently running on Broadway, as well as the summer production of “Hamlet” at Shakespeare in the Park and the spring Off Broadway basketball-fan drama “King James” for the Manhattan Theater Club. He directed two Broadway revivals last season, the Tony-winning “Topdog/Underdog” as well as “Ohio State Murders,” and he has another one coming next spring, “Home.”Leon said he had long wanted to direct a Broadway production of “Our Town,” a 1938 play by Thornton Wilder. He has tackled the play twice in Atlanta, where he lives, first in 2010 with a full production at the True Colors Theater Company, which he co-founded, and then in 2017 with a one-night reading, starring Scarlett Johansson and the cast of an Avengers movie, to benefit hurricane victims in Puerto Rico.“I grew up thinking it wasn’t a play for me, but later in life I thought, ‘If you just include more people, it’s a play about our time and our planet and each other,’” he said in an interview.“The cast will not be all Black and it will not be all white and it will not be all famous,” he said. “I want all of us to feel included, and I want the play to speak to each and every heart in America.”The lead producer is Jeffrey Richards and no cast or theater has been announced. This will be the sixth production of “Our Town” on Broadway; the last one opened in 2002. More

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      ‘The Skin of Our Teeth’ Review: A Party for the End of the World

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      Thornton Wilder’s antic play, from 1942, packs in an ice age, a deluge and midcentury décor. This Lincoln Center Theater production is the maximalist revival it deserves.No fossil evidence suggests that a giant ground sloth ever composed a symphony or that a Devonian fish split the atom even once. And yet, have human beings really proved their worth? We have brought the world calculus, the sonnet, no-knead bread. But think of what we have inflicted: environmental devastation, species collapse, atrocities of various complexions. Humans keep surviving. We’re fit that way. But when you think about it — should we?Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth,” a formally inventive, constitutionally melancholy Pulitzer Prize winner from 1942, usually ticks the box for yes. An antic ode to human resilience, written as America was entering World War II, it follows the Antrobus family as they face down an ice age, a deluge and a very human catastrophe. Somehow, they always come through.“We’ve come a long ways,” George Antrobus, the dad, says. “We’ve learned. We’re learning. And the steps of our journey are marked for us here.”And yet the revival that opened at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater on Monday, which is to say somewhere in the mid-Anthropocene, isn’t so sure. Under Lileana Blain-Cruz’s gorgeous, restive direction, this production sides not so much with George, the inventor of the wheel and alphabet, but with Sabina, the Antrobuses’ vampy maid, who maintains a healthy skepticism toward the whole of the human race.“I used to think something could be done about it,” Sabina says. “But I know better now.”We meet Sabina at the top of the play, in the living room of the Antrobus family’s flower-bedizened home in Excelsior, N.J. (The exuberant design, by Adam Rigg, with radiant lighting by Yi Zhao and climate-disaster projections by Hannah Wasileski, suggests a midcentury postmodern aesthetic.) She resents her work as a maid, and because Wilder never met a fourth wall he couldn’t smash, she resents the play, too.“I hate this play and every word in it,” she says, before throwing down her duster like a mic drop. Sabina is played by Gabby Beans (“Marys Seacole,” “Anatomy of a Suicide”), a ferocious actress and a Blain-Cruz regular who demonstrates her comic gifts here. Those gifts are ample. And they come beribboned and frilled.Gabby Beans as Sabina, the Antrobuses’ vampy maid. Richard Termine for The New York TimesShe and Maggie Antrobus (Roslyn Ruff, eternally excellent) await the return of George (James Vincent Meredith, solid), commuting home from the office as an ice sheet descends on the Eastern Seaboard. (It’s the 1940s, but as the pet dinosaur and mammoth suggest, it’s also the Cretaceous period. Or possibly the Paleolithic. Just go with it.) In the second act, set in Atlantic City, the Antrobuses have survived, only to encounter a Genesis-style flood. The final act shows them and their children, Henry (Julian Robertson), who used to be called Cain, and Gladys (Paige Gilbert), back in Excelsior, picking themselves up after a seven-year war.In most productions, the particular conflict is left ambiguous; here Montana Levi Blanco’s shrewd costumes intimate that this is the Civil War. And in most productions, the Antrobuses are white, but here they are Black, which lends that choice particular resonance, twisting the knife of human cruelty. This strategy doesn’t warp the play so much as deepen it. (The playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has contributed just a few lines — trading a reference to the Broadway classic “Peg O’ My Heart” for a shout-out to “Bootycandy” — to make all of this work.)The play takes place in the 1940s, but as the pet dinosaur suggests, it’s also the Cretaceous period. Just go with it.Richard Termine for The New York Times“The Skin of Our Teeth” is a big play. It has to be. The whole of humanity doesn’t fit tidily into three acts, even assuming as much frame-breaking foolery as Wilder allows. In Blain-Cruz’s maximalist hands, it gets even bigger, the stage overflowing with flowers and lights and dazzling, playful puppetry. She favors a high femme aesthetic — luxuriant, Instagrammable — and no other serious director working now has such a profound interest in visual pleasure and delight. She also has a killer playlist (Rihanna, Dua Lipa). Because this is the way the world ends: all bangers, no skips.For some, this too muchness, married to Wilder’s bookish mischief, will pall. The intermission doesn’t come until nearly two hours in, and as I walked out into the lobby, an usher asked me if I planned on leaving. Apparently a lot of people do. But if you stick it out, you can find real power in the way the lush design garlands a profound suspicion of human endeavor. Blain-Cruz relegates Wilder’s emphasis on endurance for something more questioning, mostly by giving space to the questions that are already there.“How do we know that it’ll be any better than before?” Sabina asks, as humanity prepares to pick itself back up again. “Why do we go on pretending?”When the curtain rises on the third act, the furniture lies ruined. But the natural world has revived. The stage blooms with a thousand flowers, and when characters traverse that meadow, it feels like a dream. Do we really want to wake from it? When “The Skin of Our Teeth” first opened, in 1942, the world wobbled on the threshold of disaster. Now, it seems, we are wobbling again. Maybe it always seems that way. Human life could continue indefinitely. Or the end of the Anthropocene might be nigher than you think. And that would be terrible, wouldn’t it? But look how the flowers grow.The Skin of Our TeethThrough May 29 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours 55 minutes. 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