Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is rarely seen on the professional stage, at least for a play of its reputation (by comparison, there have been two major productions of The Skin of Our Teeth in New York in the last seven years).  Its depiction of small-town life around the turn of the twentieth century is remembered as quaint and nostalgic, a misconception aided by the tendency to lob off the final act.  The first act is titled “Daily Life,” the second “Love and Marriage,” the third “Death and Eternity.”  Losing the third makes it easier to view Grover’s Corner, New Hampshire, through rose-tinted glasses.

But in all three acts, Our Town is written in the past tense.  Only moments after it begins, the Stage Manager (Jim Parsons), who also serves as narrator, describes a passing boy as a bright student who will die in France before realizing his potential as a great engineer.  Wilder’s view of nostalgia is not uncritical; he knows that it is always clouded by loss.  Every love story is a ghost story, as David Foster Wallace would later write.

The new Broadway revival, directed by Kenny Leon, has some strong performances, especially Parsons, whose southern twang has an appropriate small-town feel, even if it doesn’t have geographical accuracy, and whose somewhat formal and alien physicality helps separate him from the rest of the cast.  In this production, the Stage Manager seems to come from the graveyard; he knows everything that will happen to these characters, and he watches them with what seems like grief.

However, the choice to favor minimalist design—one that feels inevitable in these lean times—ultimately fails to create a sense of space.  The graveyard, with tombstones that double as chairs, is the only permanent set.  The actors mime to accommodate the lack of props, but they do not do this with consistency or specificity; the haphazard execution reminds us that the characters live in a real world with real objects, but it never makes us believe it.  Furthermore, Katie Holmes, playing Myrtle Webb, delivers her lines with the monotonous enthusiasm of an actor doing voiceover for a children’s cartoon.  It is quite distracting and makes it difficult to listen to the scenes she’s in.

Still, I appreciate the revival, since Our Town is a major American play that has been restricted to school and community theater productions.  If this one disappoints, well, perhaps it will enable the next to follow.

Our Town runs through January 19th at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.  243 West 47th Street  New York, NY.  1 hour 45 minutes. No intermission. Photograph by Daniel Rader.