The good people of Grover’s Corners, N.H., didn’t see it coming in 1901, but there it was hanging over their heads: a white PowerPoint box with a computer command.
For a few seconds in the middle of a recent Portland State University production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the tech gods intruded.
There have been so many experimentations with Wilder’s Our Town that this minor glitch in the computer-generated background scene looked for a moment like it belonged there. But it was just one of those endearing flubs that make live theater special.
What would the citizens of fictional, small-town Grover’s Corners, whose ordinary lives are the center of Wilder’s universe, have made of a computer command telling them what to do?
“Wherever you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense,” the Stage Manager says at one point in the play. He’s an almost God-like character who oversees the comings and goings of the townspeople.
Portland State’s production was mostly a traditional rendering of Our Town.
What’s really curious is that this 1938 play, now regarded by some critics and playgoers as a chestnut, was performed this month in three different productions and venues in Portland. In addition to Portland State, Our Town was performed at Reed College and continues until Dec. 1 by the experimental Liminal Performance Group at The Headwaters.
“When I told the students, they were stunned,” Kate Bredeson, director of the Reed College production, said in an interview with Willamette Week about her decision to pick Our Town.
“It has this completely saccharine reputation as being this little high-school love story, when in fact I think it’s one of the darkest plays ever written.”
Our Town long ago became a staple of high-school theater because it’s cheap to put on. No scenery or props are required beyond chairs, ladders and tables, which the actors rearrange. The actors also pantomime actions such as stringing beans and sipping strawberry sodas.
Aside from economics, the play endures because it’s about how we don’t notice the life around us while we’re living. Wilder’s writing is superior. His play is worth reading; there are many fine lines that can get lost – especially when uttered by a nervous high school student.
I saw Portland State’s performance the night before the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, a week-long countdown that finally ended in a dirge of reruns and re-enactments.
All those photos of the youthful president and his beautiful, young wife – it was like seeing them through the eyes of Wilder’s character Emily. She dies at age 26 and aches to go back among the living. With the Stage Manager’s guidance, she revisits the day she turned 12.
The ordinary day begins like always with Emily’s mom in the kitchen preparing breakfast. In the First Act of the play, Emily and her brother rush through breakfast, and their mom lectures them: “I won’t have you gobbling like wolves. It’ll stunt your growth – that’s a fact.”
In the Third Act, the deceased Emily returns and looks on in amazement as her mother cooks breakfast: “Oh! How young Mama looks! I didn’t know Mama was ever that young.”
When her father enters the kitchen, Emily can’t bear it: “They’re so young and beautiful. Why did they ever have to get old? … I love you all, everything – I can’t look at everything hard enough.”
Her mother prattles on to her children: “I want you to eat your breakfast good and slow … Chew that bacon good and slow. It’ll keep you warm on a cold day.”
The dead Emily tries to get her mother to look at her: “Look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I’m dead. You’re a grandmother, Mama. … Mama, just for a moment we’re happy. Let’s look at one another.”
Watching the living take it all for granted is too much for the deceased Emily.
“Do humans ever realize life while they live it . . . every, every minute?” she asks the Stage Manager.
Several years ago, actor and director David Cromer staged a production of Our Town in Chicago, and in that scene the actress playing Emily’s mother actually fries real bacon. The smell of bacon and the sound of it sizzling in the pan aroused so much emotion that some members of the audience wept.
Before the start of the Portland State performance that I attended, the man sitting next to me who looked to be in his early 20’s chatted with an older woman beside him as she told him about the play.
“It’s like a sitcom?” I heard him say.
During the intermission, I asked him if he was enjoying the play.
“It’s interesting to see how things were back then,” he said.
And how things haven’t changed, I thought.
To this day, John and Jackie Kennedy seem more alive to me than some of my now-deceased aunts and uncles in South Dakota – men and women I only saw briefly when I was a kid and honestly never gave much thought to.
Our obsession with celebrity seemed to begin with the Kennedys. There were celebrities before, but the arrival of the Kennedys coincided with the expanded reach and immediacy of the media. Ordinary life for ordinary Americans became even more ordinary – and forgettable.
What would Wilder make of Americans and their virtual lives?
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
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