Word: wildernesses
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When Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town in the midst of the Depression, he expressed a beleaguered nation's nostalgia for simpler times. The passage of five decades has only sweetened the attraction. As the serenely uneventful first act unfolds, spectators may find themselves daydreaming of moving to a village where everyone says hello and no one locks his door. But in the third and final act, as the shade of young Emily Webb returns from cemetery hill to re-experience her twelfth birthday, Wilder convincingly argues that what makes all life look enticing is the distance granted by memory...
This revival, staged by Gregory Mosher, director of the Lincoln Center Theater, cannot entirely recapture the liberating novelty that the first audiences found in Wilder's disdain for sets, props and other devices of illusion. But the production vividly evokes both his playful belittling of narrative and the irresistible appeal of his storytelling. Monologist Spalding Gray brings a feisty and brooding quality to the customarily benign stage manager: if his halfhearted attempts at a New Hampshire accent fail, the laughs he evokes are both frequent and authentic to the text. Film actors Eric Stoltz (Mask) and Penelope Ann Miller (Biloxi...
...flick-knife dialogue on which the movies (and so the rest of us) still feed -- all of them seem to have been copyrighted by the onetime oil executive who only began writing at the age of 45. In seven novels and in the screenplays he wrote for Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock, Chandler scripted much of the unshaven poetry and arsenic idealism that form us now, and haunt us still, in Mickey Spillane beer ads and smoky urban videos, from Jack Nicholson's Chinatown to Joan Didion's Malibu...
Written by Thornton Wilder...
...THORNTON Wilder's high-school-theater chestnut about the bygone era of small-town America finds itself on the Harvard stage best suited to its unique, self-conscious theatricality...