Thornton Wilder, a contemporary of Faulkner and Hemingway, a minister's grandson, onetime prep-school teacher, Yale graduate, peripatetic world traveler, thrice-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, silent homosexual, fictional conjuror of both Julius Caesar and Dolly Levi (who would become famous in the musical adaptation Hello, Dolly!), fluent in several foreign languages and literatures, wrote at a time when writing mattered. Armed with nothing more convincing than the writer's customary grab bag of fiction, drama, and journalism, Wilder turned the daily detritus into cosmic questions about faith, history, America, individualism, home and hometowns. His oeuvre fits in between Sherwood Anderson's small-town citizenry and Sinclair Lewis's stink-eye view of humanity, as much as it does between American literature's tradition of didacticism going back to Emerson and European-applied modernism. He is not the writer one supposes, if all one knows is his 1938 play, Our Town, which opened on January 30 in a bold new production at the Coterie Theatre, directed by Jeff Church. Wilder was, well, wilder than his positioning as a between-world-wars serious thinker would suggest, though there was much to face decade after tumultuous decade throughout his fifty year career. A realist as well as a fabulist, Wilder was something of a sorcerer's apprentice.

On paper, Our Town appears to mix Hawthorne's romances with Andrew Wyeth's pictorial realism: ghosts align with vivid impressions of people and places from the past. Yet its famous device of doing away with conventional stagecraft, making do with a ladder, chairs and tables moved on and off the stage-in the Coterie's production, doing without a stage at all, really, placing the actors inside a circle of theatergoers-and employing a Stage Manager who speaks directly to the audience, propels the play beyond the confines of characters onstage and the illusion of the curtain. Reading, say, Beckett or O'Neill is a vastly different experience from seeing their work performed; the absurdity and the ferocity of the performances register the real transformations. So it is with Thornton Wilder's plays: the plots are often not what they appear to be, and it is up to the actors and the crew to upend expectations. Church's commitment to the original production, down to its two intermissions between the three acts, works impressively. Each act is central to the other two; in giving the audience breathing room to digest what it has seen (and to contemplate what is to come, since the Stage Manager foretells the audience what each act is titled and when it takes place) Church builds anticipation, like that of a Greek tragedy.

The play's conceit-to make a story in a small northeastern town called Grover's Corners, in the early years of the 20th century, in which a young couple fall in love, marry, and the new wife subsequently dies in childbirth, reverberate with the measure of epic dimensions of Greek tragedy-when, played right, comes across gradually, like night falling. The Stage Manager role, variously portrayed by Paul Newman, Spalding Gray, even Sinclair Lewis, is handled confidently at the Coterie by Walter Coppage. Versatile (he recently played Bob Cratchit in the Kansas City Repertory Theatre's A Christmas Carol) and gifted with the stentorian tone of James Earl Jones, Coppage's Stage Manager weaves in and out of the audience with a wink and a nod at humanity's passing follies. "Nice town, isn't it?" he pronounces early on: he knows the entire story we are about to see, and hits the right note between irony and elegy.

Wilder, presumably because of the international impact of Our Town, is judged to be a writer of Americana; in truth, only a few of his plays and novels deal with America, and even then not strictly in the vein of realist fiction and drama as practiced by Sinclair Lewis, Arthur Miller, and latterly by John Updike, whose own sense of human quiddity (especially in the fictional milieu substituting for his childhood town of Shillington, Pennsylvania, re-imagined in his Rabbit novels) can be traced back to Wilder's imprint. So if the first act of Our Town sets up daily life in Grover's Corners, introducing the main characters such as young George Gibbs (Todd Carlton Lanker), the budding son of a doctor's family, and his neighbor Emily Webb (Ashlee LaPine), the introduction of passing characters, like the newspaper boy, Joe Crowell, Jr. (Brock Lorenzen), portend the mysteries-to-come: the Stage Manager, almost as an afterthought, tells the audience how Joe will die in the World War One. We have barely met him, but that is Wilder's point. None of us know what the day will bring, but sorrow is at the top of the list.

The play's success continues to come from both its expected and unexpectedness. Only a year separates the first two acts, and if the portents of doom are laid out initially, they are dramatized yet made more human in Act Two, when George and Emily's wedding takes place. The director uses lighting and the actors' marks to keep the audience looking and turning for the action; life is being lived faster. The almost slapstick pace recalls an Ionescu comedy. The young lovers' fears are a metaphor for leaving home; and home here represents life-"he that's not busy bein' born is busy dyin'," as Dylan sings. Wilder cuts between the past and the present effortlessly (with few props there is no burden for scene changes) to fill in his characters' lives; it shakes up the audience accustomed to a linear narrative, and fulfills the play's aim to intertwine life and death, happiness and sadness, futility and faith.

The mastery of the play's concept arrives finally with the last act, set in the town cemetery, as the dead-neatly composed by Church with a half of dozen actors sitting on chairs facing one direction, staring forward even when someone speaks-appear the most lifelike to the audience. After seemingly to start from real life, when, really, with the sketched-out stage directions and invisible props and the Stage Manager's commentary, the opening is fairly abstract, by the end when Emily has joined other Grover's Corners dead souls, the solidness of their dialogue and the force of the tragedy's inexorability overwhelm what on paper appears abstract. The gradual ratcheting up of Emily's posthumous self-awareness, particularly her fear that she has missed out on life, has the chill of a Bergman film. Her request to travel back to an early birthday is, like Scrooge led backward by the Ghost of Christmas Past, all the more painful because she knows she can change nothing. The scene between Ms. LaPine and Shelley Wyche, as Mrs. Webb, who talks endearing nonsense to her daughter (but not the real daughter, who is now dead), reverberates all the more poignantly. The actors never overreach the playwright's sentiment, even when some of the lines ring like proverbs. Dead is dead, and yet-it is that "and yet" which distinguishes Wilder's vision. What if one is most alive when one does not know it? Wilder never settled on a definitive belief about life or religious issues; it bothered him but it also made him into an artist.

Looking back at a drama of plain folks touched with the magnificence of fallen angels, the audience is left with an emptiness yet equally with an epiphany that life is, indeed, like a play done without props. Improvising and wishing and hoping for the best are what get us through our last acts.


REVIEW:
The Coterie Theatre
Our Town
By Thornton Wilder
Directed by Jeff Church
Runs January 27 - February 20, 2009
Call or visit the website for performance times.
The Coterie Theatre at Crown Center, Grand and Pershing, Kansas City, MO
For tickets call 816-474-6552 or online at www.coterietheatre.org 

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups.