Death, Glowing Like a Pearl
"Our Town" at Lyric Stage Boston
Against all odds, Grover’s Corners hasn’t aged a day. For a town so preoccupied with time – with the ticking off of breakfasts, marriages, and funerals – it remains oddly immune to it. Its people speak with the same plain urgency, and its church bells toll with the same steady patience. In a play haunted by the brevity of life, the town itself endures, changeless.
That is the world of Our Town, Thornton Wilder’s 1938 masterwork of everyday existence and inevitable departures. In Lyric Stage Boston’s revival, under the clear-eyed direction of Courtney O’Connor, the quiet accumulates until it feels seismic.
Even the performances seem tuned to a lower frequency, emotions held close rather than flung wide. There are no sobs, no roars of laughter, only the quiet current of feeling that hums beneath each exchange, the steady thrum of lives observed rather than dramatized. In a less skilled director’s hands, such understatement might have dulled the play’s edge. And while I sometimes longed for more outward devastation, Ms. O’Connor utilizes restraint as a hook, drawing you into the play’s quiet gravity rather than flooding the stage with sentiment.
It’s a quiet that feels almost radical in 2025, when the noise of daily life grows only louder and more fractured. Wilder could hardly have predicted that his play, which seemed old-fashioned nearly ninety years ago when it premiered, would read today as newly defiant. His reminder that the least important day will be important enough lands here as both balm and rebuke. Once dismissed as quaint, the play now stares us down with unnerving clarity.
It’s a clarity mirrored in the play’s visual world, which honors Wilder’s “no scenery” decree even as it bends it. Shelley Barish’s set offers not kitchens or street corners but an organic swirl underfoot, a stage mapped in rings like the cross-section of time itself, bounded by a fence that seems to stretch into forever. Deb Sullivan’s clean washes of light, Andrew Duncan Will’s finely tuned sound design, and Rachel Padula-Shufelt’s costumes, suspended somewhere between past and present, keep the world pared to essentials. Modest as they seem, together they make Grover’s Corners feel less constructed than remembered.
It helps, of course, that Ms. O’Connor has assembled a cast so improbably gorgeous it almost defies description. Josephine Moshiri Elwood’s Emily radiates such poised luminosity that even her smallest exchanges feel profound. And as her childhood sweetheart, George, Dan Garcia captures both the fumbling innocence of youth and, in the final act, the weight of loss. And then there’s Kathy St. George, who turns several featured roles into a study in range: the inquisitive spark of young Rebecca, George’s sister; the irrepressible chatter of Mrs. Soames, the town busybody; and finally, in the third act, the hollow stillness of the dead, her versatility landing like a revelation. It’s a uniformly strong company, Boston favorites among them, whose unshowy precision makes Grover’s Corners feel both utterly ordinary and monumental.
Boston, oddly enough, became Our Town’s first proving ground. From its single-night tryout at the McCarter Theatre in New Jersey, the play moved to the Wilbur Theatre in January 1938 for a two-week, pre-Broadway run. Although Wilder wrote that his play “glowed like a pearl” the night it premiered at the McCarter, there was instant trouble in Boston. Wilder, installed at the Copley Plaza Hotel just about two blocks from the Lyric, fretted in letters about the fate of his unorthodox script and worried that director Jed Harris had “devitalized” some of the scenes. Scenes were rewritten on Copley Plaza stationery, some of which survives, though Wilder was reportedly frustrated that Harris was ignoring most of his suggestions. As it turns out, Wilder needn’t have worried about the play’s power, though he did have cause to worry about the box office: the two-week engagement shuttered in just five days. Critics were largely put off by the scenery-less, prop-less production. But Mordaunt Hall of the Boston Evening Transcript observed, “…scenery or no scenery, this play was roundly applauded by last night’s gathering.” In fact, eyewitnesses described women leaving with mascara-streaked cheeks and eyes swollen from tears. The box office receipts said failure; the faces told another story.
From there, the play decamped to New York for its final rehearsals. Opening at Henry Miller’s Theatre less than a week later, Our Town was met not with bafflement but with rapture. It was hailed as visionary, and within months it had won the Pulitzer Prize, securing its place in the American canon. The plainest truths, after all, are the ones that tend to endure.
So it returns, nearly ninety years on, to a Boston stage a stone’s throw from Wilder’s old perch at the Copley Plaza. In fact, if he took Stuart Street on his way to the Wilbur, he would have passed the very building that now houses the Lyric. What once baffled has become canonical, and Lyric Stage’s revival proves that Our Town can still leave the eyes of Bostonians swollen from tears.
Ms. O’Connor achieves what Wilder always intended: a town so vividly inhabited that its very simplicity becomes a kind of grandeur. And so this Our Town, at once fragile and indestructible, proves that a play about death can throb with life.
Our Town
Through October 19 at Lyric Stage Boston; lyricstage.com. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.