Down Town

Decades of reading plays and seeing them live, and somehow, without deliberately avoiding it, I have never seen or read Our Town. Probably most theater-goers have a similar tale to tell. Recently an actor friend told me he had never read or seen The Taming of the Shrew. I was actually pretty impressed that he had not only never read it (like most farces it plays better than it reads) but had somehow managed to avoid either being cast in or forced to see a production. These things happen. But I’m not entirely blank when it comes to Our Town. I have seen the 1940 movie, with a score by Copland, a film debut by William Holden, and some major (Wilder-approved) changes (Emily lives!). And now I’ve also seen Ned Rorem’s operatic version at Festival Opera in Walnut Creek (many thanks to TSt for getting me into the final dress rehearsal).

The play’s once unusual features (the bare set, the Stage Manager stepping outside of the action to comment on it, and the subtle dislocations of time) are now pretty much standard practice, but the play has strengths that outlive its innovations, though I have to say it doesn’t really appeal to me, which I’m sure is more of a comment on me than on the play. The whole thing is so wholesome, the people so wise and good in their little victories and big insights, so loving and profound, that frankly it creeps me out. (Shortly after seeing the Our Town movie I watched another film with a script by Wilder, Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, and it occurred to me that it was the dark reverse of Our Town, and I felt more comfortable with it.) Give me the David Lynch-style severed ear near the white picket fence and I can happily gorge on my (literal or metaphorical) popcorn. But show me the good-hearted sincerity of decent folk in small-town Americana where stern but loving Dads give sensible advice to their chore-neglecting, baseball-crazy sons and busy but big-hearted Mothers dispense deep wisdom while shelling peas and, I’m sorry to say, the flesh of this jaded ironist crawls with uncomfortable terror. The libretto by JD McClatchy doesn’t really help things by banishing some of those subtle dislocations of time (the geographical background and other such comments) to surtitles rather than the actual dialogue. (The surtitles zip by a bit too quickly to be legible – I don’t know if they were planning to change that before the official opening; the actual sung text is not surtitled, which makes sense in a small theater presenting a work in English.) Also, 1901 – 1913 was a lot closer to the play’s original audience than it is to us, and that passage of time makes Grover’s Corners more picturesque now than it probably would have been originally, or is meant to be. My memory of the movie is that it’s much darker than the opera – the troubled drunken organist and the gossipy neighbor seemed rueful here rather than tragic or vicious. On the whole the cast was on a very high level, with Marnie Breckenridge and Thomas Glenn outstanding as the young lovers. I thought Patrice Houston was particularly good as Mrs Gibbs, and Darla Wigginton without much to work with gave us the local Helen Lovejoy in Mrs. Soames. I didn’t like Richard Byrne as the Stage Manager; he kept pursing his face in a rubbery, condescending smile and he had trouble with some of the higher notes. The set is simple and effective, as is traditional for the piece.

Our Town is meant to be – must be, to succeed as more than a sentimental period piece – an accurate picture of life, both in its dailiness and in its profounder call to cherish every moment. Is life in this Grover’s Corners really what McClatchy and Rorem have experienced as life? I don’t know much about McClatchy, and I’ve never read Rorem’s famous diaries, but I suspect it isn’t. You may notice it’s taken me a while to mention the composer. I like a lot of Rorem’s songs (check out “Early in the Morning” on Nathan Gunn’s American Anthem CD). There were some beautiful moments in the opera. All of it was pleasing and suitable. In fact, it sounded exactly the way you’d think the music for Our Town should sound, which could be seen as either a triumph or a disappointment. Even with my limited experience of the play, most of what I was seeing lacked novelty for me. It’s strange that a new opera should already have the familiarity of Carmen or Tosca, and it might have to do with the beloved source, which is already a cultural given even to those who have never actually seen it. According to the playbill, it was Wilder’s nephew and the librettist who decided to turn the play into an opera, and they selected Rorem as the composer. Nothing wrong with a librettist taking the lead, but I got the feeling that Rorem wasn’t producing this out of any deep musical need. Even granted that Our Town is meant to unfold slowly, it takes too long for it to make sense as a sung rather than spoken piece. It’s all pleasant, but I kept thinking about the scene from Getty's Plump Jack that I saw at the Adler Fellow’s Gala last December. I think the combination of music and singing and dancing and poetry and action is the basic impulse of all drama (which is why opera will never die, people, only change), from the Greeks on (even the traditional Catholic Mass is basically a dramatic re-enactment set to music), but there are some things that are just more expressive when spoken. The Plump Jack text was Henry IV pt 2’s scene between Falstaff and Justice Shallow, and any actor could have expressed about seventeen different emotions in those lines, but the singers were limited to two or three, and lines that cried out for an individual twist or inflection were subsumed by the melodic line. It isn’t until Act 3 of Our Town, when Emily sings her farewell to the earth (and Breckenridge is just beautiful at that moment), that the piece really started making sense to me as a musical work.

I’m glad I went to Our Town; it’s worth seeing, but I’m not sure it’s worth seeing twice. Others might feel differently, of course. I’m even glad I went to Festival Opera, which, in my admittedly very limited experience with them, has absolutely the worst audiences around. You could film them for a pre-concert film on “How Not to Behave in the Theater,” which actually might be more useful than most of the pre-concert lectures.