"Our Town" by the Hypocrites on May 10th in Chicago

Apparently "Our Town" is the most performed show in the United States. I'd assumed that was because it calls for no set or costumes and because high school drama departments perform it so often. Having last seen and loving it in high school, I had no interest in every seeing it again -- the way those of us who have since discovered "The Sound and the Fury" and " Mrs. Dalloway" can't be bothered with "A Separate Peace." When the Hypocrites announced they were going to produce"Our Town" I was excited and scared. Excited to see what they would do with a play that I thought was such a dud and afraid that the play would out wrestle them with its over the top emotionality. What happened instead is that this production made clear what the Hypocrites do: bring the feeling of discovery to timeworn texts that audiences must have felt when they were still new. It's a rediscovery of texts that endless unimaginative productions have robbed of their vitality and originality. It's an incredible production with exuberance and restraint at the same time.

As you probably know, "Our Town" is a play in three acts. The first act gives a sense of what general life in the town is like, the second act is about love and marriage (including that of the protagonists), and the third acts deals with the death of some of the townspeople. Mostly, though, the play seems to be about the way that we live our lives blind to beauty and the things people "up there" live in little boxes, suggesting that we live in darkness and solitude, in a state akin to death. The third act, when Emily goes back to relive the day of her 13th birthday, makes that very clear. Her mother has gone to the trouble of getting her a gift she knows Emily will love but spends the whole morning cooking and never speaking directly to her daughter. There are other examples of this throughout the play, though. For example, the choir conductor who is likely gay but lives in a loveless marriage for the sake of societal convention. The loneliness of such a life has led him to alcoholism and despair.

Two things give this production its strength: the depth of the director's insight into the text and the production's restraint. Rather than playing the emotions large, the performances are controlled, almost quiet. In the scene where Emily goes back to her 13th birthday she doesn't scream and sob. Once she realizes that her time spent with her family won't be emotionally satisfying, she seems to want to get the hell out. She conveys this with a certain quality in her voice and an energy in her body but it's very controlled. The director, David Cromer, has cut about half the stage manager's lines, suggesting that audiences today are in a different place than they were in 1930's and didn't need to be told as much.

The action of the play alone is wonderful. This is a play, though, that calls for no sets or costumes. And the device of having a stage manager who speaks directly to the audience must have been quite a shocker when the play was first produced in 1938. What I found most interesting, though, is the way time works in the play. The third act is in some ways the future. In it, we see the past (Emily's return to her 13th birthday) and the future (the death of many of the townspeople). While times passes between each act and so the third act is rally just what happens after the second act, it feels as if the second act is the present. In Act III, when Emily decides to go back, the stage manager tells her that it won't be the same because she knows the future. We see the impact of the future on the past.

Perhaps one of the greatest strengths of the production is Cromer's stage manager. he not only sets up the scenes but by the second act he sort of comes out of the play. Rather than remaining detached, he seems emotionally involved with what's happening. Not so much in what he's seeing on stage but rather with what he's showing the audience. In Cromer's production, the action takes place in every square inch of the theater, which is to say very much among the audience. The play is a cautionary tale he is telling the audience and he tells it with an undercurrent of emotion. You see his frustration at our blindness and his warning to us. That might very well be the most jarring thing in the production. The play sets itself up as a play, constantly reminding us of its artifice. In this production, it goes one step further. It points out that this is indeed a play but one that exists to warn us about how little of life we experience and how much we throw away. The play exists not to entertain but to warn.