Our Town Thornton Wilder

An Unimportant Day

. But what about daily life in Babylon or Greece? Or, more recently, Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire? Wilder chose an unlikely setting, “a very ordinary town...little better behaved than most. Probably a lot duller.” If Grover’s Corners existed, which it doesn’t, it would sit near the Massachusetts border. The Stage Manager presents a “time capsule” of life in nowhere, USA, on May 7, 1901.

We watch an unimportant day. The effect is like studying a puddle of water with a microscope. Activity abounds. To emphasize his point, Wilder omits the trappings of theater: no proscenium curtain, no scenery. Just a bare stage, a few chairs, two tables, two stepladders. The aim: awaken our eyes to the abundance of life in the simple acts we take for granted.

And encourage audience participation: remember your first love, your wedding, your first loss? Didn’t it go something like this? As in Shakespeare’s theater, the audience brings its own experiences to fill in the story.

Even Wilder’s protagonist was a bit daring for 1938. Instead of a jut-jawed male, braving great odds, the central character is a young “ordinary” woman. Emily Gibbs falls in love, gets married, gives birth, and — the one “abnormal” event — dies young.

Then she wants to revisit the living. The late Mrs. Gibbs gives her strange advice: “Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.” As in the play itself, Wilder strips inessentials from Emily’s return. She finds a thousand things she never noticed when alive. “Do any human beings ever realize life while they lived it,” she asks, “every, every minute?”

Our Town has the passion of a poem and the effect, if one chooses to heed it, of a sermon on embracing life. It’s also, 110 years after the play is set, a mite sentimental, especially on second (or twelfth) viewing. And it is one WASP-ish script.

Director Sean Murray and Cygnet Theatre offer an updated staging. The “set” is bare (even the upstage loading door is open at first); the props, few (actors mime eating breakfast and shelling peas); the costumes, contemporary.

Two differences: the casting is “colorblind” — which nicely makes “our” town everyone’s — and the cast refrains from Wilder’s sentimental excesses.

Most choices work. Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson’s bold, authoritative Stage Manager has a touch of the preacher about her. She seems certain we’ll slide back into “ignorance and blindness” if we don’t heed the play’s message. She even understands today’s flitting attention spans: to keep us focused she cuts scenes short, much to the performers’ dismay.