Thornton Wilder won a Pulitzer Prize for “Our Town” in 1938, it was one of his three Pulitzers. It went on to become a staple of American theater, but sometimes we forget its powerful gut punch.
It’s impossible to forget in Kenny Leon’s slow burn production that just opened on Broadway with Jim Parsons as the stage manager leading a cast of 28 people. As he says breaking the fourth wall at the start of the play, some of those people include Katie Holmes (her best stage work ever), the eternally young Richard Thomas, Zoey Deutsch, Ephraim Sykes, and Julie Halston.
“Our Town” is a three act play, but Leon has condensed it and taken out the intermissions, which makes the thrust of the story even more powerful. In the first act we see life in Grover’s Corners, a small town where everyone knows each other going back generations. In the second, the two primary young people, George and Emily, marry, guaranteeing the future generations of Grover’s Corner.
For the first two acts, there’s a glow of nostalgia over small town Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. Wilder wrote it in 1938 but the action takes place between 1901 and 1913. Even in 1938, people were trying to remember when America was great, a simpler time that — as you find out in act 3 — never existed. That’s because Act 3 takes place in a cemetery, where reality has set in along with the cycle of life and great tragedy. People in the audience last night were in tears by the of the play.
Plenty of good actors have played the stage manager over the years including Paul Newman, Spalding Gray and David Cromer in his own landmark production downtown in 2009. Jim Parsons, who will always be referenced as Sheldon in “The Big Bang Theory,” is astonishingly good in the role and brings out the best in the whole cast. But that’s not hard because they are each exceptional.
Broadway is brimming with wonderful productions this fall. Everyone is asking me to what to see. “The Hills of California” by Jez Butterworth, starring Laura Donnelly, is a stunner not to be missed. More on that later.
