Donna Trussell

Jerry Orbach in The Fantasticks, 1960. Luisa stands with her boyfriend, but looks at El Gallo.

New York City, 1960.

That’s where I would go if I had a time machine. At the off-Broadway Sullivan Street Playhouse I would buy a ticket to see a young, charistmatic Jerry Orbach play El Gallo in The Fantasticks and, of course, sing “Try to Remember.”

I’d go back again in 1943. The world is at war, but at the St. James Theatre, men are performing a ballet in cowboy boots. The play is Oklahoma! and it would make theater history, running a record 2,212 performances.

Imagine seeing Agnes de Mille’s brilliant choreography in the context of 1943, before Oklahoma! had become canned corn. No matter who does the directing and acting, Oklahoma! can’t resonate today. It’s a joke. A beloved joke, but still a joke.

In my time machine, I’d go back a little farther, to attend the 1938 New York premiere of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. Not the patriotic, Norman Rockwell-ized staple of high-school drama departments that Our Town has become, but Our Town as it was created.

Even now the spare set and direct address by the Stage Manager to the audience strike some as avant-garde. Imagine how it seemed in 1938.

Playing the Stage Manager at Henry Miller’s Theatre is Frank Craven, “the best pipe and pants-pocket actor in the business,” according to Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times.

Atkinson goes on to say:

By stripping the play of everything that is not essential, Mr. Wilder has given it a profound, strange, unworldly significance. This is less the portrait of a town than the sublimation of the commonplace; and in contrast with the universe that silently swims around it, it is brimming over with compassion.

But it’s a detached compassion. And it can sting.

Although Our Town is often celebrated as a nostalgic slice of small-town life, the darker subtexts — the monotony of marriage, the provincialism of Americans, the impermanence of life’s joys as well as its sorrows, the inevitability of infirmity and death and our status as a mere speck of cosmic dust — are all hidden in plain sight.

Frank Craven as the Stage Manager in Our Town, 1938.

Since I can’t really travel in time, I must make do with the productions recorded for posterity. Regarding the 1940 film (with the happy ending in which Emily doesn’t really die) the less said, the better.

The 1977 television production boasts Hal Holbrook as Stage Manager and supporting performances by Ronny Cox, Ned Beatty and Barbara Bel Geddes and even a cameo by John Houseman as the professor. But Robby Benson as George Gibbs is tough to take, and the not-so-spare set is a far cry from Wilder’s intent.

The 1989 Lincoln Center revival gets the set right, and gets George Gibbs right by casting a winsome Eric Stolz.

Penelope Ann Miller as Emily is luminous. [Ed. note: in view of the first comment below: Glynnis O'Connor as Emily in the 1977 version is good, but Penelope Ann Miller is even better. You can watch clips from Act III here and [:::sob:::] Emily’s goodbye speech here. Miller and Stolz in Act II are here.]

Perhaps the hope with casting Spalding Gray as Stage Manager was that he would bring some much-needed acerbity to the production.

In the 2007 New York Times article The Genius of Grover’s Corners, Jeremy McCarter writes:

Frequently lost in the sentimental haze that most revivals inflict upon the play is the contrary voice of Simon Stimson, the town drunk and suicide. “That’s what it was to be alive,” he snarls. “To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those … of those about you.”

He makes a good point. Grover’s Corners is, in retrospect, an unbearable place: quite content to be homogeneous, conformist, anti-intellectual and lacking “any culture or love of beauty.”

When staged properly, the play doesn’t let us to feel simple nostalgia. We ought to weep at Emily’s famous line not because she finds earth wonderful, but because she was unable to find it so during her close-minded life in her close-minded town — which is, of course, our town.

Wilder makes a profound statement about the limits of human understanding here, one that requires delicacy and a little steel to convey. “ ‘Our Town’ is one of the toughest, saddest plays ever written,” Edward Albee has said. “Why is it always produced as hearts and flowers?”

Albee’s point is well taken. The problem with Spalding Gray is that his natural sarcasm and chilly manner tip the scales too far in the other direction.

But now and then the casting paid off. Lines that got lost in Holbrook’s folksiness found their intended irony with Gray: “Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about ‘em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts.”

Thornton Wilder wrote the third act of Our Town in one day, after a walk with a friend on a rainy evening in Zurich. Act III is the heart of the play. Were it not for Act III, Our Town would be a mere footnote in theater history.

In Act III the dead sit in chairs, their “graves.” They are waiting, says the Stage Manager. “They’re waitin’ for something that they feel is comin.’ Something important, and great.”

With these lines Wilder plants the notion that the living, who are always waiting for something, are sleepwalking through their lives.

In Act III we learn that when Mrs. Gibbs died, she left $350 to her son and daughter-in-law. That was exactly what the furniture salesman had offered for her highboy. Mrs. Gibbs told Mrs. Webb in Act I that if she took the offer, she’d use the money to visit Paris.

Apparently Mrs. Gibbs never made it to Paris. And what did George and Emily spend the $350 on? A “ce-ment” drinking fountain for stock.

So you have Paris on the one hand, and a cattle trough on the other. In the Lincoln Center production, Emily’s voice trails off as she describes it to her mother-in-law: “There’s a patent device on the drinking fountain so that it never overflows.” You can see the light bulb going off in Emily’s head: The cattle trough, as special as it was, is of no use to her now.

On Amazon you can buy a DVD that contains both the Holbrook and Gray productions, but in my opinion neither version really does the play justice.

Perhaps it’s just as well that no definitive production exists on tape or disc. Our Town is pure theater, as this interview with director Gregory Boyd makes clear. I’m sure once in a while, a director somewhere gets it right, but, sadly, I doubt I’ll be in the audience to see it.