Homespun as it is, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is one of the great American meditations on life and death, so it’s not surprising that Mark Anderson and Isabelle Kralj would turn to it to commemorate their friend and colleague, Ed Burgess, who died a year ago. As Theatre Gigante, Anderson and Kralj are fond of giving a postmodern spin to iconic material. Burgess’s last appearance onstage in Milwaukee, in fact, was Gigante’s meditation on the lives of dancers Isadora Duncan and Vaslav Nijinsky.
Here, the signature details of Wilder’s play are apparent: the stack of simple chairs that become the sets for all the scenes, the stage manager, the metaphysical reflections from an actor posing as an audience member.
And a few bits of dialogue—quoted directly–from the play, including Emily’s famous line: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute.”
But most of Our Our Town consists of variations on Wilder’s themes. At times, the cast sits silently in its chairs, quiet as the dead themselves. At others, they seem to float above them, as if gravity has abandoned them. The “every, every minutes” of life are played out with petty arguments and banal conversations that bounce around from couple to couple. It’s all here—food, love, insecurity, wonder, sadness. Sometimes acted, sometimes danced, and sometimes intellectualized and reflected upon (Tom Simpson takes a particularly funny turn as a “guest professor,” for which everything seems to be “beside the point”).
Gigante has created works that are more like plays, and one sometimes wishes that Our Our Town had some narrative drive. But with the gentle power of Wilder’s original play in the back of your mind, Our Our Town has a quality of reflection and ceremony. When Burgess’s name is finally spoken in the final moments of the piece, it feels gently cathartic, a calm and beautiful assertion of both the power of memory and the fragility of things worth remembering.
