#268: OUR TOWNS.  For Thornton Wilder, the town is Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, the date May 7, 1901.  I’ve wondered what imaginative consent young people can now give his play Our Town, which may look to them at first like a rather arch and audience-courting version of small town life.  It was first produced in 1938; when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties a good deal of 1901 Grover’s Corners was still recognizable and familiar.  The media have since reduced local and semi-rural American life to stylized situation comedy, as well as doing a good deal to erase local accents and customs: anyone who says “Aya” and speaks in an old New Hampshire accent is seen as straight out of mythic hicksville.  But Wilder in his stage notes says,  “It is important to maintain a continual dryness of tone—the New England understatement of sentiment, of surprise, of tragedy.  A shyness about emotion.”  Put this together with the cumulative impact of the three acts—the wallop of the widening perspective and emotion of the third act, when it arrives—and I suspect the play is perfectly safe and will still leave audiences a bit out of breath.  There are many productions of it visible from movies and television—the 1988 staging with Hal Holbrook is on Youtube, which has begun to take on the patina of its date of production—but rereading the play recently I was struck by how beautifully it was made for the stage, and is anchored there.  The play for decades has been a popular choice, as it offers a local company a large choice of good roles; I hope you can see it on stage sometime, maybe with a college troupe, working up to the roles rather than moving comfortably around in them.  Our Town for years has had the rep of being a play you almost can’t wreck; a man so unsentimental as Edward Albee thought it was the greatest play of the American theater.  I wouldn’t be surprised both these statements still hold true.

      For Wilder, it was Grover’s Corners; for Dylan Thomas, in his “play for voices” Under Milk Wood, it was the mythical Welsh town of Llareggub (give it a second).  The contrast with Wilder’s language could hardly be greater.  With Wilder we come to think of Edgar Lee Masters, whom he cites (and slightly misquotes) in Our Town’s second act; with Thomas we connect with the great wave of high modernism, Joyce and Woolf, or Mairtin O’Cadhain’s Irish-language novel Cre na Cille (another graveyard tale), all those people who were edging their language out into the tidal and connotative.  With Thomas more is always better; in the poems that don’t come off, they drown in their own invention, but when they work there’s the wondrous feeling of being kept aloft, riding a wave, birdriding the wind and air.  (We may not entirely grasp where we were going or where we ended up, but it was a hell of a ride.)  This is the trick and the contrast with Our Town, which works eminently well on stage; I’ve never heard or seen a performance of Under Milk Wood where Thomas’s words didn’t overwhelm me and make my attention glaze over.  Michael Sheen’s performance of the opening speech (it’s on Youtube) is a miracle and a wonder: that’s two minutes and eighteen seconds of the whole.  I would suggest that Under Milk Wood works as a piece to read, taking in the language at your own pace, perhaps over more than a single sitting. It’s thus, I think, that Llareggub—“the capital of dusk,” Thomas calls it towards the end--is best taken in, best gathered under Thomas’s loving gaze, and grounded as well as set in flight.

      The Laramie Project, by Moisés Kaufman, is a later play (2001) but as ambitious and daring in form as the Wilder or Thomas.  After the much-publicized murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming in 1988, Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project went to Laramie six times to interview people who knew Shepard, to get a sense of the town, and to follow the trials of Shepard’s accused attackers.  The play details, among other things, the enormous public attention the crime attracted; the play itself is now frequently performed.  Kaufman filmed it for HBO, which throws in newly mixed layers of artifice: realistic setting, well-known actors, scripted with the transcripts of the townspeople’s interviews, the interviewers inserted as characters.  It’s some distance from great filmmaking—too much reliance on dramatic closeups, a bit overscored; some of the roles are too sketchy for the actors to be able to gain much purchase, some come to look like set pieces.  Mind you, some of the familiar actors do shine: Steve Buscemi turns into Doc O’Connor wizard quick; Laura Linney is amazing, in one of the most complicated monologues doing a dozen right-hand turns in two and a half minutes.  It’s in Linney’s monologue that The Laramie Project gets into one of its most interesting subjects: the difference between tolerance and acceptance.  And the film is certainly an example of strong material outweighing  other flaws.  The townspeople, hectored by the publicity, are plaintive: “Now, after Matthew, I would say that Laramie is a town defined by an accident, a crime. We’ve become Waco, we’ve become Jasper. We’re a noun, a definition, a sign.”  People keep saying, we’re not that kind of town, and yet there the horror is, like something in the road you can’t drive around.  Kaufman captures people trying to do the right thing, and their shock at these two boys, locals, boys everyone knows, who have done the monstrously wrong thing.  “My secret hope was that they were from somewhere else, that then you can create that distance: we don’t grow children like that here. Well, it’s pretty clear we do grown children like that here.”  The ugliest thing about the homophobia of some of the townspeople is not its rancor or stupidity so much as its satisfied, righteous primness—with the exception of the Reverend Fred Phelps of the Westboro Church, portrayed by James Murtaugh in full baleful hating voice (when Phelps died in 2014, Time simply wrote “Good riddance.”).  But the play is never just damning or appalled: it is balanced with some of the townspeople’s authentic grief and sympathy.  When the play was staged, the New York Times said it was “determined to find the light in an event of harrowing darkness.”  I would say instead it went in looking for truth, and found the light that was genuinely, even unexpectedly, there. Flaws and all, The Laramie Project is never exploitative of its subject, it tells you much you didn’t know, and it knocks you down and then helps you to your feet.

     One of the pros who shows up in Laramie Project is Margo Martindale, as Trish Steger, a shopkeeper.  She is also the protagonist of a seven-minute marvel, the final sequence in Paris Je t’aime, an omnibus film of eighteen segments from 2006.  She plays Carol, a Denver mail carrier who’s studied French for two years—she speaks the language with an accent that’s been run over by a car—and goes by herself to Paris for a six-day vacation (she doesn’t want to leave her dogs—Lady and Bumper—for any longer).  Alexander Payne, the director, watches Carol wander aimlessly around Paris, jet-lagged, eating alone, and we hear as her narrative—she’s reading to her fellow language students—wanders into a solitary past.  But at the end, sitting in a park in the 14^th, she has an epiphany, a rush of joy and sadness simultaneously, but of being alive. And, in that hopeless flat accent, she says “C’est a ce moment que j’ai commencé a aimer Paris.  Et le moment que j’ai senti que Paris m’aimait aussi.” –It was then I began to love Paris, and feel as if Paris loved me back.  So few artists have celebrated the special generosity of Paris,  and damned if the whole thing isn’t right there on Margo Martindale’s face.  Brava.

--Our Town, by Thornton Wilder.  Many editions, including the Samuel French acting edition.

--Under Milk Wood, by Dyland Thomas.  New Directions, 1954.

--The Laramie Project, by Moisés Kaufman and the members of the Tectonic Theater Project. Vintage Books, 2001.  Kaufman directed the film version, 2002.

--Paris Je t’aime, omnibus film, 2006; sequence directed by Alexander Payne, “14e Arrondisement.”  Both films are on Hulu, but can also be seen for free on Youtube.  Don’t tell anyone I told you.