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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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...
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