Arts & Manners: Our Town

Washington, D.C., my new home, has obligingly been a more eventful theater town than New York in the early weeks of this season, although the Capital is more prone to create the Cultural Event than exciting theater on its limousined opening nights. At the Kennedy Center, several weeks of theater, music, ballet, and film were produced for the series “Shakespeare and the Performing Arts.” Then Ford’s Theater (where Lincoln was shot—now restored as a working theater) premiered a play it commissioned to begin the bicentennial celebrations, a play called The American Revolution: Part I. More substantial than these, however, is the Arena Stage Company’s production of two plays it recently performed in Moscow, under the sponsorship of the State Department’s Cultural Exchange Program.

The plays selected were Our Town and Inherit the Wind—thematic and somewhat romantic choices, and perhaps even a little tired. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, staged in our times, is likely to seem more a nostalgic American retrospective than it was created to be in 1938, sentimental though it is; its Stage Manager and its scenery-less settings—suggestive ladders and chairs against a bare backstage wall—no longer serve to provide the anti-illusionistic frame that once helped make Grover’s Corners, N.H. such a matter-offact microcosm. Audiences today are familiar with the freest of staging forms (such as Arena’s) and the freer dramatic forms which this play helped to encourage. In 1973 the ladders on which George Gibbs and Emily Webb sit in the moonlight have been prettily trimmed by designer Ming Cho Lee with the dark, polished rails and spindles of another, cozier era. And high in the background, Lee has suspended spoke-backed chairs, pendulum clocks, and oval frames as in a recent exhibit of early Americana at the Yale Art Gallery. As audiences seek out the fond and comfortable moments, the play becomes more of a romantic reverie than a metaphor for patterns of the American experience. The Arena production is serviceable, aside from the too professionally precocious renderings of George and Emily. Alan Schneider staged the work sensitively. As the Stage Manager, Arena veteran Robert Prosky presided nicely over the sometimes mellow, sometimes cloying evocation of “the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century.” In Moscow the play reportedly suffered from the poor, improvised translation audiences heard through earphones. The more melodramatic and schematic Inherit the Wind, familiar to the Russian public in translation and through the Spencer Tracy-Fredric March film, fared better.

GW

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Gary Jay Williams

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Washington, D.C., my new home, has obligingly been a more eventful theater town than New York in the early weeks of this season, although the Capital is more prone to create the Cultural Event than exciting theater on its limousined opening nights. At the Kennedy Center, several weeks of theater, music, ballet, and film were produced for the series “Shakespeare and the Performing Arts.” Then Ford’s Theater (where Lincoln was shot—now restored as a working theater) premiered a play it commissioned to begin the bicentennial celebrations, a play called The American Revolution: Part I. More substantial than these, however, is the Arena Stage Company’s production of two plays it recently performed in Moscow, under the sponsorship of the State Department’s Cultural Exchange Program.

The plays selected were Our Town and Inherit the Wind—thematic and somewhat romantic choices, and perhaps even a little tired. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, staged in our times, is likely to seem more a nostalgic American retrospective than it was created to be in 1938, sentimental though it is; its Stage Manager and its scenery-less settings—suggestive ladders and chairs against a bare backstage wall—no longer serve to provide the anti-illusionistic frame that once helped make Grover’s Corners, N.H. such a matter-offact microcosm. Audiences today are familiar with the freest of staging forms (such as Arena’s) and the freer dramatic forms which this play helped to encourage. In 1973 the ladders on which George Gibbs and Emily Webb sit in the moonlight have been prettily trimmed by designer Ming Cho Lee with the dark, polished rails and spindles of another, cozier era. And high in the background, Lee has suspended spoke-backed chairs, pendulum clocks, and oval frames as in a recent exhibit of early Americana at the Yale Art Gallery. As audiences seek out the fond and comfortable moments, the play becomes more of a romantic reverie than a metaphor for patterns of the American experience. The Arena production is serviceable, aside from the too professionally precocious renderings of George and Emily. Alan Schneider staged the work sensitively. As the Stage Manager, Arena veteran Robert Prosky presided nicely over the sometimes mellow, sometimes cloying evocation of “the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century.” In Moscow the play reportedly suffered from the poor, improvised translation audiences heard through earphones. The more melodramatic and schematic Inherit the Wind, familiar to the Russian public in translation and through the Spencer Tracy-Fredric March film, fared better.