Critical Evaluation-Our Town

http://www.ourtownoffbroadway.com/

Over Spring Break, I had the fortune of seeing a production of Our Town by Thornton Wilder at the Barrow Street Theatre in Greenwich Village. The production moved me to tears, as my first time seeing the play, or any Thornton Wilder play staged before. Some things that really impressed me about the production were the creative use of space, and the role of the stage manager, and the way in which they helped show the timing and themes of the play.

Each act of the play, which has three in total, begins with a monologue by the stage manager, helping to orient the audience to the setting, characters, and the time elapsed between acts. The first thing I noticed about the space when I walked in was how bare bones it was, with no set, only some tables and chairs. There was no curtain, no scenery, and no fancy lights. At the time I thought this might have been specific to the Barrow Street Theatre's production of the play, but in fact, it is very specific in the text itself saying "No curtain. No scenery. The audience, arriving, sees an empty stage in half-light."

Then the stage manager proceeds to describe where everything is onstage, like the church, main street, and Mrs. Gibb's garden. What sparked my interest about this was that the audience relies totally on the stage manager to direct them. There are no visual clues at the beginning about where is where, and it is all a matter of imagining that the town is really there. I was a little confused at first, about whose house was where, especially because I could only rely on the actors and their simple costumes to give me clues. However, I quickly got over this uncertainty, as the actors were very direct with physical movement to show who they were and what they were doing. For example, Mrs. Webb makes it clear that she is making dinner, by repeating the same direct scooping motions while holding a bowl. This element of the acting reminds me of the unit we did on physical theatre, where we learned that action should be direct and to the point.

Also, I think the abstractness of the set is what allows a play like this to be put on. Because it has three seperate acts, with different events such as church choir practice, a wedding, and sitting in an soda shop afterschool, it is very difficult to achieve all these different locations with actual scenery. More
importantly, the fact that the audience does not see an actual house to represent the Webb's home, or a real cemetery in the third act, is exactly what allows the play to have its title "Our Town". Because the audience has to picture so much of the background and the context in which the play happens, it really can be applied to any small American town. I think that, and the way it deals with the theme of death, is probably why this play is so famous, and why theatre companies and high schools around the country continue to put it on.

Moreover, the stage manager is very important in setting the scene, as well as the tone of the play, and acts almost like a character from the town himself. In a sense, the stage manager knows all of the characters. He knows their future, their past, and what will happen to them in the play. For example, in Act I, the character Joe Crowell is introduced, and the stage manager reveals to the audience that he died when the war broke out, in France. This moment breaks the conventions of theatre, because not only is the "stage manager" speaking directly to the audience, but he is talking about what is to become of a character in the play, from the perspective of the future. Also, in the haunting scene where Emily comes back from the dead in the form of a ghost to her family's kitchen, she communicates with the stage manager the whole time. In this production, I think the actor who played the stage manager, Michael Shannon, was really great. He kept a cool demeanor throughout the production, but was also personable to the audience, and seemed just like a person from the town himself. If he had not been an effective actor, then Thornton Wilder's breaking the third wall would not have gotten the messages of the play across.