A number of the sounds are effected off stage in the usual way. But Kahn, in quite a few instances, brings stagehands into full view to stimulate the required sounds. So we see a man imitating a cock's crow at dawn; and another enters to ape a train whistle by blowing into a set of three wooden pipes. When an 11-year-old Joe Crowell appears to deliver the morning newspapers, we spot another fellow crouching to create a swish-plop on the stage floor with a wire brush and a soft beater, while Joe mimes the act of delivery. And, again, we watch someone make the sound of rattling bottles and clomping hooves although Howie Newsome's horse and milk-carrier are invisible.
Once more the Oriental theater provides a traditional counterpart. In the Kabuki theater of Japan not only is it obligatory to have a group of geza of musicians, just off stage, to simulate conventional sounds on a host of percussion instruments, but there are also special stagehands, called Kurogo, who render all manner of assistance to the actors in full view of the audience. These Kurogo are dressed and veiled in black, to indicate that we are to pretend they are invisible.
The cast of players who portray a sizeable sample of the 2642 inhabitants of Grover's Corners touchingly and devotedly serve the script that Wilder said was "an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life." The characters all talk pretty much the same way, but Wilder could not have fashioned their colloquial speech without a keen ear and much hard work.
Best of all is the Stage Manager of Fred Gwynne, who, under Kahn's guidance, maintains just the right pacing, and captures the proper folksiness. He is not afraid of pauses, whether to light his pipe or to contemplate what he wants to say next. In a couple of places he changes Wilder's words, updating a reference to "the treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight" to "atom bombs and Apollo flights."
He has a winning way of putting over his occasional aphorisms, such as. "Wherever you come near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense." Or the notion put forth in a couple of passages near the start of Shaw's book-length preface to Misalliance, which Wilder, having the Stage Manager attribute it to "one of those European fellas," distills into an epigram. "Every child born into the world is nature's attempt to make a perfect human being."
Although born and raised in New York City (and a 1951 graduate of Harvard), Gwynne has mastered his small-town New Hampshire accent to absolute perfection. The consistency and authenticity of his diction are uncanny. I've never seen so fine a Stage Manager. And this is the best work Gwynne has ever done--a flawless performance.
Not far behind in Richard Back us as George Gibbs, the not-so-bright high-school student who falls in love with Emily next door, marries her, and loses her during childbirth. Having graduated from Harvard eight years ago, he has now turned 30; but the years have been kind to him, and he has no trouble passing for a lad half his age. He comes by his accent naturally, since he was born and raised in Goffstown, New Hampshire, which is near add not unlike the Grover's Corners that the Stage Manager so precisely pinpoints as to longitude and latitude. Backus' George is admirable all the way from awkward adolescence to bereaved husband. A useful preparation for this role was Backus' appealing portrayal, at Harvard's Loeb Theater in 1970, of the similar small town New England teenager who is the focus of O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! (a revival of this lovely play opens tonight at Boston University's Summer Repertory Theater).
Less impressive though generally laudable is Kate Mulgrew as Emily, the object of George's affection. She is at her best in Act I, called "Daily Life," and Act II, called "Love and Marriage." Especially effective is her handling of the drugstore scene, in which Emily is ill-at-ease and nervously kneads her fingers. It is to the demands of the final act that she does not fully rise. This is the rainy cemetery scene in which the dead articulate their thoughts (an idea Wilder got from the early cantos of Dante's Purgatorio) and Emily returns from the dead to relive her twelfth birthday (a device Wilder had already tried in his novel The Woman of Andros). Here Miss Mulgrew fails to evince the intensity and luminosity that better actresses have managed to summon.
William Larsen is a shrewd Doc Gibbs, and makes the first act's most touching moment--in which he gently chides his son for allowing Mother Gibbs to chop the wood--a memorable vignette. Eileen Heckart, with her always expressive face, is a dotingly solicitous Mother Gibbs, and is carefully to speak of her husband's hobby as the Civil Waw. Lee Richardson and Geraldine Fitzgerald, as Mr. and Mrs. Webb, are all right but not outstanding.
John Glover understands the nature of Simon Stinson, the church organist, who amusingly overdoes his final consonants to remind his chair members how to enunciate their hymn texts. Stinson is also the town drunk, and his pack of troubles eventually drives him to suicide. Wilder quietly makes a strong point by not only including him among all the other decreased townfolk in Act III but by placing him in the front row of the dead. The handling of the other minor roles ranges from adequate to capable. And Lawrence Casey's costumes nicely evoke the period covered, which is from 1899 to 1913.
The play will surely be current in 1999 and 2013; but I can't think of a better time than 1975 to make Our Town your town.
[Ed. Note--The drive to the Picturesque American Shakespeare Theater's grounds on the Housatonic River takes about two and a half hours via the Massachusetts Turnpike. Interstate 86 and 91, and the Connecticut Turnpike to Exit 32 or 31. Performances in the air conditioned theater tend to begin rather promptly at 2 p.m. or 8 p.m., and a quartet of singers offer madrigals on the lawn beforehand. There are hands free facilities for picnickers on the premises.]