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PBS records an American classic
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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Our Town hasn’t been the same for me since Spalding Gray’s account of how, when he was playing the Stage Manager on Broadway in 1988, just as he asked whether the Dead of Grover’s Corners weren’t "waitin’ for the eternal part in them to come out clear?", the specter of 11-year-old Wally Webb projectile-vomited. But, when you think about it, Spalding Gray? Surely the creased and balding but still American-eagle-beautiful Paul Newman is closer to what playwright Thornton Wilder had in mind as the folksy cosmic conductor of his early-20th-century small-town-New Hampshire symphony of the everyday. And the former Hud gives a self-effacing, thoughtfully pursed-lipped, no-nonsense performance in this 2002 Westport Country Playhouse production, which transferred to Broadway’s Booth Theatre, where it was taped for television by Showtime and Masterpiece Theatre. The latter broadcasts it as part of its "American Collection" series this Sunday at 9 p.m. Since its 1938 debut, Our Town has been as ubiquitous on American stages as its Stage Manager, standing in for everyone from the minister to the soda jerk, is in Grover’s Corners. (The engaging 2002 documentary OT: Our Town focuses on an inner-city California high-school production, and that film is full of clips from the 1977 television production that starred Hal Holbrook.) There are reasons for the play’s tenacity, of course, and James Naughton’s Westport version, rescored for television so that the acts seem almost Velcro’d together, taps into them. It’s light on the Hallmark hokum, heavy on the Beckettesque shadows. Set on the Booth’s cavernous bare stage, with a couple of ladders, a few sticks of furniture, and a cemetery’s worth of folding chairs, the production is dark, almost sepulchral, so that there’s an echo of Godot’s famous image of birth astride a grave in the play’s G-rated depiction of "the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the 20th century . . . : in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying." It’s obvious from the beginning that Newman will not be doing a star turn; his first task is to help arrange the mismatched chairs before spit-shining his thin hair and commencing to speak: "The play is called Our Town." And, he might add, it’s estimated to have been performed nightly, somewhere, for the past 65 years. The first act covers a 1901 day in the life of Grover’s Corners, with emphasis on the next-door-neighbor families of newspaper editor Webb (played with comic intensity by Jeffrey DeMunn) and Dr. Gibbs (the Lincolnesque Frank Converse); even in these opening forays there are hints of constriction and unhappiness amid the schmaltz. Despite the Stage Manager’s contention that Mrs. Webb (Saturday Night Live founding cut-up Jane Curtin) and Mrs. Gibbs (a stalwart Jayne Atkinson) have produced three meals a day for 20 years without having a nervous breakdown, the doctor’s wife expresses her frustrated belief that "once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to." And Simon Stimson, the drunk choir director who will later take his own life, is given such a fierce turn by Tony winner (for Angels in America) Stephen Spinella, radiating misanthropy at the organ and shrinking in anguish from Doc Gibbs’s wholesome helping hand, that his bibulousness seems more tragic than comic. Act two, three years later, centers on the courtship and marriage (at 17) of George Gibbs — awkward, athletic, amiably thick, and touchingly vulnerable in the person of Ben Fox — and smug yet sincere class brain Emily Webb. As personated by Maggie Lacey, this New Hampshire lass looks like a cross between Nancy Kerrigan and the young Liv Ullmann, and for all her primness, she seems ready to swoon at the scent of her future mother-in-law’s heliotrope. In Naughton’s transfer of his production to television, the march from the 1904 wedding to the 1913 trip up cemetery hill is as inexorable as time itself, with the town folk filing out of the folding chairs at the end of the ghostly, blue-lit nuptials and circling back into their graves for the third-act payoff — for this is where Our Town’s power lies. Is there anything in the canon so sentimental and yet so tough-minded as Emily’s farewell to "clocks ticking . . . and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths" as she takes her place among the impassive dead, cocking a curious eye as the living carry on their unseemly ’rassle with ignorance, blindness, and grief? This is the crux of Wilder’s play, and it’s worth wading through the miming paper boys and milk-delivery personnel to get to it. What’s more, Lacey, her nose running a glistening dribble, rises to the challenge of Emily’s transformation. Realization seems to bombard her swollen heart from every direction, so that her speeches are not valentine set pieces but painful discoveries. Surely if Thornton Wilder had designed the New Hampshire license plate, it would read, "Live free and die."
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