Trudie Lee

The cast of Our Town

DETAILS

Our Town by Theatre Calgary
Max Bell Theatre
Tuesday, January 15 - Sunday, February 3

More in: Theatre

Find It...

Max Bell Theatre

Call me a cynic, but I have never really warmed to Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town. I have found productions of the play to be overlong, tedious, saccharine and even a little smug. “They must have been giving out Pulitzer Prizes like Pez candies in the ’30s,” I’d mutter from my seat, while attending a number of productions over the years. For those that might not be familiar with it, Our Town is a strange mix of Brecht and Norman Rockwell, with an enormous cast and a minimalist set that makes it ideal for high school and university drama departments. I think that is the main problem —I now recall that none of the productions I saw were professional.

Having just seen Theatre Calgary’s version, I’m forced to re-evaluate my opinion of the play. Speeches that come off like long, dreadful list poems describing the town of Grover’s Corners can come to life in a whole new way if the right actor delivers them. And this is where TC’s Our Town really shines. In a way, it’s kind of a love letter to Calgary’s acting community, with a long list of familiar names and faces in the cast. Although the accents wandered a tad here and there, the cast is uniformly strong and helped bring out some of the amazing imagery in the writing in a tangible way.

Our Town is keenly aware of its own existence as a play, and is narrated with an abundance of folksy charm by a character called the Stage Manager (Dave Kelly). He introduces the characters, play and the town of Grover’s Corners, a peaceful and idyllic New Hampshire town. His detailed and poetic descriptive images take the place of a set, and a wide variety of colourful and strangely familiar characters fill in the canvas and give us a complete picture of small-town life. The primary focus of the play, however, is two young people who find each other in the midst of all of this nostalgic splendour and through the course of three acts, fall in love, get married and part from each other. It’s a minimalist microcosm of small-town ideals with a carpe diem theme that is hammered home particularly hard in the third act.

The entire ensemble does a terrific job with a play that can become sickly and plodding in lesser hands. Standouts include Elinor Holt as the sturdy Mrs. Gibbs, David Trimble with appropriate amounts of swagger and stagger as the haughty drunk choirmaster Simon Stimpson and the always reliable Duval Lang and Christopher Hunt as Doc Gibbs and Mr.Webb, respectively. Tyrell Crews brings the right amount of earnestness to his George Gibbs, and Kassia Warshawski manages to avoid most of the clichés and bring believability to Emily Webb, especially in the tricky third act that can come off as trite. Kelly is quite an interesting choice as the Stage Manager, as I had always pictured the character as more of a wise old Wilford Brimley type, but a more youthful performer helped to keep the pace moving a little quicker and made for an enjoyable theatre experience.

TC’s Our Town has turned me around on Thornton Wilde. My cynical side was turfed pretty early in Act 1 — even if the play is nostalgic for an America that I’m not sure ever really existed.