Verities Revisited

Not even the high professionalism of his Broadway production can disguise the fact that Thornton Wilder's Our Town was, is and always will be a humanities lecture with visual aids. The principal aids are the characters, who, ike the tables and chairs on the otherwise barren set, are deployed in a series of vignettes by the Stage Manager. His is the unenviable job of trying to be a Greek chorus to just folks. The lecture part of the play stresses the importance of the familiar things of life, and that each day should be savored as if it were the last. Essentially, Our Town says the same thing as Hair while keeping its pants on.

As the Stage Manager, Henry Fonda establishes the play's underlying innocence with his copyrighted brand of casual intensity. Ed Begley and Mildred Natwick as Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs and John Randolph and Irene Tedrow as Editor and Mrs. Webb never falter in their roles as small-town New England caricatures circa 1910. Likewise, Elizabeth Hartman and Harvey Evans encounter little difficulty getting their portrayals of Emily and George from the soda fountain to the play's touching cemetery scene. Unfortunately, Miss Hartman bears the burden of having to ask: "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?--every, every minute?" Such answers too frequently pose as questions in Our Town and indicate why gravestones make poor soapboxes.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.