Our Town Lookingglass Theatre Company
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Like his equally misunderstood friend Robert Frost, Wilder wasn’t as cuddly as he’s come to seem. The play’s three acts—covering daily life, marriage, and death over the course of a dozen quiet years—present a pleasant enough picture of turn-of-the-century small-town America, with its fundamentally decent inhabitants and moonlit, heliotrope-scented evenings. But darker currents glide beneath. The alcoholic church organist Simon Stimson remains a tormented outsider throughout. The wedding of high school sweethearts George Gibbs and Emily Webb is marred by their stark terror in the face of an uncertain future. And in the last act, Emily, who has died in childbirth at 26, begs to reexperience just one day of her life only to find she can’t bear her family’s apparent obliviousness to the world’s transience. “Now you know,” jeers Simon when her spirit returns to the cemetery. “That’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.”
Still, as another dead soul tells Simon, “That ain’t the whole truth and you know it.” Wilder imbues the play with a sense that life’s smallest events are themselves imbued with a universal beauty, despite—or maybe because of—their impermanence. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Wilder only became a New Englander as an adult, but he understood transcendence as well as Emerson or Thoreau ever had.
But the point isn’t merely to put together a show unlike any the company has done before. By casting many of the company’s longtime and founding members, 20 years after its inception, to perform a play about the fleeting nature of life in a close-knit community, the directors seem to be aiming for an elegy to times past. This is different from what Cromer was up to, but a potentially rich approach nonetheless. As the characters progress toward the eternity of the tomb, Thebus and Shapiro invite us to consider where the Lookingglass members fit along their lives’ trajectories, now that they’ve graduated from youth and started staring down middle age. Laura Eason, for example, plays teenager Emily Webb not as a kid but as a fortysomething woman playing a kid, regarding her algebra homework and ice cream soda with a tender, rueful awareness that they won’t last. David Schwimmer pairs George’s searching teenage confusion with a sad-eyed weariness no adolescent could possibly feel.
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