Our Town

Brian Nemtusak, TimeOut Chicago

08/09 Awards
Open Run New York
Obie Award, Best Director - David Cromer
After Dark Award, Direction - David Cromer
After Dark Award, Outstanding Performance - Jennifer Grace
Jeff Theater Award Best Director - David Cromer
Theater World Award, Best NYC Debut - Jennifer Grace
Top 10 Plays 2008 - Chicago Tribune
Top 10 Plays 2008 - Chicago Sun Times
Top 5 Plays 2008 - TimeOut Chicago
Highly Recommended - Chicago Reader


“I’ve always been partial to the sinister reading of Remembrance of Things Past as an elaborate phantasmagoria: Proust’s narrator remembers nothing, his sprawling belle epoque reminiscence being, in reality, just the feverish dreams of a bedroom-bound invalid (like Proust himself). There’s a similar take on Our Town that upends the conventional sentimental treatment familiar to what’s likely the most-produced-in-high-school-theater play ever. Like a nonmusical Spoon River Anthology, this reading makes ghosts of all the turn-of-the-century characters, not just the conscious dead of its last act—benign shades endlessly re-creating a perpetually fading time and place.

It’s a stretch, of course, but Wilder was the screenwriter on Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, which took an equally jaundiced view of “evil” and “good,” contrasting Joseph Cotten’s black-heart charisma with the everyday suffocation of the prim little burg where he hides out. There’s a proto-Lynchian, twilit ambiguity running through Wilder’s brand of Rockwelliana, something sympathetic yet cool: He’s come to praise and bury this vision of small-town America, as testified by his two “outsider” surrogates—the metatheatrical Stage Manager and the suicidal, alcoholic organist Simon Stimson—especially in their elegiac closing remarks.

Director Cromer—who also deftly plays the empathetic/dispassionate narrator—teases out muted, wistful notes, bringing things closer to the gently spectral style Wilder arguably intended than what you may’ve been conditioned to expect from this “nostalgic” chestnut. Outside one audacious—and brilliant—bit of set-design excess, things hew close to the bare-bones staging the script dictates. Leads Grace and Fagin are winning without stooping to aw-shucks cuteness; but it’s Byrnes and Curtis, as their golden-lit fathers, who deliver the show’s signature performances”.