Our Town, Syracuse Stage, Syracuse, New York

This is, in some ways, the story of my experience with not one but two productions of Our Town. I am a bit ashamed to admit that I had never read nor seen a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. It is a classic, of course, and I had a vague notion of what it was about before reviewing it at Syracuse Stage—but I had never read it, read a review of it, or seen it. I came to this assignment with a blank slate, with no knowledge or bias or history with the play. In some ways, I think, this made my encounter with the two productions a bit more honest and fresh. I did not have to overcome being forced to read the play in high school or having seen a bad production or even a good production of it somewhere else.Syracuse Stage is about a two-hour drive from my house. Wanting to do a bit more research before I saw the production, I did a quick internet search and found a PBS version of Our Town, with Paul Newman as the Stage Manager. Since I was driving, I could not watch it, but I could listen to it and was quickly entranced by Wilder’s gorgeous meditation on the sublime nature of everyday life, his treatise on how beauty can be found in the ordinary if you have the wisdom to see it. I got to the theater in downtown Syracuse in the middle of the third act of the PBS production, just as Emily was about to go back, back to her own life, back to her memories. Honestly, I was very excited. I did not have many expectations going into this experience, but I was so engaged with just listening to the play that I looked forward to having it brought to life.The Syracuse Stage is a professional theater company in downtown Syracuse. It receives funding from Syracuse University and considers itself “in residence” there. The company works closely with students and faculty from the university, and much of the cast of Our Town comes from the local theater community. It is a lovely theater space, with an inviting exterior courtyard that leads into a spacious lobby. The lobby is split into two areas: on one side, a traditional lobby leading directly into the theater, and on the other side, a large cafe-like space, lined with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out to downtown Syracuse. It felt open and warm and inviting, a bit different from many lobbies, which can feel cave-like and closed off from the outside world. I could picture people coming here to sit and read or study rather than coming to see the show. Hung from the wall of the lobby was a timeline of the company’s history, and I read this with interest, curious to see how long the company had been in production.Syracuse Stage has been putting on plays since 1974. In that time, it has produced over 300 plays in 48 seasons, with several world premieres in the mix. A number of noteworthy actors have graced its stage, including Jason Alexander, Lilias White, and Sam Waterston. It has an impressive history of productions, mostly well-known classic works of theater—plays by O’Neill, Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, and Miller—along with lesser-known works. Their focus is mostly plays, but they have produced the odd musical here and there, West Side Story and Little Shop of Horrors among them.The theater itself is intimate, a proscenium stage but smaller than the stage at my daughter’s high school, with a seating capacity of 499. It seemed a perfect size, where even the seats in the back row still afford a great view of the action onstage. My seat, however, was in the very front row on the left side of the house. I typically like to sit close. I like to be able to see the actors work, the details of their performance, elements that are harder to pick out from further back. The curtain was open, and the stage was dominated by a representation of a tree made of rope, painted black, twisted and tied to three separate stage pipes at three separate heights. It was striking and evocative and as an image one that became inseparable from my experience of the play. It also made me curious; in the first words of the play, Wilder describes his preference for the setting: No curtain.No scenery. (Collected Plays 149)Why did the creative team decide on this major divergence from the direction specified by the playwright? I was not yet sure, but I was intrigued by the choice.It was a matinee performance, and the house slowly filled with a combination of older folks and young families. It felt a bit like watching the characters of the play, young and old, fill the house. Was this, perhaps, part of what Wilder had intended when he wrote the piece, this mirror of the audience? The Stage Manager, played by Jim True-Frost, entered and the play began. True-Frost has a history with Syracuse Stage, having appeared there twenty years ago in a series of productions. Since then, he has enjoyed a distinguished career, with his best-known role being Prez in the HBO series The Wire. In addition to his impressive list of TV and film credits, he is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where he has appeared in a variety of plays including David Copperfield and Side Man.True-Frost’s costume immediately brought a contemporary feel to the role: dressed throughout in a Syracuse Stage hoodie and khaki pants, he seemed the epitome of a current stage manager. Throughout the play, the Stage Manager checks the time, and True-Frost’s Stage Manager did this not on his watch, but by pulling out a cellphone and looking at it. This simple act underscored his connection to the world we live in as opposed to the world of the play, and heightened, in a way, the sense of history and time that has passed between now and the time in which the play is set.The other choice made, either by True-Frost or by the director, Robert Hupp, was to play the role straight, almost boring and casual. He did not try to perform or embellish the role as a character or try to play anything beyond a straight narrator. Having just recently listened to Paul Newman’s Stage Manager, the contrast was striking, and perhaps a little unfair to True-Frost. Newman’s version had gravitas, a sense of ceremony and presentation, with a dash of humor thrown in. All of that was lacking in the Syracuse Stage presentation. I even questioned, at times, whether True-Frost knew his lines, as he had the script with him throughout (Fig. 1). It was akin to being at a museum, with True-Frost as the volunteer docent, and not a very good one, showing you the history of this little town, Grover’s Corners. It felt like a choice meant to honor the work as opposed to serving the work. By this I mean: Syracuse Stage sought to honor Thornton Wilder’s intentions and direction of having a Stage Manager present the world of the play as simply as possible, with little fanfare or frills or “performance”; like the stage with no set, we have a stage manager with no dressing. But by doing so, I believe they failed to serve the play and Thornton Wilder in the best way they could. The PBS production served the work by bringing it to the audience, making it more entertaining, more interesting to hear, funnier—and thus more engaging.Aside from True-Frost, the cast was a blend of student actors picked from the SU Drama Department and professional actors from around the country. Mrs. Webb, played by Christine Albright (a professional actor and faculty member at Syracuse University), was a delight to watch. Her scene miming the snapping of beans with Mrs. Gibbs evoked an imaginary image of beans flying as she worked (Fig. 2). She was always present and brought an energy to her performance that made her every appearance come alive. Similarly present and energized, Alberto Bonilla (a professional actor with an impressive set of credits both on Broadway and regionally) was charismatic and funny as Mr. Webb. He drew some of the bigger laughs of the entire show in his scene with George, in which he gives his son-in-law marriage advice. Segal, a professional actor and faculty member at Syracuse, delivered a detailed and nuanced performance as Simon Stimon, bringing the character’s bitterness and anger out in a way that was a sharp contrast to everyone around him. The character’s drunkenness was subtle and specific: at the end of Act 1, Simon Stinson has a moment where he walks onto the stage and interacts with Mr. Webb and the Constable. The actor made the choice not to be falling-down drunk or demonstrably inebriated, but there was a slight unsteadiness to his gait that made it obvious that the character was highly impaired and trying to hide it. Overall, however, by the end of Act 1, I was a bit disappointed. I wanted to be charmed by the town of Grover’s Corners, by this portrait of a town and its people, and I was not.The second act did not improve on that feeling. There were highlights: the scene between George, played by Diego Echiverria De Cordova (a student in his junior year at Syracuse), and Mr. Webb, in which Mr. Webb is advising George on marriage, was funny and thoughtful, as noted above (Fig. 3). De Cordova’s scenes as George, both with Mr. Webb and Emily, were dynamic and engaging. During the soda shop scene, his speech to Emily, convincing her that he could change—attempting to make his intentions clear but not quite having the courage or the language to say exactly what he felt—was funny and excruciating and sweet all in one. But overall there were too many lost opportunities for laughter, and the drama felt performative and not based on honest human affection. In the scene between Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs, played by Michael Stewart Allen and Che Lyons (both professional actors) talking about their own wedding day, Wilder writes humor and kindness and a shared history between the two of them. But the emotion behind all of that did not come through in their performances. Overall, Mr. Hupp’s direction was too precious—treating the text with reverence, as if we were already dead, as opposed to finding the town’s life and exuberance.The most memorable part of Act 2 was at the end of the act. Because I was sitting in the front row, it was slightly below eye level to the floor of the stage. At the beginning of Act 2, I could tell that between the acts a part of the floor of the stage had been removed, revealing a rectangular section, approximately four feet by eight feet. But I could not see what was in it, if there were stairs or if was simply open to something under the stage. All through Act 2 the actors avoided this area until the moment when George and Emily walked up the aisle to be married. The two actors stepped into this section together and it was revealed that the opening was only about an inch deep and filled with water. They stood in the water as the stage manager performed the wedding ceremony and then walked through it and off the stage, tracking wet footprints across the slight thrust of the proscenium stage. Because of where I was sitting, I was not aware that it was filled with water until that moment, when I could see and hear the water splashing. It was a striking design and directorial choice and definitely not one specified in the text.They expanded on that choice, literally and figuratively, in Act 3. Where there was only one section of the floor exposed and filled with water in Act 2, in Act 3 there were three sections: the one directly center stage that was featured in Act 2, and two more, one stage left, one stage right. When Emily appeared for the first time, dressed in her white dress, and approached the other members of the cemetery, she stepped into the water and walked through it to find her seat next to the others. In a literal and metaphorical sense, she was crossing the water, crossing a divide, going from one elemental state to another. A little later, when Emily decided she must revisit a time from her life, she did the same thing—stepping into the water, but this time staying in it as she watched her former life. She was caught in the divide, being on neither one side nor the other and thus in a state of unrest and agony. Again, the directorial choices that were brilliant and memorable were most certainly the visual moments that remained with me long after the performance was over. When Emily stepped into the past or crossed the border, she made a deliberate choice to step into the water in a way that made the water splash. It was a wonderful way to illustrate the thematic and narrative needs of the play at that moment.Act 3 is all about the character of Emily—her funeral, her memories, her afterlife. Magdaliz Rivera, a student actor in her sophomore year at Syracuse, took on the role gamely, putting a great deal of energy into her performance, but in the end it all felt a bit one-note. She was charming but not textured in her performance. I never got the sense that there was anything more to Emily than being an ingénue in a play, a fault perhaps best attributed to the direction. After her twelfth birthday memory in Act 3, Rivera’s Emily is directed to sob and scream at the Stage Manager before her “goodbye” speech (Collected Plays 207). This decision put me in mind of a young girl disappointed with not being able to keep a favorite toy or a dress rather than a young woman bidding farewell to existence and to a life and community she loved. She goes through so much and in some ways is both old and young as a character, and those undertones never came through in her performance. Still, it is a testament to the production and to the strength of Thornton Wilder’s work that, despite all of the flaws of the production, the end of the play affected me quite deeply.Walking out of the theater, I took in the scenery one last time, especially the huge tree in the center of the stage made of rope and pipe. It was presumably supposed to represent the “big butternut tree” the Stage Manager refers to in Act 1 (Selected Plays 151). To me it symbolized all of the connections in that town, in life, that were made, that we make in our own Grover’s Corners. And it occurred to me that, in one way, it was not scenery but simply elements of the stage rearranged in a dramatic way. The pipes supporting the tree were exposed and the rope itself was painted black. All of these elements are things that are normal, mundane, and common elements of a stager—just as Thornton Wilder took mundane, common elements of life and rearranged them in Our Town to create something momentous and beautiful.