Holly Twyford: Last News

Our Town to life on stage. Especially during an ongoing global pandemic.“It’s been one of the craziest things, putting on this show in the time of COVID,” says Alan Paul, associate artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company, who directed the organization’s current production of the Thornton Wilder classic.Initially scheduled to run the first two months of 2022, the show was postponed until May in an effort to steer clear of this winter’s first wave of COVID’s omicron variant. “And then when we were getting ready to open the show, a bunch of people in the cast got COVID.

Our Town (★★★★☆) at the Shakespeare Theatre expressively conjures an entire population and bygone way of American life.They were bygone days in 1938 when Thorton Wilder wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, set just after the turn of the century in bucolic Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. Wilder directed in the text that the action should unfold on a bare stage, where the span of a life might be measured over the twelve years spent with the citizenry of this small town.Bustling underneath the sturdy, arching beams of set designer Wilson Chin’s wood-frame theater-within-a-theater, Paul’s excellent cast do evoke not just the tapestry of family ties and neighborly disputes in Grover’s Corners, but also a vibrant sense of the landscape.In their eyes, we can see the sunflowers and butternut trees, smell the sweet scent of heliotrope on a moonlit night.