The Barrow Street Theatre's "Our Town": It Won't Be the Same Without You

It goes so fast, this play about how life goes so fast; this play about how, despite the inevitability of death, life endures; this play about how puny is our participation in this life that is ending and beginning all at once.

But that the show, The Barrow Street Theatre's production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, seemed over nearly as soon as it began is a testament to the brilliance of director and stage manager David Cromer.

Cromer is not perfectly true to Wilder's text and stage direction, yet his choices make him Wilder's most perfect collaborator. Unchanged, the text deftly poses the eternal question, Do I matter?, and suggests we will discover the answer for ourselves by focusing not on the grand gestures, but upon the most banal of details--the ones which, however mundane, connect us to every civilization, past and present.

Cromer's changes resound with this chorus of humanity, beginning with what his own performance as the stage manager makes possible. Cromer's brisk, all-business delivery shucks any tendency to become sloppy with sentiment. Cromer is our camera, not our interpreter. This allows each audience member to decide what the meaning of each scene is; in a sense, to add one's own voice to the experience of the show, rather than have us accept, de facto, that Wilder intended us to feel nostalgic about days gone by.

Cromer and set designer Michele Spadaro underscore this participation of ours in the show--as well as in a life lived among others whom we might, or might not even know--in a number of ways. The first is to leave the lights on throughout the entire performance. There is nary a moment to allow the dark to cover us if our attention slips from the details unfolding before us. And, because the show is presented almost entirely in the round, we audience members are always facing one another. This smashes our anonymity, making it plain to others if we are affected, outwardly anyway, by what we are witnessing "on stage."

Whether this is a deliberate nod to Shakespeare and his notion that all the world's a stage, and we are but actors upon it, I have no idea, but it certainly is powerful because it is authentic. Cromer's disinterest as the stage manager, combined with the particular staging of Our Town casts the "our" over all of "us" like a net, binding us to him and the entire ensemble. Yet, where they carry us is simultaneously to our respective, private interior landscapes, while also to a point in time we all see as a group, unfolding before our very eyes. Who we are is who we are, we cannot hide it, and like it or not, we are a part of the show.

There is no threat in this. It's what we do every day of our lives. Cromer's Our Town makes it possible for us to consider just how extraordinary this is.

The entire cast, both as individuals and as an ensemble, resonates with the grace of truth, but one player in particular stands out. James McMenamin's conflicted, soulful young George Gibbs is a revelation. As the mother of a teen aged son myself, I was terribly moved by his performance, every bit of it.

Please go see this show, this version of it.

Our Town at The Barrow Street Theatre has been extended until September 2009.
For tickets:
http://www.ourtownoffbroadway.com/

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