Stretching Borders of ‘Our Town’ Offers Sad Insight

Director Mark Rucker reminds us right away that this is theater, not life. When the audience files in for his new production of “Our Town” at South Coast Repertory, we see actors behind a scrim at the back of the stage, sitting at make-up tables, applying eyeliner, chatting, doing crossword puzzles.

Once the play starts, Rucker reminds us afresh of theater artifice--he has cast the play with no thought to racial or ethnic lines, making families of black, Latino, white and Japanese-American actors. He announces that “Our Town,” an American masterpiece, is for all actors. And, for better or worse, in ways both intentional and unintentional, Rucker proves that good acting is in fact all that matters in the life of a play.

As Thornton Wilder created them, the nice, white people of Grover’s Corners, N.H., were neatly segregated at the beginning of the century. The Congregational Church sits across the street from the Presbyterian, and the Polish and “Canuck families” live on the other side of the railroad tracks.

These distinctions are pointed out by a narrator called the Stage Manager. Wilder envisioned him as a man; here the role is played by Kimberly Scott, an African American woman in contemporary, casual, baggy clothes. Instead of the hat and pipe called for by Wilder, she wears a stopwatch around her neck, which gives her the breezy efficiency of a girls’ basketball coach.

The Stage Manager is our guide into the heartbreaking, ordinary lives of the folks in Grover’s Corners. Scott plays the role with an offhand air, occasionally conspiratorial, which makes little impression. As she stretches out her arm imprecisely to point out an unseen row of stores near the town center, she doesn’t seem to see the stores there; the stores seem entirely theoretical to her. Watching her, one wonders why Rucker cast her instead of someone else equally wrong for the part. Therein lies the burden of Rucker’s concept: In nontraditional casting, we can’t help but expect the actor to have some particular affinity for the role.

And yet along comes the luminous Sanaa Lathan, the young black woman playing Emily Webb, the archetypal American girl. Emily falls in love with the boy next door, George Gibbs, marries him and then dies in childbirth at 26. Unlike her co-star Jesus Mendoza, who plays George, Lathan never pushes the youth or innocence of her character. Her Emily effortlessly crosses the line between archetype and specificity that Wilder created with so much beauty.

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The rest of the cast is likewise uneven. Kirk Taylor and Jennifer Parsons form a credible partnership as Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs. Armando Jose Duran is solid as the kind Mr. Webb, editor of the town newspaper, but Emily Kuroda is flat as his wife. As Simon Stimson, the alcoholic choir director that the town tolerates with pity, Gregory Millar gives an arresting performance. He creates a tightly wound man with hair that, despite being firmly parted and brilliantined, seems to want to rise straight up off of this woeful Earth. As he leads the town choir, his long, stiff hands reach futilely for a kind of music that the townspeople can never get right.

Rucker’s larger point about the play is eventually made in the play’s sublime third act, which takes place in a graveyard on a hill above Grover’s Corners. In this famous scene, the dead of the town wait, in remote stasis, for “something they feel is coming.” They find the Earth uncomfortably stimulating to contemplate--it’s vulgar, all that feeling that “live people” have.

Here, Wilder writes some of his finest poetry, employing the understatement of the dead to describe the plight of human beings who can never understand the terrible beauty of life as they live it.

“From morning till night, that’s all they are, troubled,” Emily observes as she sees a bereaved husband lay a flower on the grave of a beloved wife.

Rucker’s production reminds us of something not in Wilder’s text--that for us, the differences that cause us grief are wider than any in the neat town of Grover’s Corners. Uneven acting notwithstanding, Rucker and his interracial cast remind us that all of our differences are equally sad and meaningless from the Olympian hillside where the dead watch over us.

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* “Our Town,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7:30 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2:30 p.m. Ends March 28. $28-$43. (714) 708-5555. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.

Kimberly Scott: Stage Manager

Kirk Taylor: Dr. Gibbs

Daniel DeMarco: Joe Crowell

Greg Watanabe: Howie Newsome

Jennifer Parsons: Mrs. Gibbs

Emily Kuroda: Mrs. Webb

Jesus Mendoza: George Gibbs

Julie Garcia: Rebecca Gibbs

Jonathan Lau, Alex Mehra: Wally Webb

Sanaa Lathan: Emily Webb

Hal Landon Jr.: Professor Willard

Armando Jose Duran: Mr. Webb

Mercy Vasquez: Woman in the Balcony

Juan Monsalves: Man in the Auditorium

Jenny McGlinchey: Lady in the Box

Gregory Millar: Simon Stimson

Martha McFarland: Mrs. Soames

Art Koustik: Constable Warren

Kevin Hainline, Jason Lau: Si Crowell

Daniel DeMarco, Juan Monsalves, Matthew Reiff, Kamarr Richee: Baseball Players

Paul Gutrecht: Sam Craig

Don Took: Joe Stoddard

A South Coast Repertory production. By Thornton Wilder. Directed by Mark Rucker. Sets: Michael Devine. Costumes: Walker Hicklin. Lights: Anne Militello. Sound: Jon Gottlieb. Wig and hair design: Carol F. Doran. Production manager: Michael Mora. Stage manager: Scott Harrison.