Jim Parsons in “Our Town”

Jim Parsons in Our city at Ethel Barrymore.
Photo: Daniel Rader

Sometimes – very rarely – a director creates something so striking with a piece that the interpretation seems to merge with the bone structure, and it's damn difficult to clear the slate for future exploration. “Definitely” is a pompous, silly word, and at the same time I find it very difficult to understand Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade from the production of Peter Brook. Although the comparison would probably embarrass him, David Cromer has done something with Thornton Wilder's Our city in 2009, which to this day manages to haunt a piece as canonical as Romeo and Julietas curricular as To kill a mockingbird. Wilder called Our city “an attempt to find a value above all else for the smallest events in our daily lives” and in the third act of the play – when Emily Webb, who died young in childbirth, returns to her girls' house on “an unimportant day”. , just to be there Overwhelmed by the beauty of life's little things, unnoticed by the living – Cromer unveiled a working kitchen at the back of his formerly supportless, pared-down stage. Mrs. Webb cooked bacon on a griddle; the smell filled the small theater. Wilder's intentionally blank space was suddenly and overwhelmingly pierced with reality when Emily asked her famous question: “Do any human being ever know life while they are living it?”

Wilder might have objected (“Our aspirations, our hope, our despair are in the head – not in things, not in the 'landscape,'” he wrote of his piece), but there was plenty of noise in there. And Cromer himself has spoken of how the election was not born out of a desire to “undermine”. Our cityBut out of the urge to rediscover its inherent power, it inevitably became sentimentalized and worn down over the years. This fundamental drive – the sense of search for clarity, of the need to return to an old play to reveal its bright, undiminished heart – is what Kenny Leon's new Broadway production is missing. It's not painful, but it's far from enlightening. In a sense it's certainly moving in the middle of the road – get in, move on, get it over with and get out. But Leon (like many of the play's post-Cromer directors) also seems to be reaching for gestures to make this visit to Grover's Corners new and different, and the flourishes end up seeming tentative or confused without coming together. At the end of the show, he goes so far as to pipe the smell of bacon into the audience – the Cinnabon version of Cromer's innovation. Wilder insisted that his piece needed “only five square meters of board space and the passion to know what life means to us.” The man knew what it was about. Add frosting and you should know too.

Here comes the icing before the cake. Leon's production begins not with the stage manager (Jim Parsons), but with the town organist, the suffering alcoholic Simon Stimson (Donald Webber Jr.). Stimson solemnly walks over Beowulf Boritt's monochrome wooden monolith (boards, boards everywhere) and plays a few notes on a piano. He is gradually joined by the entire production ensemble, singing a piece called “Braided Prayer” by the interfaith music trio Abraham Jam. Everyone sings “Amen” in unison, but the singing continues – into the cell phone for some reason? A pair of actors hold up a phone selfie and sing another religious song while laughing and flashing peace signs. Another (Willa Bost) stares more calmly into her cell phone and sings “He's Got the Whole World in His Hands.” Bost has a beautiful voice – and what are we doing here? There's a strange “Hey family!” Coming soon Our city! Hit the Like button!” Sentiment for the proceedings, along with a large helping of the explicitly holy.

Of course, Our city already contains numerous references to faith as a central aspect of small-town American life. More significantly, part of Wilder's brilliance lay in his incredible flair for the long zoom. The play, he said, depicts “the life of a village against the life of the stars,” and the climax of the first act involves young Rebecca Gibbs (Safiya Kaijya Harris) excitedly telling her older brother George (Ephraim Sykes) about a letter says her friend Jane received: “It said: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover's Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America… But listen, it's not finished yet: the United States of America; continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the earth; the solar system; the universe; the Spirit of God.” That’s the game, right there. But in his opening sequence, Leon clings to the “God” part of this construction with a literalism that paradoxically keeps the scale of things all too human. The entire piece suddenly becomes a prayer, which seems like a misinterpretation of Wilder's cosmic vision. There may be a fine line between sacred reverence and universal reverence, but it is still a line.

The advantage of this Our cityParsons' prologue consists of allowing Parsons' stage manager to sneak into the action and mercifully begin his first speech without applause. What does it mean to include well-known television stars? Our city? What town will Grover's Corners, New Hampshire become? There were times when I felt like the “city” depicted here was actually the strange bubble of contemporary Broadway, where TV stars like Zoey Deutch (played by Emily Webb) and Katie Holmes (as her mother) do old-fashioned things Lives rub hands like Richard Thomas – who first appeared on Broadway in 1958 at the age of seven – or born stage artists like Sykes and Billy Eugene Jones. As the two fathers of the piece, Dr. Gibbs and Mr. Webb, Jones and Thomas are unsurprisingly a highlight. Both follow Wilder's rhythms and personalize them to get to the heart of the “continuous.” dryness of tone,” the playwright demanded in his notes. Holmes, meanwhile, feels a little lost and uncomfortable as she's constantly asked to mime putting on an apron and making breakfast, and a little too polished for a scene in which her daughter asks her, “Mama, were you?” “ You pretty?” Deutch has more control over Emily, but without any particular insight. Her voice is high and bright as a bell, and neither she nor her performance ever falters.

Then, at the center of it all, is Parsons, holding back a little, sporting a serious beard and a blue suit (Dede Ayite did the costumes, which have a collage-like, time-hopping quality that feels understandable as an idea but doesn't). additive in execution). His stage manager is, above all, feisty – he keeps things moveand there's nothing wrong with that. Like Thomas and Jones, Parsons steers clear of the maudlin attitude that can be Wilder's death knell. His eyebrow is always half-raised, and he deliberately underlines potentially tense moments, like the stage manager's description of the city's Civil War graves: “The boys from New Hampshire…had this idea that the Union should be held together, even though they had never seen it before.” more than fifty miles of it. All they knew was the name, friends – the United States of America. The United States of America. And they died because of it.” Like Deutch, Parsons doesn't quite hit the grand mark of the role's New England warmth, but he's a good companion and a wry, steadfast guide. As I watched him, I thought about how much Wes Anderson owes to Wilder. Then I started dreaming The Production.

This might be a bad review: A critic should review the production there! But with a play like Our city – where its enduring wonder lies in both its granular ordinariness and its immensity – the imagination will take flight. The spirit will expand with the material: “Our aspirations, our hope, our despair are in the spirit.” Whether a production does full justice to the piece is another question.

Our city is at the Barrymore Theater.