ChannelTim

A champagne problem of mine is that, having grown up in a suburb of New York, my knowledge of the theatrical canon is largely confined to the plays that have been revived on Broadway in my lifetime. And since Thornton Wilder’s seminal Our Town was last produced on the Main Stem when I was four years old, I had never encountered it until I saw Kenny Leon’s new revival, opening October 9th at the Barrymore Theatre. My theatre-going companion, hailing from a Midwestern small town not dissimilar from Grover’s Corners, was intimately familiar with the material via multiple high school interpretations. Despite being an oft produced play, Our Town had eluded me for so long that I was floored by the daringness and perceptiveness of the text when I finally saw it for myself. But that was all that floored me. Remarkably meta-theatrical for a play written in 1938, Our Town is both a play about life in a small town at the turn of the twentieth century and a play about a play about life in ...