Our Town/
Nuestro Pueblo.

Pulitzer and Tony Award-winner Edward Albee called Our Town “the greatest American play ever written,” and, after having done a production of this exciting, new adaptation that, with new layers of language and cultural inclusion, expands to encompass everyone in this quintessentially American—and human—story, I am in complete agreement with Albee’s statement. Having performed what I consider to be an exceptional take on the piece, I take that even further and suggest it might simply be the greatest play ever written.

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There was a celebratory factor in this production in that it was the first one emerging from COVID, previewing with masks and removing them by opening night. But the EXPERIENCE of this adaptation was the real gift here. The bilingual element was achieved through some characters speaking English and others Spanish. Large screens reflected subtitles throughout the production offering the alternative to whatever was being spoken onstage at any given moment. In addition, headsets were made available to Spanish-speaking audience members who were able to hear offstage actors in an adjacent studio watching the play on monitors and reading all of the lines in Spanish. So the production simultaneously addressed three subsets of viewers—native English and Spanish speakers and bilingual speakers. 

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The undertaker, Joe Stoddard, does not appear till Act II, but serves as the link between the living and the dead. He carries all the data of both worlds, as he relates them to a visitor to the cemetery. He knows who is in all the graves (as well of the stories of their lives and deaths) and he knows who they left behind (and the story of THEIR lives—including his own, which he shares glibly with the visitor). He has no judgment of any of it—he is in touch with both worlds and sees it as the natural progression of things. I don’t think many people give much thought to the scene, but I now think it is a critical one in the play—the perfect opening to the moving lesson we are about to learn, through Emily, in this act. Joe recounts the stories. He doesn’t mourn. But he doesn’t take any of the inhabitants lightly. He honors their lives by remembering them. And he honors the living. 

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The undertaking resulted in an extraordinarily inclusive environment wherein Wilder’s message resonated profoundly. The entire Company was moved to tears in one talkback when an elderly Black man said, “I have never seen a version of this play that included US. I mean, we went through all these same things: birth, kids, marriage, loss. We were there the whole time. So it was good to finally see US in Grover’s Corners.” This was one of two productions I did that year in which a member of the audience put forth the comment of “being seen for the first time.” It made me more keenly aware than I may have ever been of the power of this medium—and of art in general. How proud I am that I was part of this.