Since winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1938, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town has remained a staple in American theater. University Theater’s rendition, staged November 6 through 8 at the Logan Center for the Arts, underscored both the humor and the sadness that exist within the microcosm of the family. The cast oscillated between that humor and sadness to underscore familial dynamics as an inconstant force, shifting across the three acts.
Our Town follows two families, the Webb and the Gibbs families, living in the small, simple town of Grover’s Corners. A stage manager narrates the time change throughout the play as the households transform into one, act by act. The first act, “Daily Life,” displays the routines of the two families; “Love and Marriage” shows them uniting through the union of Emily Webb and George Gibbs; and the final act, “Death and Eternity,” stages Our Town’s essential tragedy.
At the heart of the show are the maternal figures Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb, respectively played by fourth-year Genevieve Evans and second-year Maggie Banks. Their performances underscore the women’s internal strife, dutifully getting their children to school on time while being stuck in roles that limit dreams of life outside Grover’s Corners. The pair are the first characters onstage in act one, mirroring each other from either side of the stage as they conduct their morning rituals. Both their backs are turned from the audience—something that I was taught to avoid in theater, but that works so well here. They yell to their kids, playing upstairs on the balconies, who run down in a bustle of energy and chatter before rushing offstage to school. With the two women alone again, the theater feels empty. University Theater’s rendition plays on this constant oscillation between noise and quiet in family life, ending the play with silence in the same way the muted ritual of the mothers opens it.
The actors possessed a comfortable familiarity with the script, evident in their quick and playful family banter that highlighted the play’s humor. Our Town is notable for its tragedy, yet the audience frequently broke into laughter. In the first act, Rebecca Gibbs, played by second-year Delaney Gramlick, exclaims to her mother, “Ma, I hate this dress. Every day I go to school dressed like a sick turkey.” I started laughing and couldn’t stop. I was reminded that although Our Town contains tragedy, it is also notably funny, brought to life by the actors’ timing. Despite the inevitability of calamity, this cast nailed the humorous moments of family that exist in the quotidian, making their relationships more realistic.
Just as Mrs. Gibbs and Rebecca brought out bittersweet paradoxes in mother–daughter relationships, so did Mrs. Webb and Emily Webb, played by second-year Maya Bond. When Emily asks her mother if she’s pretty, Mrs. Webb sighs: “Emily, you make me tired.” Evans’s comedic timing underscored a gap between mother and daughter, where one cannot understand the worries of the other. But, characteristic to the University Theater’s rendition, the sentiment is quickly subverted into humor, as Mrs. Webb informs Emily, “Of course you’re pretty; I’d be embarrassed to have a daughter who wasn’t.”
Up until the third act, Bond portrayed Emily as a child, worried about her appearance and afraid of getting married. Bond demonstrated her range by driving home the emotional crux of Our Town in the final scenes. Going back through her memories, Emily realizes how precious the small moments of family were, which Bond emphasized through her distressed calls to her mother, who can no longer hear her. Her change showed an obvious shift in Emily’s character, from childish and naive to possessing knowledge of something deeper in death, allowing her to let go of her life in Our Town, as we in the audience are asked to do as well.
