culture
It’s Still Our Town at Soulpepper
Albert Schultz and Krystin Pellerin. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann.
In theatre, there are a few classics⎯The Crucible by Arthur Miller, A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, Antigone by Sophocles, A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, The Seagull by Anton Chekhov, and anything by Shakespeare are a few. These are plays that are generally removed from our own time, with language, characters, ideas, and perspectives closely tied to their era and a reputation that now precedes them in any modern production (of which there are usually very many). For contemporary audiences, a misfired staging can feel dated, dry, and disconnected, and perpetuate the idea that going to the theatre is an activity best done after a game of bridge at the club, promptly followed by cheese and crackers and an early bedtime.
Then, there are productions that make us understand why a play is considered a classic in the first place. Soulpepper‘s latest mount of Our Town by Thornton Wilder, a story about small town life in the early 1900s and the gravity of the mundane, is one of those productions.
You’ve probably seen Our Town before, maybe even a handful of times, or at least heard of the fictional small New Hampshire town of Grover’s Corners in some cultural reference. The play has a long history with Soulpepper given the company’s short life: first produced at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in 1999, and again in 2006 as the first play to ever be mounted at its current home in the Distillery District, the Young Centre of Performing Arts. It won the Dora Award for Best Production that year, and with a large number of cast members reprising their roles, including Soulpepper’s artistic director Albert Schultz performing as the Stage Manager and Joseph Ziegler returning in the director’s chair, our hopes were high for an excellent production.
And we weren’t disappointed. Schultz is a charming and omniscient guide with a smirk, making the audience wonder what he knows and we don’t. He leads us through the love story of Emily Webb (Krystin Pellerin) and George Gibbs (Jeff Lillico), who are heartwarmingly innocent. Nancy Palk gives George’s mother, Mrs. Gibbs, compassion, hope, and yearning while keeping her the head of the household, and young Dominique Matamoros melted the hearts of everyone in the audience with her cheeky Rebecca Gibbs, George’s little sister. Though, it has to be acknowledged that the entire cast plays an enormous role in bringing Grover’s Corners to life, as Mrs. Soames (Brenda Robins) continues to gossip about the town drunk Simon Stimson (William Webster) and the townspeople continuously badger the milkman Howie Newsome (Michael Hanrahan) about the weather as he tries to proceed with his route.
Our Town is as much, or even more so, a play about moments than it is about characters. And Joseph Ziegler’s direction fills the show with tiny interactions that make these characters real, sympathetic, and timeless (we’ve probably never shared an ice cream soda with a crush, but we’ve all been glad to have something to do with our hands when the conversation turns silent).
All of these elements make the first two acts engaging, endearing, and surprisingly funny: we in the audience can just sit back and let the goodhearted, trouble-free small town life at Grover’s Corners wash over us. This makes Our Town seem at first pretty banal, but that also proves why this play is classic—it sets up the audience so well for the blow that is the third act (which we’ll leave alone for those who are unfamiliar with it).
While we were expecting a great show, we weren’t expecting it to have the resonance it does at this particular moment. When Thornton wrote the play in the 1930s, he chose to focus on the characters and events that make up mundane daily life because he was sick of the grandstanding tragedies and comedies of the time. You could say that our society is obsessed with reality, with the abundance of reality TV shows dominating the airwaves and their stars catapulting dangerously quickly to worldwide fame. But by tuning into the pre-meditated and orchestrated moments of over-the-top “reality” that makes for good television, we’ve also lost touch with the beauty of having breakfast with our mother, walking home from school with our first love, or letting our little sister sit on our lap to look at the moon (not that we can see it in the city anyway). These moments might not come packaged with that perfect one-liner, and background music will never start up as you walk down the street, but Our Town makes the point that real life is dramatic enough without all of that excess. When Schultz’s Stage Manager announces that the script of Our Town will be placed in a time capsule so Grover’s Cornians 1,000 years from now will know the life of everyday people, we shudder to think what future earthlings would think if we buried our current representations of real life.
Our Town can be dated, yes, and it is definitely part of the Dead White Male theatrical cannon, but its honest, imperfect, and simple representation of life’s smallest and biggest moments make it universally relatable and timelessly telling. That is, of course, when it is in the right hands.
Our Town is playing at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts (55 Mill Street, Building 49) at 1:30 and 7:30 p.m., $28–$65 or $22 for ages 21–30 at www.stageplay.ca. Call 416-866-8666 or visit Soulpepper’s website for ticket and date information.