`Our Town’ gets updated > Penobscot Theatre takes on postmodern times

It takes a brave man to tamper with tradition. And director Jay Skriletz isn’t running scared. In his haunting version of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” which opened over the weekend at Penobscot Theatre, he takes a play that can easily slip into sentimentality and gives it a postmodern edge.

You may recall that “Our Town” is set in one of American drama’s most famous towns: Grover’s Corners, N.H. It’s the great Everywhere of American smalltown life. Or, as Wilder put it, the play is about “life, death and things like that.”

There’s not much room for imaginative navigation in Thornton’s play. You can do a comic version. You can do a maudlin version. Or, God forbid, you can do a high school version. Skriletz’s version takes a quirky step beyond these and messes with our heads.

The play’s setting, as written by Wilder, continues to be the stark emptiness of a blank stage — one of the very elements that made Wilder’s play extraordinarily innovative in 1938. But Skriletz tampers with the time frame. The first act is set in the prescribed time of 1901. The second act zips forward to the 1960s, and the play ends in an existential version of 1998. Somewhere in that final act, Skriletz throws in 1984, too. But either the allusion is too quick to catch, or I simply missed it among the deep blacks and shadows of this final brush with the big questions of life.

As the times are a-changin’, the Stage Manager, played amicably — if somewhat youthfully — by Charles Alexander, ages in reverse. He begins hunched, becomes middle-aged, and is finally a kind of scowling Hamlet for the ’90s — dressed all in black and elucidating life.

Naturally, it’s jarring to go through such a rapid time movement in a place that boasts little change through the years. The effect is faithful to Wilder’s anti-natural style; it makes us stop and consider that there’s nothing new in Grover’s Corners, and there’s nothing new in the 1900s.

The actors in this large cast handily make the shifts, not so much in their characters or voices, but in their demeanors. Tamela Glenn, as Mrs. Webb, and Leslie K.A. Michaud, as Mrs. Gibbs, are the anchors. Their clothing changes, but they remain the center of this town, and, as actors, give the show its elemental continuity. Edward Weisman and Michael Weinstein, opposite these women, are equally effective but less central.

Whenever Bob Field and Lil Christian act out the romance between George and Emily, we witness something lovely and vulnerable. Field is a whirl of young male enthusiasm, and Christian has unusual elegance and self-possession for a teenager. How easy it would be for them to pump these roles with sugar. Instead, they give them honied simplicity.

Although the participation of Davidson Kane’s infant son, Spencer, upstages all concurrent action (including the curtain call), some of the supporting performances are less appealing. Be forewarned, too, that there’s enough miming in this show to meet the theater’s quota for the next 60 years. While most of Jill E. Shea’s costumes helpfully escort us through the time warp, there’s no making sense of the blaze-orange jail uniforms worn by the stage hands. Is time our prison? Or are the presence of “prisoners” yet another defiance of the waspy underpinnings of this play?

If you’re a purist about “Our Town,” this production may not work for you. Beyond that, Skriletz makes some cogent points about time, and does so without offensive cleverness or indulgent obscurity. By Wilder’s own admission, the play was influenced by Gertrude Stein’s ideas about America and universality, and Skriletz doesn’t stray from those themes. At its best, this play won’t let anyone leave the theater without something to say or think about. At its worst, it might leave you wishing the actors would speak up and out toward the audience.

Wilder is the only person to win a Pulitzer for both fiction and drama. He’s a charm in American drama, one that is often dimmed because “Our Town” has been a staple in high-school drama departments. If you fall into the group that thinks it outgrew “Our Town” with acne, this production is a good first step in reconsidering that place Wilder holds in our collective experience of American life and death and things like that.

“Our Town” will be presented 7 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 8:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Friday through April 5 at Penobscot Theatre. Additional performances are 5 p.m. March 28 and April 4, and 6 p.m. March 29 and April 5. For tickets, call 942-3333.