SOUL FOOD.('Our Town')(Theater Review)

In 1938, when Thornton Wilder's second full-length play, "Our Town," had its world premiere, at Princeton's McCarter Theatre, Variety's verdict was brusque. "The season's most extravagant waste of talent," the broadsheet's critic called the play. In a parting shot about its flamboyantly experimental, Pirandello-influenced construction, he added that it "should never have left the campus." But "Our Town" outfoxed the critics and endured to become part of the century's slim volume of American stage classics. In a marvellous Broadway revival, directed by James Naughton (at the Booth), it speaks as unforgettably as it did back then to the vanity of national despair.

"You never teach anyone anything," said Wilder, who believed that theatre was not a "discussion forum" but a place to "show the human condition." "You merely recall things to them that lay sleeping just below the level of consciousness." What "Our Town" coaxes its audience to recall is glory in the midst of grief. "So all that was going on and we never noticed!" says Emily Webb, who died in childbirth and has chosen to return to Earth to relive her twelfth birthday, before being finally "weaned" from life. Of the play's many stylistic and narrative accomplishments, the most profound is its ability to engineer a sort of imaginative detachment that lets us reconnect to the bittersweet thrill of existence.

Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, is the cosmic Protestant antecedent of the comic Lutheran Lake Wobegon, Minnesota; here, too, the women are strong, the men are handsome, and the children above average. The play's narrator and general master of artifice is the Stage Manager, who gives the phrase "deus ex machina" a whole new meaning. He holds the script, he sets the scene, he serves as an interlocutor between the worlds of the living and the dead, calling the characters into life and out of it; he is, it turns out, the Author of Authors, the Big Guy himself. It seems, in every way, apt for Paul Newman to have taken on this role. God should look like Newman: lean, strong-chinned, white-haired, and authoritative in a calm and unassuming way--if only we had all been made in his image! Newman brings onto the stage half a century's expertise and good will; he can't miss, and he doesn't. He doesn't even have to work too hard.

Dressed in a brown vest, tan slacks, and what look like sensible brown Johnston & Murphy brogans, he sets the play's amiable, reflective tone and its aesthetic agenda. "Here's a couple of trellises for those that feel they have to have scenery," he says at the opening, pushing the wooden constructions onto a mostly bare stage. In the preface to the play, Wilder writes, "Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the minds--not in things, not in 'scenery' "; the Stage Manager is there to remind us that what the play sets out to capture is, in Wilder's words, "not verisimilitude but reality." As he introduces us to the inhabitants of Grover's Corners, one by one, it becomes clear that the play is a sort of seance with the dead. "Here's his wife comin' downstairs to get breakfast," the Stage Manager says of Mrs. Gibbs (Jayne Atkinson). "She's up in the cemetery now." This is a paradigm, it seems, of both life and playwriting, in which the dramatist fashions an event from his interior world, haunted as it is by scenes, voices, and fragments of memory. The play itself appears to make this connection at the finale, when the newly dead Emily comes to terms with her former glibness about life. "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" she asks the Stage Manager. "Saints and poets maybe," he replies.

Because the play's roles are allegorical, more illustrated than characterized, "Our Town" requires actors with strong personalities. As Emily's mother, Mrs. Webb, Jane Curtin gets amusingly persnickety at her teen-age daughter's infernal questions--for instance, whether she's pretty enough to make people interested in her. "Now stop it," she tells Emily ...