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Stage, Managed: A TV-Star-Driven Our Town
Kenny Leon’s production is gentle where it could bite.
Likewise, though the comparison would probably embarrass him, David Cromer did something with Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in 2009 that manages, to this day, to keep haunting a play that’s as canonical as Romeo and Juliet, as curricular as To Kill a Mockingbird. Then, at the center of it all, there’s Parsons, reining himself in a bit, wearing a serious beard and a blue suit (Dede Ayite did the costumes, which have a collage-like, time-hopping quality that feels intelligible as an idea but not additive in the execution). His eyebrow is always half-raised, and he pointedly underplays potentially freighted moments like the Stage Manager’s description of the town’s Civil War graves: “New Hampshire boys … had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than fifty miles of it themselves.
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