‘Our Town’ for Our Times

Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” in which several characters acknowledge and appreciate the hills, birds, moon and stars, is a perfect play for a moonlit venue on a slope, like the Hillside Amphitheater at Eagle Rock’s Occidental College.

It’s also an ideal choice this year for the Occidental Theater Festival, attempting to rebound after a dormant season caused by fiscal woes. Wilder’s spurning of artificial scenery--the locales within the town of Grover’s Corners, N.H., are illustrated by only a few slight pieces of furniture and the imagination--can help a struggling company as it tries to cut costs.

There are, of course, many other reasons to stage “Our Town.” With its simple theatricality and its homespun approach to life, love and death, it’s the most evergreen and accessible of American plays.

Christopher Shelton’s staging emphasizes the play’s timelessness and its theatricality by making the Stage Manager (Tom Shelton) a contemporary figure who behaves like a modern stage director. Dressed by designer Donna L. May in coolly hip slacks, jacket and shirt instead of the cracker-barrel clothes (with pipe attached) sometimes seen on male Stage Managers, Tom Shelton uses his hands and searching glances to probe ever deeper into the substance of the Stage Manager’s words.

While this approach flies in the face of Wilder’s recommendation to maintain a New England-style dryness of tone, it nonetheless helps connect our own turn-of-the-millennium era to the turn-of-the-last-century period in which the play is set. The Donahue-style intensity of the actor’s ruminations also helps the play cross the wide spaces of the alfresco environment. Yet Shelton never crosses into caricature.

The “audience members” who pose scripted questions are also dressed in 1998 styles. When the man who asks about social injustice is dissatisfied by the answer, he stalks out, vowing to never again spend his summer in Eagle Rock.

Otherwise, everyone is in period clothes, and the casting is generally in the classic mold. Marjie Schaffer appears to know her central character of Emily deep within her bones. Michael Newman’s George looks appropriately juvenile, though his diction occasionally sounds a bit too studied.

The parents ring true, especially Alan Freeman as a tweedy editor Webb and Ann Dusenberry as a luminous Mrs. Gibbs, whose frustration over her husband’s sedentary style is keenly felt. Matt Foyer’s Simon Stimson represents humanity’s deeply troubled spirits with dignity.

In the absence of sets, Trevor Norton’s lighting works overtime and well--as long as the audience stays in the lower reaches of the amphitheater, under the major overhead lights. If the crowd ever swelled enough to fill the theater’s vast upper domain, the lighting (and the sound) would have to be rethought.

BE THERE

Our Town, Hillside Amphitheater, Occidental College, 1600 Campus Road, Eagle Rock. Tonight through Sunday, July 16 through 18, 8 p.m. $18. (323) 259-2922. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.