Wilder's 'Our Town' an Exalting Experience

STRATFORD, Conn--"There is no man in America whose words will carry farther around the earth." So wrote Archibald MacLeish, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes, about Thornton Wilder, also a triple Pulitzer recipient. Yet Wilder's position in letters remains perplexing, for he is, at 78, something of a homeless and neglected was if.

He is the author of six novels and winner of the Gold Medal for Fiction. But ask novelists about him and they'll tell you he's a playwright. His Our Town, which premiered in 1938, has been performed more frequently than any other American play ever written. But ask theater folk to list a half dozen American dramatists and his name is unlikely to appear. Press them about Wilder and they'll tell you he's the novelist who wrote The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Wilder is a man of incredible learning in many subjects (such as the dating of Cope de Vega's early works, or Palestrina's technique of counterpoint), a master of classroom teaching, and a former professor at the University of Chicago and Harvard. But mention his name to scholars and they'll dismiss him as a creative writer. He can't win; praised by some, condemned by others, he is overlooked by most.

Wilder has written of his growing conviction that "the theater is the greatest of the arts." Over the years he has turned put a sizeable number of plays, running from three minutes to three hours. His position as a dramatist, however, rests largely on three full-evening works: Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth (a revival of which will open at the Colonial Theater in Boston on August 51, and The Matchmaker. A small number, to be sure: but Chekhov's rightly elevated rank as a dramatist tests on only four plays, while Webster, Wycherly, Sheridan, Beaumarchais, Biichner and Rostand enjoy renown on the basis of two each.

Turning to an American play for only the third time in its history, the American Shakespeare Theater has chosen to offer Our Town this summer. There are some who have proclaimed this the greatest of all American plays. I wouldn't subscribe to that verdict, but think it certainly ranks in the top dozen.

In some circles people take a condescending view of the work, meeting at its heavy doses of nostalgia, sentimentality, and homespun platitudes. But if the realm of art is wide enough to contain such bleak and pessimistic views of man and the world as Shakespeare's King Lear, Sartre's No Exit, and Beckett's Endgame, then it is wide enough to contain Wilder's warm, gentle, compassionate and hopeful approach. Wilder early reacted against the tradition of naturalism, with its emphasis on the seamy and sordid side of life, and has by nature tended to look through rose-colored glasses. But anyone who can't tell the difference between Our Town and a Kate Douglas Wiggin novel or an Andy Hardy movie is just plain obtuse.

In a second kind of reaction against slice-of-life dramaturgy and realistic settings, Wilder dispensed almost entirely with scenery and props. "In a 1941 exposition of his theory of drama, he said a play should be aimed at the group mind and be based on pretense. Later he wrote that "the novel is preeminently the vehicle of the unique occasion, the theater of the generalized one."

It was his belief that he could reach a wider audience by forcing each spectator to create his own setting from his imagination and his own personal experience, a more authentic reality thereby resulting. University was Wilder's goal, as he made clear near the conclusion of his off-the-cuff talk to 15,000 people at Harvard's 1951 graduation (at the end of which President Conant called Wilder's remarks "the most significant I have ever heard from an academic man on a commencement program"). Wilder stated: "All literature is one expression of one human life experience. And when James Joyce plays upon 24 languages as upon a clever [we shouldn't] find it preposterous. All the languages in the world are but local differentiations of one planetary tongue."

In Our Town Wilder brings the usually unseen Stage Manager on stage. We see him suggest the Locale--Grover's Corners. New Hampshire--by bringing in some plain wooden chairs and a couple of tables, to which are added, as needed, a plank and, for a second-story window scene, a pair of step ladders. The Stage Manager also narrates background for us, guides the players, bridges time gaps, comments on what happens, doubles as a druggist, minister and an unnamed the woman (in early drafts of the play he took on several of the children's roles to boot), and dismisses us after each act.

He serves besides as Wilder's mouthpiece; and, in fact. Wilder himself played the part for a fortnight on Broadway and occasionally there after in summer stock. In a way. Our Town is almost as much an illustrated lecture as a play.

Our Town struck its early audiences as highly unorthodox (partly because it lacked the normal theatrical suspense and conflict), but it was welcomed across the country in every city except Boston, where its chilly reception caused the run to be halved. Actually, Wilder's technique here evolved out of his own one-act plays of 1931, especially Pullman Car Hiawatha, where we find no scenery, minimal props, the versatile Stage Manager, and even the very name of Grover's Corners (located in Ohio this time, however), not to mention the prototype of Emily's valedictory apostrophe to the world.

Even so, Wilder claimed no credit for invention. In the preface to an edition of three of his plays, he says, "I am not an innovator but a rediscoverer of forgotten goods and I hope a remover of obtrusive bric-a-brac." In Elizabethan times, after all, Shakespeare's plays were performed with few trappings. One need only read the Prologue to Henry V. which is an eloquent apologia for this manner of staging.

But Wilder acknowledges a more important influence, namely, certain traditional types of Oriental theater. As a youngster Wilder lived and went to school in Shanghai and Hong Kong for a time. In the abovementioned preface he notes that in Chinese drama an actor may straddle a stick to suggest horseback riding, and that in the Japanese Noh theater a circling of the stage may stand for a long journey. He might have added that the centuries-old Noh drama uses no curtain and no change of lighting. The plays are acted with few or no props beyond a fan, which may represent a cup of wine or a deadly weapon. We know, too, that Wilder was deeply affected by seeing the art of Mei Lan-fang when the late Chinese star visited New York and moved many observers to proclaim him the greatest actor in the world. Mei was the supreme master of mime and symbolic gesture, and his dramas made do with the same kind of simple table and straight chairs that the Stage Manager brings in at the start of Our Town. When Our Town opened. Wilder wrote, in the New York Times. "The theater longs to represent the symbols of things, not the things themselves."

For all the attempts, in many of the plays of Brecht to keep the audience at a distance and emotionally uninvolved, through the use of didactic songs narrative, cardboard characterization, projected titles, and other devices, Brecht's content is often so potent that we are sucked up willy-nilly--as in Mother Courage and Galileo. Similarly, Our Town, despite its lack of verisimilitude, rarely falls to sweep us up into the lives of its simple characters; and anyone who cant sit through its (somewhat too short) final act with dry eyes is nobody I should care to know.

Wilder has himself carefully prescribed in the text the myriad details of staging, so that, at a basic level, there is not much a director need do. Thus it is a hard play to ruin, which explains part of its appeal to high-school and other amateur groups with their often untrained directors. Nonetheless, a skilled director and gifted players can raise Our Town to an exalting experience, and that is exactly what Michael Kahn and his charges have achieved here.

In one respect, Kahn has made a fascinating departure from Wilder's script. I refer to the matter of sound effects, where the director has out-Wildered Wilder--and I bet the playwright would applaud. While there are many things that Wilder does not want us to see, he does want us to hear them. Some of these are distant--like a whistling train, a factory work-whistle, and chirping crickets on a moonlit night. Others, however, are on-stage things that are wholly imaginary--like the milkman's horse and his clanking bottles, and Mr. Webb's lawnmower.

A number of the sounds are effected off stage in the usual way. But Kahn, in quite a few instances, brings stagehands into full view to stimulate the required sounds. So we see a man imitating a cock's crow at dawn; and another enters to ape a train whistle by blowing into a set of three wooden pipes. When an 11-year-old Joe Crowell appears to deliver the morning newspapers, we spot another fellow crouching to create a swish-plop on the stage floor with a wire brush and a soft beater, while Joe mimes the act of delivery. And, again, we watch someone make the sound of rattling bottles and clomping hooves although Howie Newsome's horse and milk-carrier are invisible.

Once more the Oriental theater provides a traditional counterpart. In the Kabuki theater of Japan not only is it obligatory to have a group of geza of musicians, just off stage, to simulate conventional sounds on a host of percussion instruments, but there are also special stagehands, called Kurogo, who render all manner of assistance to the actors in full view of the audience. These Kurogo are dressed and veiled in black, to indicate that we are to pretend they are invisible.

The cast of players who portray a sizeable sample of the 2642 inhabitants of Grover's Corners touchingly and devotedly serve the script that Wilder said was "an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life." The characters all talk pretty much the same way, but Wilder could not have fashioned their colloquial speech without a keen ear and much hard work.

Best of all is the Stage Manager of Fred Gwynne, who, under Kahn's guidance, maintains just the right pacing, and captures the proper folksiness. He is not afraid of pauses, whether to light his pipe or to contemplate what he wants to say next. In a couple of places he changes Wilder's words, updating a reference to "the treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight" to "atom bombs and Apollo flights."

He has a winning way of putting over his occasional aphorisms, such as. "Wherever you come near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense." Or the notion put forth in a couple of passages near the start of Shaw's book-length preface to Misalliance, which Wilder, having the Stage Manager attribute it to "one of those European fellas," distills into an epigram. "Every child born into the world is nature's attempt to make a perfect human being."

Although born and raised in New York City (and a 1951 graduate of Harvard), Gwynne has mastered his small-town New Hampshire accent to absolute perfection. The consistency and authenticity of his diction are uncanny. I've never seen so fine a Stage Manager. And this is the best work Gwynne has ever done--a flawless performance.

Not far behind in Richard Back us as George Gibbs, the not-so-bright high-school student who falls in love with Emily next door, marries her, and loses her during childbirth. Having graduated from Harvard eight years ago, he has now turned 30; but the years have been kind to him, and he has no trouble passing for a lad half his age. He comes by his accent naturally, since he was born and raised in Goffstown, New Hampshire, which is near add not unlike the Grover's Corners that the Stage Manager so precisely pinpoints as to longitude and latitude. Backus' George is admirable all the way from awkward adolescence to bereaved husband. A useful preparation for this role was Backus' appealing portrayal, at Harvard's Loeb Theater in 1970, of the similar small town New England teenager who is the focus of O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! (a revival of this lovely play opens tonight at Boston University's Summer Repertory Theater).

Less impressive though generally laudable is Kate Mulgrew as Emily, the object of George's affection. She is at her best in Act I, called "Daily Life," and Act II, called "Love and Marriage." Especially effective is her handling of the drugstore scene, in which Emily is ill-at-ease and nervously kneads her fingers. It is to the demands of the final act that she does not fully rise. This is the rainy cemetery scene in which the dead articulate their thoughts (an idea Wilder got from the early cantos of Dante's Purgatorio) and Emily returns from the dead to relive her twelfth birthday (a device Wilder had already tried in his novel The Woman of Andros). Here Miss Mulgrew fails to evince the intensity and luminosity that better actresses have managed to summon.

William Larsen is a shrewd Doc Gibbs, and makes the first act's most touching moment--in which he gently chides his son for allowing Mother Gibbs to chop the wood--a memorable vignette. Eileen Heckart, with her always expressive face, is a dotingly solicitous Mother Gibbs, and is carefully to speak of her husband's hobby as the Civil Waw. Lee Richardson and Geraldine Fitzgerald, as Mr. and Mrs. Webb, are all right but not outstanding.

John Glover understands the nature of Simon Stinson, the church organist, who amusingly overdoes his final consonants to remind his chair members how to enunciate their hymn texts. Stinson is also the town drunk, and his pack of troubles eventually drives him to suicide. Wilder quietly makes a strong point by not only including him among all the other decreased townfolk in Act III but by placing him in the front row of the dead. The handling of the other minor roles ranges from adequate to capable. And Lawrence Casey's costumes nicely evoke the period covered, which is from 1899 to 1913.

The play will surely be current in 1999 and 2013; but I can't think of a better time than 1975 to make Our Town your town.

[Ed. Note--The drive to the Picturesque American Shakespeare Theater's grounds on the Housatonic River takes about two and a half hours via the Massachusetts Turnpike. Interstate 86 and 91, and the Connecticut Turnpike to Exit 32 or 31. Performances in the air conditioned theater tend to begin rather promptly at 2 p.m. or 8 p.m., and a quartet of singers offer madrigals on the lawn beforehand. There are hands free facilities for picnickers on the premises.]