Their ‘Town’ Too

“Our Town,” Thornton Wilder’s classic American play about growing up, getting married and dying, takes place at the turn of the 19th century in the fictional New England hamlet of Grover’s Corners, N.H.

He based Grover’s Corners on no specific village but imagined it from several he knew: Peterborough, N.H., where he vacationed, nearby mill towns like Keene and, for one important scene, a rural cemetery he had glimpsed in Vermont.

Wilder, who died in 1975, said many times that he meant to evoke the commonplace flavor of daily life and, equally, to symbolize the universal human condition; he used stripped-down theatrical techniques dating to Shakespeare and earlier that depended not on realism but on what he termed “the reality of the mind.”

In his preface to the published script, Wilder offered “some suggestions for the director” underscoring his approach: “The scorn of verisimilitude throws all the greater emphasis on the ideas which the play hopes to offer.”

South Coast Repertory plans to go him one better. Its revival of “Our Town,” beginning previews tonight and opening Feb. 20, will have a large cast made up of African, Mexican, Asian and Anglo Americans--not remotely like any population you’d have found in rural New Hampshire in 1901.

The three principal characters will be portrayed by a black female actor who grew up in Texas (Kimberly Scott, as the stage manager, a white male role); another young black woman who grew up in Harlem (Sanaa Lathan, as Emily Webb, also a white role), and a Latino man born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and raised in Phoenix (Jesus Mendoza, as George Gibbs, white again).

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Purists may grumble. But Martha Scott, 84, who originated Emily on Broadway in 1938, says: “It’s already been done by many kinds of people. It’s one of the great things about the play--that it can be done differently.”

“Absolutely,” agrees Teresa Wright, 84, who understudied the role of Emily in that Broadway production, then played it on the road in 1939. “How the cast goes over will depend on the audience, of course. But if the actors are good, they can nail it.”

Mark Rucker, who is directing the SCR production, can’t go out and hire receptive playgoers but has gone out of his way to hire a quality cast, many of whom will make their SCR debuts.

For example, Kimberly Scott earned a Tony nomination in 1988 for her featured role in August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” Lathan was nominated last year for best-actor honors in the NAACP Theatre Awards for her role in “To Take Arms” at the Tamarind Theatre in Los Angeles.

Neither bats an eye at playing traditionally white roles.

Scott recalls doing many in Restoration pieces and Elizabethan dramas during her training at the University of Texas and the Yale School of Drama.

Lathan, also a Yale drama grad, says that regardless of her race and inner-city background, she can easily see herself as Emily.

“The play touches on so many big human issues,” she explained in a recent interview at SCR. “That first love between George and Emily is something we all can identify with.

“When I read this play I was [working out] on a treadmill. I had never seen the play. I had never read it. I’d heard about it, but that’s all. In the third act, I was sobbing--on the treadmill. I couldn’t help it.”

Scott added, “I don’t think in narrow terms of what Mr. Wilder has to say and how it connects to me. It would be a very narrow way of looking at the play if I thought of myself [only] as a young black woman from Kingsville in south Texas.

“At the same time, being from a small town, I recognize a lot of things in the play. Some I look at and go: Ding. Ding. Ding.”

She doesn’t have the slightest qualm about the gender reversal of her role, either.

Consider this: The stage manager, a mild Yankee curmudgeon given to philosophical observations, is often depicted smoking a pipe. It lends him masculine authority to go with his omniscience.

But, Scott quipped, a broad smile on her face and her big voice proof enough of her authority: “I don’t smoke a pipe.”

Like Lathan, she has never seen “Our Town.” Which is just as well, she said. “I’m kind of glad that it’s new to me. Right now it’s just me having this love affair with Mr. Wilder’s words. The poetry is astounding. I still weep when we go through it.”

Mendoza, who has seen the play, points out that the emotional catharsis of “Our Town,” which invariably reduces audiences to tears, “is what theater is all about.”

All three actors are delighted that the SCR production--being staged in the play’s customary style, with dramatic lighting but little scenery--will have traditional, sometimes elaborate, period costumes. (Mendoza will wear shirts with high turnover collars; Lathan will be laced into a white gown with a corset and petticoats for Emily’s wedding). By keeping in period, they say, they can better connect the present to the past.

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But their transformation into the Grover’s Corners townsfolk of a century ago “is not only [achieved] in the production values,” Scott asserted. “It’s because our multicultural cast is adept at handling the conceits of the play.

“You know,” she added, “people get the image in their minds that if it’s nontraditional casting, it’s got to be something modern.”

Scott shakes her head vigorously, as if to say: “No way.”

At the very least, she and her colleagues intend to change those minds.

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* “Our Town” previews tonight through Thursday and opens Feb. 20 at South Coast Repertory’s Mainstage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesday-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Pay-what-you-will performance will be Feb. 22 at 2:30 p.m. $18 (previews); $28-$43. Ends March 28. (714) 708-5555.

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* INAUSPICIOUS BEGINNING

1930s audiences initially rejected Wilder’s classic, but before long he had moved them to tears. F23