Scraping Away the Sentiment OUR TOWN

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Of the plays that tower over American drama -- Thornton Wilder's Our Town, Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night -- Our Town is at once the most universally familiar and the most widely misunderstood. Audiences tend to recall Wilder's glimpse of small-town, turn-of-the-century New Hampshire as sweet, sentimental, nostalgic and funny. It was all those things. But it was also -- and remains, 50 years after its first public performances in January 1938 -- groundbreakingly unconventional in form and chafingly unsettling in its view of human nature. More than any other play in American literature, Our Town opened the minds of the mainstream to nonliteral ways of telling a story. Unlike the domestic tragedy of Williams and Miller and O'Neill, Our Town took the sweeping view that a misspent life is not a pitiable exception but a lamentable norm. Life, Wilder argued, is almost too precious to be wasted on the living, who fritter it away in trivialities.

The play's prickly virtues are recaptured in a spare staging by Director Arvin Brown at New Haven, Conn.'s, Long Wharf Theater. Hal Holbrook stars in the role Wilder sometimes enacted himself, as the Stage Manager or narrator of this funny valentine to the squandered joys of everyday life. Scoffing, moments after he enters, at those who feel a need for scenery, Holbrook commands the lowering of a couple of trellises halfheartedly entwined with flowers; an instant later, they are hauled back up out of sight. From then on, the actors proceed without props or sets save for a couple of platforms, a few chairs and some suspended window frames.

A few words, a mimed gesture, perhaps some sound effects (a boy blowing a train whistle, a man whinnying like a horse) suffice to define the space and locate the scene. With a minimum of identifying costume, actors shift character: when the young lovers (Daniel Nathan Spector and Louise Roberts) have a first tentative date at a soda fountain, Holbrook abruptly becomes the attendant who serves them. As Wilder points up through risible "lectures" about this archetypal town's economy, politics, demographics and even geology, what matters about its people is not the naturalistic detail but the philosophic essence.

In defiance of the "rules" of drama, Wilder kills off half a dozen characters without offering even one juicy onstage death scene, and the mourners are limited to one wordless gesture and one choked cry. Although the play appears to celebrate the tender bonds of family and community, the beauty of human connection is all but unseen: real self-awareness comes in monologue or in rueful exchanges among the shades of characters already dead. In the climax, a young woman who has died in childbirth revisits earth on the day of her twelfth birthday, only to find that her mother cannot "see" her. That is, not only is the mother unable to envision the ghost of her daughter's future self but, for all her maternal devotion, she is so caught up in minutiae that she fails to pay meaningful attention to the actual girl who stands yearning for it. That moment underlines why Wilder chose his austere narrative form. It too demands that people pay attention rather than be guided by the obvious. It sends them into the night having had to stop and look and listen.