Grover's Corners captures the world in Lookingglass 'Our Town'

There’s not one but two 500-pound gorillas in the room at the start of Lookingglass Theatre’s production of Our Town. Hairy Ape No. 1: Can David Schwimmer actually act? No. 2: Can the production achieve even a thousandth of the emotional resonance that David Cromer’s definitive, unforgettable and staggeringly successful "Our Town” did earlier this year?

The answers are yes and yes. Schwimmer has more in him than “Friends' ” amiably one-note Ross would indicate. As for directors Jessica Thebus and Anna D. Shapiro’s production, it is radiant. It’s not worth comparing it to Cromer’s Off-Broadway-bound version. It’s a beautiful thing, in and of itself.

In its examination of the most mundane everyday moments “Our Town” is transcendent. In milk carts and baseballs, newspapers and algebra homework, Wilder depicts all the world, a place so achingly beautiful that we bumbling mortals – “Always at the mercy of some self-centered passion or another” - can’t begin to appreciate it as we stutter and stumble from cradle to grave.

“O, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you . . . Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?" Emily (Laura Eason) asks with heart-ripping sincerity late in the final act. The answer comes cold as rain on a grave: “No.”

Yet “”Our Town” allows audiences – albeit for a brief, shining moment in time- to “realize life while they live it.” If that all sounds like movie-of-the-week mush, rest assured it isn’t. Shapiro and Thebus have crafted an “Our Town” that provides an achingly vivid view of the world in all its wonders.

That’s an impressive feat, given ‘Our Town’s' history: The drama has been all but ruined by over-production. In countless high school stagings and community theater revivals, it’s presented as Norman Rockwell schmaltz, a sentimental story set in a folksy world that resembles Disneyland’s Mainstreet. It’s usually played as the worst kind of nostalgia – rose-colored glasses look back at an ideal Americana that never really existed.

Shapiro and Thebus keep the humanity and excise the schmaltz. Wonder is ever present. As is death, harsh and implacable.
With minimalist costumes and the houselights up for much of the production, Our Town works its magic, drawing you in to the cycle of everyday tragedy and joys that comprise human existence. In the Stage Manager (Joey Slotnik), we get a narrator who is both matter-of-fact and eerily other worldly in his perspective on the lives and times of Grover’s’ Corners. Is he speaking from beyond the grave? Is he a resident of the town? The still, unremarkable voice of God among us? Yes.

What Wilder manages so exquisitely is to paint a lovingly detailed portrait of daily life in a turn-of-the-century New Hampshire town, and then – with the beauty of a billion small planets and sharply glimmering stars – makes it blossom outward to the very edges of the solar system.

At the heart of Grover’s Corners is George Gibbs (Schwimmer), a high school baseball star who grows up to marry Emily (Laura Eason), his high school sweetheart.

Both Schwimmer and Eason are in their 40s (and Schwimmer looks a bit worse for the wear), which puts them at a distinct disadvantage when playing the 16-year-old versions of George and Emily. Yet both manage beautifully, capturing innocence and youthful joy without preciousness or affectation. Conducting their courtship over homework and strawberry ice cream sundaes, the pair light up the stage with that singular wonder that tragically, inevitably ebbs into nothing as one matures from child to adult.

What we see in George and Emily – indeed, through all the townsfolk of “Our Town” - is that intangible eternal that defines humanity, something the Stage Manager explains but doesn’t even try to describe: “. . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.” In Schwimmer and Eason and all the rest of this marvelous ensemble cast, we feel that “something eternal,” even as mortality proves over and over to be a relentless, uncompromising taskmaster.

High above the all-but bare stage, the detritus of human lives hangs, literally, over Grover’s Corners. Chandeliers, bathtubs, hundreds of tables and chairs, old clothes, doll houses, bicycles, coffins – look up at John Musial’s staggeringly elaborate set design, and you can see a world of once-valuable things relegated to rust. It’s a sublime, startling visual of ashes-to-ashes, humankind’s impermanence illustrated in a thousand belongings that once cherished, now no longer matter. And that plays into the all-powerful, radiant core of Thornton Wilder’s masterpiece: Fugit hora. Carpe diem. Open your eyes.