Whatever else Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (Barrymore Theatre, booking to Jan. 19, 2025) is, it isn’t as honeyed a classic as it is sometimes imagined. Kenny Leon’s celebrity-filled Broadway revival is a brisk, tart-toned parable of small town American life that interrogates, satirizes even, the outwardly genteel setting of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, and cautions us throughout to put down any rose-tinted spectacles we might be tempted to see it through. It also intends to be a more straightforward celebration of community.
As written, the play, first performed in 1938, is a spare and sober anatomy of a community, rather than a cozily sentimental hymnal. In this production its characters are dressed not in the costume (by Dede Ayite) of the early 1900’s, but in a curious mash-up of back-then and right-now: so, jeans, sneakers, and post-Victorian flounce. (Perhaps the intention is to make the play timeless, or self-consciously spanning of many eras, to echo one of the piece’s themes.) Flickering lanterns on stage and hanging from the rafters form an omnipresent constellation of stars designed with dreamy intent by Allen Lee Hughes.
The drama comes to center on the union, then renting asunder, of young couple George Gibbs (Ephraim Sykes) and Emily Webb (Zoey Deutch)—and what it all says about a whole basket of you-name-it: life, death, the universe, time, and community. We see them first as the next door neighbor kids of Dr. Gibbs (Billy Eugene Jones) and Mrs. Gibbs (Michelle Wilson), and Mr. Webb (Richard Thomas) and Mrs. Webb (Katie Holmes).
