Shaw Festival
Through October 15
OUR TOWN Royal George Theatre/Shaw Festival
I will start by saying I am not a fan of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” even while recognizing it’s considered a pillar of the Canon of American theatre.
It’s small town New England America more than a century ago, the White Protestant America which dominates our history.
Wilder’s play is a constant in those lists of great plays and receives constant mentions.
The difficulty is that the play isn’t done often, despite limited set and a flexibly large cast.
More productions would allow newer opinion on the script.
Even the Stratford Festival with its ability to fill a series of theaters with a series of plays hasn’t done “Our Town” since 1991, in a memorable production with Douglas Rain as the Stage Manager.
That role is almost a narrator, as the actor wanders on and off the stage and some times plays a role, chronicling continuing events.
The play begins in 1901, in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, a little town in the mountains north of Boston.
It’s a small industrial town, with some churches, a major rail line and lots of scenery.
It has a newspaper which appears twice a week, under the aegis of Editor Webb (Patrick McManus), and which has a very busy physician, Doctor Gibbs (Patrick Galligan).
They have children and George Gibbs (Charlie Gallant) and Emily Webb (Kate Besworth) are friends and classmates.
Over the next 12 years, they become real friends, husband and wife and grieving husband and dead wife.
Wilder saw this all as telling of life’s passages in a small town, along with the town constable (Aaron Ferguson) and the alcoholic choir director Simon Stimson (Peter Millard) and the members of the choir.
It all ends up in the ancient cemetery high above Grover’s Corners where people from the same families have been buried for centuries.
Stage Manager Benedict Campbell narrates the stories and the individual stories of life in the small town, the happiness and the sadness, the triumphs and tragedies as cars begin to replace horses and time moves on.
Ken McDonald’s set is really more elaborate than the show needs or is usually put on stage, here, an arrangement of metal pipes lifted up and down.
Mostly, it’s a set like the Irish Classical Theatre, chairs and tables moved on and off, along with two ladders on wheels which allow the Gibbs and Webb homes to be simulated or the drug store with its phosphate stand or the church for the wedding or the cemetery.
It’s all a good production, with strong directing from Molly Smith.
The essential role is Campbell’s, along with McManus, Galligan, Besworth, Catherine McGregor’s Mrs. Webb and Jenny L. Wright’s Mrs. Gibbs.
Because this is Shaw, there are also a lot of strong smaller parts, like Millard’s Stimson and Sharry Flett’s Mrs. Soames.
If you think about it, Grover’s Corners is the 19th Century world of William McKinley, since it opens before that president was murdered in Buffalo and Theodore Roosevelt became the first of the 20th Century.
The steam engines of the railroad, the horse-drawn milk wagon, the phosphates, are all elements of the past, heavily symbolic of old Congregational New England with Polishtown away from the center of the community.
How much that has to do with today is an open question, unless you think that love and romance are symbolic of an age rather than a standard practice back to Denisovan times.
This is a symbolic but outdated script, from another time, either when Wilder wrote it (first production 1938) or when he set it, starting in the first decade of the 20th Century.
“Our Town” is interesting and a look at a community and society sealed in aspic, with the show buoyed by the work of Benedict Campbell, Galligan, McManus and Besworth.
A.W.
© Copyright 2023 - Speakupwny.com
hosted by Online Media, Inc
Buffalo Web Design and Web Hosting
Top of Page
|
