It’s seldom that a director follows well an author’s stage directions as closely as Desdemona Chiang follows Thornton Wilder’s now-classic ones. What the Asolo Rep production differs from is the stylistically realistic movie version of Our Town,.
Traditionally, the Stage Manager has basically been a Narrator speaking from the house side of the stage, joining in the central activity on but a few occasions (once as a minister, for example). Here Kenn E. Head mostly talks to the audience from downstage center or flips around, usually as a guide interpolating past explanations for a present action. Excellent directorial blocking and Head’s personality-infused performance thus contribute greatly to audience following the play’s complete action.
Two families contribute the central characters, teenagers George Gibbs and Emily Webb (effective Alex Benito Rodriguez and Caroline Mixon) , to be followed over a period of a dozen years. She’s at top of her high school class. Though less of a student, George is an excellent baseball player, very popular with the guys.
Greg Watanabe comes over realistically as George’s father, Dr. Gibbs who may be a bit overworked as Grover’s Corners’s physician, but comes home to a very supportive wife. Summer Dawn Wallace presents her as mainly occupied with cooking and housekeeping, but also as a loving mother to George and typically younger sister Rebecca (Jamie Saunders with an impressive speech highlighting the place of Grover’s Corners in the Universe).
Next door to Gibbs’ home live Emily’s family, headed by Gregg Weiner’s authoritative Mr. Webb, who edits the town’s newspaper. His wife is another dedicated homemaker, spouse, mother (also to young son Wally, played by Asolo veteran young actor Asher Woomert). But Diane Coates as Mrs. Webb also often injects sensible comments, even directly to the audience, on happenings, especially involving George and Emily.
In each of three acts, years apart, George and Emily follow a path together that was not anticipated when they were teenagers nearing high school graduation. He especially had a change in his educational and vocational plans. Did this line up with how the other people of Grover’s Corners fared?
Supporting actors portray the Townspeople—from Milkman to Choir Director to Gossip to Professor. Like all the actors, even the ones playing the milkman and the newsboy who throws the papers on subscribers' doorsteps, mime their activities. No Movement Coach or Director is indicated in Asolo Rep’s handout of a two-sided page from a web program, so one must credit the good, important miming done or assigned to Director Desdemona Chiang.
Outstanding in the technical parts of the production is the lighting, so varied in Xavier Pierce’s scheme. This includes a spectacular ending starlight scene. It may seem that there’s no scenery but, as my Scenic Imagination Professor Mordecai Gorelik always said, the scenery is whatever’s being performed in or on. Asolo Rep’s sometimes includes parts of audience spaces in its production of Our Town that seem appropriate.
It’s sometimes said that very little that’s dramatic happens in Thornton Wilder’s major play. On the contrary, what happens in the main plot is life, marriage, and death, with an implied message that these and their components constitute the stuff of a drama worth appreciating. Asolo Rep certainly has recognized that.
