"Our Town" at Barrow St., NYC

By Robbie on March 11, 2009

Well, the show opened smashingly last week.  Neil Simon was there, among a few other celebs and a lot of Chicagoans -- friends and family of the cast.  My date was the ever-smashing Amy Warren, who ended up spending rather little time with me, since she seems to be on a back-pounding basis with everyone in New York theatrical circles, after just a few months living here.  August (hey, obscure pun!) personages have been spotted almost nightly since opening: Dustin Hoffman last night, Edward Albee the night before.  In such a small room (140 seats), with the audience fully lit (meaning, if you like, both "under lights" and "drunk"), the big shots make loud presences.

David Cromer, who directed the show and plays the stage manager in it, is the reason this "Our Town" is so different and so good; and he is the reason our family disrupted its stupefying suburban routine to come here.  I had had a little acquaintance with David as a man and as a director before "The Adding Machine," just by virtue of his long friendship with my wife, Donna.  But seeing that soul-shaking musical and his take on "Picnic" in close succession permanently sealed the deal for me.  "This guy's not just another good director -- they'll be talking about his stagings a hundred years from now," I blabbed to my son on the way home after seeing the first mounting of "Our Town" in Chicago last year, and I stand by the hyperbole.  I don't see as many plays as I'd like to, but the ones I do get to see tend to be distinctly disappointing, post-David.  People moving all over the place for no clear reason.  Actors overselling meager lines, trying to wring unearned sympathy or simply show their chops.  Theater referring to nothing outside of its own insipid, provincial world.

I would say that of all David's talents, his talent for reading underlies his growing record of accomplishments most.  Have you read a play lately?  They don't exactly leap off the page into bright visualization, much of the time, not in the way that a novel or story is designed to do.  Thornton Wilder's characters have template-style names and jobs: Webb the editor, Gibbs the doctor.  The style of their speech is 1900 farmer dialect and its substance hovers unremittingly over the eternal questions, love and union and discontent, the beauty of earthly nature and the black largeness of space, our helpless bondage to the fourth dimension of time.  Reading the play now, it is a little easier to feel an authorial relation with contemporaries like Steinbeck, Dos Passos, and Faulkner than to feel these characters as full-fledged, respirating mammals; and the opening stage directions -- "No curtain. No scenery." -- more as a bottled message from an twinkling, cordoned-off age than a cold, bold stroke.  Not to mention the main impediment, the ascension of this work to its place of sick pride as the "Stairway to Heaven" of the theater.

David is very evidently able to engage with over-familiar creations like "Glass Menagerie" and "Our Town" with none of the penumbral prejudice and clutter of shallow history-flattening data points.  He thinks hard and well about what these characters' lives were like, what they mean to say, how their words betray their inner personae, and what the author would like revealed to the hearts of his audience.  Saying it in this way makes it sound obvious and trite.  But -- again -- see one of David's shows, and then see another ten professional shows at random, and you'll see how rare it is that a staging proceeds clearly from an open-minded reading of the text by a very smart person.

The reviews have been appreciative.  An exception is the formerly fearsome old lion John Simon.  An acid notice from his pen might in happier times have provided some positive thrills, but to say that an actress named Grace has no grace, or to object thickheadedly that the stage manager is "supposed to be a New Englander with a pipe" is to reveal oneself pitiably as a man who is paid little and edited less.  Hilton Als of the New Yorker drew with vivid anecdotes the peculiar blend of elitism, high modernism, and near-conventionality that was Thornton Wilder, praised the interpretation, and ended with a tender tribute to Lori Myers's performance as Mrs. Gibbs.  A keener or kinder appraisal no one could want.  Interestingly, the players are keeping away from the reviews, as I guess actors generally do, so that their playing isn't improperly influenced.

Well, we are happy to be a cog in this enterprise, and are primly glowing with self-approval for recognizing early, before Als et al., the size of David's gift.  The Barrow Street production will surely be around a while, but you should come see it while he's in it, and while Donna's in it.