by Thornton Wilder

Don Hampton & Jennifer Gilbert in Our Town

Theatre Review - by Everett Evans - Houston Chronicle

Let's say you're launching a new theatre company in a suburban enclave about 30 miles northwest of downtown Houston.You need an opening play that is safely familiar and traditional, with wide appeal. Yet it must have artistic validity as well. Ideally, for an innaugural show, you want a work that will be revelatory to those encountering it for the first time, yet just as welcome and meaningful to those encountering it for the 50th.In short, you couldn't choose a more suitable play than Our Town, Thornton Wilder's beloved, Pulitzer Prize-winning classic. And that's how Artistic Director Craig Miller is opening the new Texas Repertory Theatre.

Our Town is foolproof, providing that it is capably staged and honestly performed. Miller's clean, decisive direction and his well-chosen cast meet those requirements, and the results are predictably potent.

Our Town depicts the village of Grover's Corners, N.H., in the early years of the 20th century. The play focuses on two neighboring families: Dr. Gibbs, his wife and her children, George and Rebecca; and town newspaper editor Mr. Webb, his wife and thier children, Emily and Wally.The omniscient Stage Manager narrates, providing history, statistics, and philosophical asides. He places the trivial details of ordinary lives within the cosmic continuum, revealing universal trurths through thier everyday routines.

Act I depicts a typical day in 1901. Besides establishing the two families, it sets up the incipient romance of adolescents George and Emily. Act II takes place three years later, on George and Emily's wedding day. Amid thier hopes, fears, and last-minute panic, a flashback shows the moment, a few years earlier, when they realized they were meant for each other. Act III takes place nine years later, in the town cemetary. Emily has died in childbirth.

As George and other mourners cluster around her grave, Emily joinsthe dead, who sit on chairs and speak impassively of growing ever more distant from the passions of the living. Discovering that she can return to relive part of her life, Emily is warned against it by the others. Choosing to relive her 12th birthday, she soon finds it unbearable because she is now aware of the preciousness of every moment of life, as she realizes the living can never be.

"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it-every, every minute?" she asks the Stage Manager.

"The saints and poets, maybe" he replies.

Emily bids a final farewell to the world and returns to her grave, as the Stage Manager reflects on the stars "doing thier old criss-cross journeys in the sky".

Out Town stands as Wildre's ,asterpiece, although his earlier novel, The Bridghe of San Luis Rey and his subsequent experimental play The Skin of our Teeth also won Pulitzers.

One could quibble about the homespun philosophy and sentiment, yet Our Town is so inspired in its content and structure that it remains unique, timeless, and indestructible. The details are telling, the gentle humor sure, the pathos affecting. Wilder's gradual, insistent layering of little incidents and larger implications ultimately achieves something profound and moving.

Steve Fenley makes the Stage Manager aptly colloquial yet unsdentimental, even stern at times. He brings a matter-of-fact bluntness to his narrative duties, nicely understating such richly lyrical passages as his description of the cemetary.

Jennifer Gilbert's Emily may seem a tad self-consciously adorable in early scenes, but blossoms into a bright young woman of deep emotion and eagerness for life. Her graveyard scene and farewell to life are especially charged with graceful yearning. Ryan Schabach's boyishly winning George, shy and decent, makes an ideal match for Gilbert's Emily.

Don Hampton exudes folksy authority (and the production's most pronounced New England accent) as Mr. Webb, with Ellen Perez bustling and maternal as his wife. Josh Morrison makes a relaxed, confident Doc Gibbs, with Lyndsay Sweeney an industrious and understanding Mrs. Gibbs. Other capable portrayals include Julia Traber's fluttery gossip and Patrick Jenning's embittered town drunk.

Texas Rep should have a successful launch with its sincere rendition of this poignant play. Few theatrical locales hold up so well to return visits as Our Town.