The cast of Our Town . . . but Wilder includes (clockwise from top left) Chris Carver as adult Bentley; Camber Carpenter as show choir head Fanny Simpson; Frances Karagio as Bentley’s mom; Joseph Monseur as jock Frankie; Ben Elias as Bentley; and Kathryn Taylor as Jen. Photographs by Adam Smith.
“The Stage Manager in Our Town must be gay. I mean, he spends all his time gossiping about everyone in town and rearranging furniture.” This is a funny line, stereotypes notwithstanding. It sounds like something you might hear from the quippy gay men in good comedies like Will & Grace or Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey.
The line comes from a not-so-good new comedy, Our Town … but Wilder, written and directed by Richard Krevolin. It’s about an aborted high school production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in a small Connecticut town circa 1984 and begins with a character called Stage Manager (Chris Carver) introducing the work, the setting, the characters. Later, a scene takes place in a cemetery, and Bentley—the fatherless, closeted boy who was to play the Stage Manager in the school show—makes a speech saying goodbye to everyday things. The only scenery is a folding ladder and some chairs.
All of this is lifted from the real Our Town, which suggests Krevolin wrote his play as an homage. But large chunks of Wilder diverge from the Our Town template, so instead we end up with an ungainly mix of lame one-liners, extended monologues where clichéd characters over-explain themselves in crass terms, “meta” gimmicks, catty show-queen asides, treatise on homophobia and anti-Semitism, sledgehammer-subtle political commentary, and a plot line that’s both broad-humored and hyper-melodramatic.
Meanwhile, what the play could use more of is fact-checking. Someone tells a story in 1984 about commiserating in a bar with Exxon Valdez captain Joseph Hazelwood, but the massive oil spill that made Hazelwood infamous didn’t happen until 1989. Bentley’s best friend Jen talks about how they came up with the idea “to have me kiss a ninth-grade girl deeply and passionately in the cemetery scene.” But nobody kisses anyone in the cemetery scene of Our Town, and a decision like that would be made by the director, not actors. Jen recalls a car accident where “We crash into this big oak tree . . . I fly right out of the car,” yet she gets right up and is fine. Uh, isn’t the only way to “fly out” of a moving car through the windshield?
“The play could use more fact-checking. Someone tells a story in 1984 about commiserating in a bar with Exxon Valdez captain Joseph Hazelwood, but the massive oil spill that made Hazelwood infamous didn’t happen until 1989. ”
Perhaps the biggest lapse in logic has to do with the incident that causes the school play to be shut down. Bentley rips his jeans, and his teacher and director Mr. Lichter tells him to take them off so he can sew them. While Bentley is sitting there in his underwear, “YMCA” comes on the radio, and they both start dancing—until the principal walks in. The audience is expected to agree with Bentley and Jen that because this was not sexual (which, based on some dialogue, isn’t entirely true anyway), Mr. Lichter is unjustly rebuked. But it is never appropriate for any teacher to be with a student in his underwear.
The pivotal Mr. Lichter is not a character in the play, and only after he’s forced to resign do we hear, repeatedly, about how beloved and inspirational he was. To give you an idea of how ill-conceived this storytelling is: Imagine Gypsy without Rose as an actual character—Louise and June and Herbie and Mr. Goldstone and Uncle Jocko and the maid in the last scene just talk about how brash and driven she was.
In a program note, Krevolin says he wrote the first draft of Wilder when he was in grad school, then shelved it for 30 years. He’s had other plays produced in that time, yet this effort feels like the work of somebody who decided to write one play and cram every idea and topic into it. According to the playwright’s note on the script, “This is a memory play about a small town in Connecticut. . . . This is also a play about the theories, origins, uses, significations and meanings of language and the ensuing actions accompanying the understanding of that language.” (Phew!) And “it is a play about the playfully comic absurdity of who we have become.” Krevolin subtitled his play A Lamentation for America, which doesn’t exactly sound comically absurd.
Our Town . . . but Wilder ends with the entire cast loudly exhorting us to “Love each other!” This after 90 minutes of Bentley and Jen speaking hatefully about their “freaking stupid town” and the petty, narrow-minded “decaying and rotting filth” who live in this “cesspool of narcissists incapable of growth and change.”
Maybe in another 30 years, Krevolin will have written yet another draft that’s not so tonally and thematically diffuse.
Our Town . . . but Wilder runs through Dec. 31 at the Actors’ Temple (339 W. 47th St.). Performances are 7 p.m. Monday and 8 p.m. Saturday, with a 2 p.m. matinee Sunday. For tickets, call (212) 239-6200 or visit telecharge.com.
