Word: wildernesses
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...Wilder acknowledges a more important influence, namely, certain traditional types of Oriental theater. As a youngster Wilder lived and went to school in Shanghai and Hong Kong for a time. In the abovementioned preface he notes that in Chinese drama an actor may straddle a stick to suggest horseback riding, and that in the Japanese Noh theater a circling of the stage may stand for a long journey. He might have added that the centuries-old Noh drama uses no curtain and no change of lighting. The plays are acted with few or no props beyond a fan, which...
...Wilder has himself carefully prescribed in the text the myriad details of staging, so that, at a basic level, there is not much a director need do. Thus it is a hard play to ruin, which explains part of its appeal to high-school and other amateur groups with their often untrained directors. Nonetheless, a skilled director and gifted players can raise Our Town to an exalting experience, and that is exactly what Michael Kahn and his charges have achieved here...
...respect, Kahn has made a fascinating departure from Wilder's script. I refer to the matter of sound effects, where the director has out-Wildered Wilder--and I bet the playwright would applaud. While there are many things that Wilder does not want us to see, he does want us to hear them. Some of these are distant--like a whistling train, a factory work-whistle, and chirping crickets on a moonlit night. Others, however, are on-stage things that are wholly imaginary--like the milkman's horse and his clanking bottles, and Mr. Webb's lawnmower...
...cast of players who portray a sizeable sample of the 2642 inhabitants of Grover's Corners touchingly and devotedly serve the script that Wilder said was "an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life." The characters all talk pretty much the same way, but Wilder could not have fashioned their colloquial speech without a keen ear and much hard work...
...Stage Manager of Fred Gwynne, who, under Kahn's guidance, maintains just the right pacing, and captures the proper folksiness. He is not afraid of pauses, whether to light his pipe or to contemplate what he wants to say next. In a couple of places he changes Wilder's words, updating a reference to "the treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight" to "atom bombs and Apollo flights...