At last, Newman is back in ‘Town’

“Nobody very remarkable ever come out of it, s’far as we know,” says the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” speaking of Grover’s Corners. No matter how off-the-cuff the actor delivers it, the line sounds like a lie. This is, after all, Paul Newman up there, whose remarkableness -- easygoing star charisma incarnate, here sporting a cardigan and specs -- makes the fictional Protestant Republican burg a mighty glamorous place indeed.

The last time Newman played Broadway was in a 1964 romantic comedy called “Baby Want a Kiss.” Nobody remembers much about it, except that it starred Newman and his wife, Joanne Woodward.

Now Newman has returned, wearing an air of humble authority like a second cardigan, in a revival of Wilder’s 1938 play. It originated earlier this year at the Westport Country Playhouse, where Woodward is artistic director.

It is a curious and bittersweet experience, in ways only partly related to the curious bittersweetness of Wilder’s classic. If you do it right, “Our Town” can -- and should -- be more troubling than most interpretations favor. Newman notwithstanding, director James Naughton’s rendition is coyly hearty in its comedy and predictable in its pathos. Too many of the performances lack the ease and texture of what Wilder self-consciously labeled his first act: daily life.

Everything Newman does, and doesn’t do, contrasts with a general impulse to “explain” the play’s moods and themes. For a famously no-scenery play, designer Tony Walton has served up an awful lot of scenery. In a gently expressive (albeit heavily amplified) voice, Newman lays out the facts about Wilder’s town. The Stage Manager’s lecture, in director Naughton’s weirdly literal staging, becomes an illustrated lecture, with slide projections.

Newman later scores some large laughs -- with a sharp hand-clap, he delivers the line about being 21 or 22 and “then whisssh! you’re 70” -- but in the main, he does nothing to call attention to himself. This is a doggedly plain-spoken performance.

The other principals are played by seasoned performers, although you never believe these people live in the same town. Frank Converse portrays Doc Gibbs like a 19th century ham actor; for a guy who’s getting only three hours’ sleep a night, he’s boisterous as all get-out. Jane Curtin’s Mrs. Webb nails plenty of the humor, although her dialect sounds as if it’s coming from a New York City borough yet to be discovered. The young lovers, Emily Webb (Maggie Lacey) and George Gibbs (Ben Fox), look right but carry more than a touch of cuteness and archness. Only Jayne Atkinson’s flinty Mrs. Gibbs feels at home in Wilder’s universe.

Most contemporary productions of “Our Town” tend to be dominated by the town’s most visibly unhappy resident, the suicidal alcoholic choir director Simon Stimson, played here by Stephen Spinella in an extreme but effective turn. The play tends to work better, though, when Stimson isn’t the sole disrupted soul in Grover’s Corners. I’m not saying it should be a town full of neurotics, but everyone in the play is guilty of casual, everyday slights or blind spots, of living near or around but not in the moment. Wilder is quite clear on this, when the recently deceased Emily returns to her 12th birthday and cannot see it through a second time.

In a 1988 Lincoln Center production, Gregory Mosher directed a blessedly unsentimental “Our Town.” That production was the virtual opposite of this one; Mosher’s Stage Manager was Spalding Gray, the show’s one drawback, aggravatingly stiff and snarling. In contrast, Newman, in his economical fashion, plays the material right down the middle while his colleagues mug and grin their way through the ritualistic passages of courtship, marriage, milk delivery, what have you. Have these actors been to New Hampshire? Where’s the stoicism, of the cold, of everyday ordinary activity? Even smart folks such as Jeffery DeMunn (Editor Webb) are popping their eyes and overstressing gags.

Not Newman. Although it’s somewhat frustrating that the performance doesn’t have a bit more spark, it’s not nearly as frustrating as the rest of the show. Wilder once wrote that the problem with popular theater was its aim only to be “soothing.” This is a soothing, and sadly limited, take on a deceptively simple play.

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Michael Phillips is theater critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.