Milwaukee Repertory Theater goes all in with production of “Our Town.”
Like many people, Brent Hazelton first encountered “Our To wn” in school. “I was the worst George Gibbs in the history of Western theater when I was in college,” said Hazelton, not fully grasping how much competition he might have for that distinction. Not only is Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” the most successful play ever written by a Wisconsin native, it’s also been one of the most-performed plays in American theater since its Broadway debut in 1938. From the moment rights to produce the play became available, school and community theater productions of “Our Town” have flowed without ceasing. In the first 20 months after it closed on Broadway, nearly 700 theaters across the United States and Canada performed “Our Town,” according to Tappan Wilder, Thornton’s nephew and literary executor.
It has been one of the two most popular plays performed by high schools over the past eight decades, according to a National Public Radio analysis of survey data compiled by Dramatics magazine.
For the fourth time in its history, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater is staging Wilder’s play, famous for its bare-bones approach to set decor, its heartwrenching finale and the presence of the Stage Manager, a narrator who guides the action on stage. As director of the Rep’s new production, which begins April 10, Hazelton’s mission is to bring the people of Grover’s Corners to life again.
It’s a big job. The Rep’s production has a cast of 31 actors, including 8 children. It’s the second-largest cast the Rep has put on its Quadracci Powerhouse stage, trailing only its production of the musical “Ragtime.”
Hazelton said artistic director Mark Clements challenged him to create “an ‘Our Town’ for our town.”
That directive led not only to a multiracial cast but also one filled with veteran Wisconsin actors in secondary roles, such as American Players Theatre star James Ridge as Simon Stinson, the alcoholic church organist; Carrie Hitchcock as Professor Willard; and Jonathan Smoots as undertaker Joe Stoddard.
With familiar actors including Laura Gordon (as the Stage Manager), Chiké Johnson, Elizabeth Ledo, James Pickering and recent Scrooge Jonathan Wainwright also in the cast, it’s the equivalent of a Wisconsin theater all-star team.
“You get people that good and you don’t need a lot of text to tell the story, because they’re … telling it simply by existing,” Hazelton said.
The story they’re telling about this small town is not a sentimental or cutesy one, Hazelton insists. Wilder wrote a play “about how human beings just continually miss connections and never take advantage of any of the opportunities around them to know themselves better, to know their neighbors better, to connect more deeply with the world,” Hazelton said.
A passion for theater
Thornton Wilder was born April 17, 1897, in Madison, in an apartment at 14 W. Gilman St. His twin brother, who would have been named Theophilus, was stillborn.
His father, Amos, had purchased partial ownership of the Wisconsin State Journal and moved to Madison to edit it. The Wilder children played in a summer cottage on the shore of Lake Mendota, in what’s now Maple Bluff. The family attended Madison’s First Congregational Church, where Thornton was baptized and his father was a church deacon.
Wilder’s love of theater began early. Biographer Penelope Niven reports that his mother took him to his first play, a production of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” in Milwaukee.
Shortly before Thornton’s ninth birthday, the family moved to Hong Kong for his father’s first consular position; Amos would later serve in Shanghai. This began years of moves for Thornton, including a stint in a Chinese boarding school far from family.
Wilder’s second novel, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” (1927), made him famous and brought him an enormous income, which he used largely to support his siblings and parents, including the father who disapproved of his passion for theater. It also won him his first of three Pulitzer Prizes; when it comes to major awards, he is Wisconsin’s most-decorated writer.
But in that same time period, Wilder became disenchanted with American theater, believing it had lost vitality through too much attention to scenery and props that fixed productions in a specific time and place.
“In its healthiest ages, the theater has always exhibited the least scenery,” Wilder wrote in a preface for “Our Town,” pointing to the theatrical worlds of Aristophanes and Lope de Vega as evidence.
Wilder worked out his ideas in several one-act plays. In “The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden,” kitchen chairs stood in for an automobile. In “The Long Christmas Dinner,” a family suggests the passage of 90 Christmases without leaving the table. In “Pullman Car Hiawatha,” a Stage Manager opens the play with a speech, chalks the floor where chairs will stand in for berths, and later interprets the words of other characters for the audience.
Not long after his brother’s wedding in 1935, Wilder began writing a play he called “M Marries N,” in which a Stage Manager would act as minister for two young people in love. This germinal idea grew into “Our Town,” the village life of its mythical Grover’s Corners influenced by Wilder’s many summer visits to Peterborough, N.H.
Surprisingly, he wrote this all-American drama, with straightforward dialogue that countless high school students have since spoken, while corresponding with and championing the work of his friend Gertrude Stein, the avant-garde writer whom many found incomprehensible.
No scenery
The published play opens with short, memorable stage directions: No scenery. The Stage Manager describes the town in detail, walking here and there on the stage, filling the audience in on the background of characters.
The Stage Manager (Laura Gordon here) brings Professor Willard (Carrie Hitchcock) onstage to describe local geography, and Mr. Webb (Matt Zambrano), editor of the local newspaper, to offer a political and demographic report. (Note: Spoilers follow.)
In Act I, the audience meets the Gibbs and Webb families, particularly young George (Di’Monte Henning) and Emily (Cher Desiree Alvarez), who fall in love. In the second act, we see their courtship and wedding day.
In Act III, nine years later, Emily has died in childbirth. She emerges from the funeral procession in a white dress, and sits down on a chair in the cemetery among the dead who preceded her, next to her mother-in-law, Mrs. Gibbs (Elizabeth Ledo). In this vestibule of the afterlife, inspired by Dante’s “Purgatorio,” Emily perceives the penned-in condition of her loved ones back among the living. “They’re sort of shut up in little boxes, aren’t they?” she tells Mrs. Gibbs.
Film and television adaptations have brought the Stage Manager and the people of Grover’s Corners to many folks who have never stepped into a theater; a 1955 live TV musical starring Frank Sinatra as the Stage Manager introduced the song “Love and Marriage” to the world.
As popular as it was and is, “Our Town” has not lacked critics. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt called it original but also found it depressing. Contemporary theatergoers are more likely to complain it is too folksy or sentimental, which could be a function of how it is performed rather than the play itself.
It’s certainly not what Wilder had in mind. In a set of suggestions for directors, Wilder urged them “to maintain a continued dryness of tone — the New England understatement of sentiment, of surprise, of tragedy. A shyness about emotion.”
Hazelton seconded Wilder’s statement.
“He didn’t set it in Wisconsin for a very specific reason, we are more emotionally expressive than New Englanders,” said Hazelton, a Whitewater native.
Hazelton described the reticence baked into “Our Town” as a challenge for the actors. “The emotional vocabulary of the play is about wanting and almost continual self-denial, which is a really hard thing to play.”
Over the decades, the Stage Manager has been a showcase role for namebrand performers, including Hal Holbrook, Spalding Gray and Paul Newman (who played George Gibbs in the Sinatra TV version).
In 1971, Geraldine Fitzgerald was the first woman to play the Stage Manager. Helen Hunt has played the role on Broadway. In 2017, Milwaukee native Jane Kaczmarek portrayed the Stage Manager in a Pasadena Playhouse coproduction with Deaf Theatre West, with the play performed in both American Sign Language and spoken English.
Gordon, who is playing the role here, has performed in 85 Rep productions over the past 25 seasons.
“Wilder’s from here, so the work matters a little more to us, right?” Hazelton said. “This is a thing we have cultural ownership over. I’m from here, so it matters a little more to me.”
He is confident that a play written in the 1930s, before TV and the internet, still has plenty to say to contemporary audiences.
“It’s just full of simple, profound human truths. … One after another after another after another.
“If we’re still doing American plays from the 20th century in 200, 300 years, I think this is going to be the one that is going to get done.”
Portions of this article were adapted from “Wisconsin Literary Luminaries: From Laura Ingalls Wilder to Ayad Akhtar” (The History Press).