Beau Meyer
Newlyweds George and Emily (Tucker Penney and Emma Bahnson) with Stage Manager (Denzel Taylor).
Halfway through the first act of Thornton Wilder’s classic drama Our Town, the Stage Manager announces that a new bank is being built in Grover’s Corners. He asks the audience what should be placed in the cornerstone of the building so that people 1,000 years in the future will know something about those who populate the little New Hampshire town in 1903.
In some ways, Our Town itself is a perfect time capsule. Playing in the Hemsley Theatre through Oct. 29, University Theatre’s production captures life in a small town, played out in scenes that are probably familiar to anyone who grew up in a rural community. Paper boys delivering the morning edition. Farmers, doctors, policemen and newspaper men talking about the weather. Ladies gathering for choir practice at the church and gossip sessions that follow. People living “lives of quiet desperation,” with secret hopes unrealized, important conversations left unsaid, and disappointments buried.
Under the direction of Roseann Sheridan (artistic director of Children’s Theater of Madison), this production mostly follows traditional conventions. Thornton Wilder famously demanded that the play be performed with “no curtain, no scenery,” and that the Stage Manager speak right to the audience.
The actors (mostly undergraduates, some with no prior theater experience) gather around from all corners of the theater and follow the Stage Manager’s directions. The cast mimes entering and exiting houses, fixing dinner, weeding gardens, and going about their days. Cast members also provide sound effects — chiming in as chickens, train whistles and birds. Two ladders are used to signify upstairs bedrooms where teenage sweethearts George and Emily lean out their windows to talk to each other at night.
Our Town is a quiet play with a very long lead-up to its central point. Fortunately, this production has an excellent guide — Denzel Taylor as the Stage Manager. A fifth-year senior in the UW’s First Wave program, Taylor is charismatic, authoritative and a bit mysterious as he directs our attention to the scenes unfolding. Part magician, part omniscient narrator, he is unsentimental and determined to show us our common mistake, of taking our lives for granted.
As the naïve young couple at the center of the play, Emma Bahnson (Emily) and Tucker Penney (George) both do a fine job of communicating the awkwardness of youth, the impatience and uncertainty of young love, and the pain of being separated too soon. Penney imbues his part with real honesty and heart, while avoiding the “aw-shucks” small-town stereotype.
As Emily’s father and the editor of the town newspaper, David Pausch brings gravitas and texture to his character, representing the older generation. His scenes with Emily are especially touching, and his painfully awkward conversation with his future son-in-law on the morning of the wedding is one of the only truly funny moments in the play.
Costume design by MFA candidate Tia Taylor is hit and miss, as is the cast’s miming of their activities in the first two acts. The third act breaks this convention.
Wilder once commented that he disliked seeing productions of Our Town because “everyone performs it like it was a Christmas card.” This version mostly avoids that trap. And the third act’s pointed message about consciously examining our lives and truly appreciating the people around us feels modern and relevant, even though the play debuted in 1938.
