Our Town at Portland Center Stage

Years ago, I lived with a man who was only interested in one subject. That's not a huge thing as far as tragic marriages go, but because all of our time was devoted to this one thing, I spent years feeling culturally and intellectually starved as well as lonely. One time, my mother-in-law gave us a bunch of old movies on video cassette, and one of those was Our Town (1940). That night, I took the tape of the film version of the Thornton Wilder play about the preciousness of everyday life into the bedroom alone and bawled my eyes out.

I've been in love with the play ever since but had never seen it on stage until last Saturday night when I had the good luck to get amazing third-row-center seats for the production at Portland Center Stage. It was performed as it's meant to be performed:

Well, OK, they do have a curtain, but the rest is the same. No scenery. Just chairs and, for the scenes that take place from second-story windows, two ladders.

Theaters always have a big choice to make as far as whether to produce a classic exactly as written or to give it some twist to make it their own. The twist Portland Center Stage employs is equal parts subtle and bold and is very effective. For this story about turn-of-the-last-century small-town life in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, there is quite a diverse cast. The lack of a period set helps put this over so that it's surprisingly  easy to swallow a family in which George Gibbs (Sathya Sridharan) is Indian American and his sister Rebecca (Hailey Kilgore) is African American. One plus to welcoming such diversity into Grover's Corners is that you end up with a cast of very strong actors, but it also plays beautifully into the sense of universality that lies at the heart of Our Town, the idea that this small town is the whole big world.

And, such a strong cast. I thought everyone did great honor to Wilder's characters, but if I had to choose stand-outs, I'd say I thought both the mother characters, Mrs. Gibbs (Gina Daniels) and Mrs. Webb (Tina Chillip), were wonderful, and Sathya Sridharan's gangly, exuberant George was delightful. Sharonlee McLean and Leif Norby added some great supporting cast comedy. And when John D. Haggerdy's Mr. Webb walked Emily (lovely Nikki Massoud) down the aisle on her wedding day, when he turned to look at her in the second before he released her, the love on his face felt utterly real.

While the actors give us subtlety and realness, Rose Riordan's staging gives us beautiful theatricality. One favorite moment is when George and Emily realize they're in love for the first time. Riordan has them walk together, across the back of the stage, then right down the middle, heading right at us in the audience, before breaking away, giddy (the way giddy combines both joy and fear) and running off in opposite directions - a long, silent moment that gives us time to reflect on just how enormous this regular old love thing is.

And then there's the moment when the curtain goes up on act three. I'm not going to give it away, but what I saw was stunning. The staging in this final leg of the show is beautifully haunting and worth the price of admission.

The philosophical climax of Our Town has been described by some modern, jaded crab apples not unlike myself as a tad simplistic and preachy:

Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?

But I have to say. Since seeing the play, I find myself stopping here and there in my day, trying to thornton-wilder my way into holding a little harder onto each moment and reminding myself, "every, every minute."

*

Our Town runs through October 11 on  the Gerding Theater's main stage. More information is here.

Photos of the production courtesy of Patrick Weishampel/blankeye.tv

a moment in the day: grandfather

You never know what smells are going to find you as you walk through this apartment building. Someone's pizza delivery. Someone's didn't-quite-all-make-it-down-to-the-basement garbage. Often: wet dog. Which I don't mind. Tonight as I walk Nicholas down the three flights of stairs and out into the lovely grand entryway of the apartment, it's a distinct smoke smell. Something thick and oddly sweet, and my brain instantly says, Papoo. My great grandfather on my mother's side. But is that right? What I'm smelling reminds me of pipe tobacco. Did Papoo ever smoke a pipe? Why did this scent make me think of him?

When I really think of Papoo, I remember mints. Or maybe... butterscotch candies. Some sort of candies he loved to eat and always for sure smelled like when I leaned in to hug him when I visited him when I was very young and he was very old. Sad that I don't even remember which candies anymore. Because I so remember remembering what he smelled like - that lovely visceral memory of him - for so long.

Maybe this pipe smell in the entryway is another of my grandfathers. But I think of Coco, and what I remember is the sharp scent of boat gasoline. Or the sweet of blackberry pies baking in their house. And when I think of Pappaw, what I remember is moth balls.

It suddenly makes me terribly sad to be this far along in my life, to be so far away from the scents of grandfathers.

a moment in the day: the floors

We're at the house every moment that we're not... somewhere else. Today I worked nine to five and then we attended a literary event but now, nine o'clock at night, we're at the house again.

The smell of sawdust has replaced the stale cigarette smell, at least in the four rooms where the floor guys have been sanding things down. Working like mad to remove the paint that was splattered and slopped across the lovely, old fir floors when the people who lived here before didn't bother to cover anything while painting the rooms. Working like mad to reduce the outrageous amounts of staining that resulted from those people letting their cats and dogs pee all over the carpet and never bothering to clean it up. Untended animal urine that the floor guys and the carpet-removal guy before them have declared to be the worst case they've ever seen.

I'm mad at those people. For hurting this house. The paint splatters all over the lovely wood molding, the spray of old soy or teriyaki sauce (that's what the cleaning woman said it was) up one living room wall and across the ceiling. The garbage we found half buried in the dirt behind the garage. I know I don't have any right to be mad at them; it was their house and they could do whatever they wanted in it. But now this house is mine, and I feel like you do when you find out someone kicked your little sister.

All the half-assed do-it-yourself repair jobs they did on the plumbing. Paint smeared across window glass. The door they took out and walled up but never bothered to refinish. All the filth they were living in. All the neglect. How neglect can feel like disrespect.

Stephen crouches with a spray bottle of hydrogen peroxide, squirting the spots along the floor where the long-ignored animal urine stained the wood the worst. There's only one spray bottle and it's not my turn, so I'm walking around, taking some pictures and looking at the difference this treatment has made already.

I stoop and touch the floor. Touching is something I've been avoiding in this house, at least when I'm not working to scrape paint spatters off the wood columns or help unscrew ugly bathroom fixtures from the walls. It's like there's a layer of those people lingering like old smoke residue all along every surface. But now, we've yanked out the old green carpet and the floor guys have sanded the top layer off the wood underneath, exposing a surface those people never touched. I run my hand along the soft, powdery surface. Something new. Something clean.

a moment in the day: paint chips

Stephen and I stand in the room that will someday be our bedroom: paint-splattered wood floor, army helicopter stickers on the wall, the exposed drywall where the ugly prefab fireplace was demolitioned over the weekend. We have a little stack of paint chips and Stephen's holding one to the wall, up against the wood molding around the door, and we're talking about color.

I've felt so emotional throughout this house process, grumpy and sleep deprived and periodically wanting to burst into tears because, say, Stephen announces that we'll have to keep our section of the sidewalk clear and then nudges a weed to its death with his shoe to demonstrate. I just know the house is going to smell like old cigarettes forever, and the thought that I'll never hear the streetcar go by the house and I'll never hear the Amtrak train whistles at night fills me with grief.

The color on the paint chip is green, a late-summer green, like hot sun through waning leaves. I picked the paint chips out, and Stephen likes my choices, and that makes me incredibly proud. The choices weren't arbitrary. We've been talking color for a long time. But just the fact that my opinionated artist husband asked me to pick out the paint chips with my own eyes and is standing here, now, nodding and smiling and saying, "Yes, I think that's going to look really nice," fills me with whatever is the opposite of that grief thing I was just talking about.

He uses his hand to cover the green squares above and below the shade we're considering, and I stand back like it's a portrait in an art gallery. I say I think it's great and he says he thinks this might be it. We turn the card over to see what the name of the color is so we can make a note of it. It says, Footy Pajamas.

a moment in the day: porch toast

Stephen and I sit side by side on the porch steps. Early-dusk blue sky, a cartwheel of crows overhead. We closed on our house today, this house behind us, and it feels real like only something this big feels real, which is to say not real. Whose house is this, it's not our house, it's not a house at all, it's the facade of a house sitting on the old MGM motion picture back lot, it's a painted stage flat on the opera stage at the Keller auditorium. We each have a glass of Veuve Clicquot.

We’ve been wandering around the empty rooms that are full of the stale smell of the fifteen thousand cigarettes smoked by the people who lived here before, pulling up old carpet to see the paint-splattered wood floors underneath. Taking “before” pictures of the cracked kitchen counters, the lovely but scarred and paint-splattered wood moldings and columns in the dining room, taking stock of the work before us.

Cats make lazy lopes through the street. A perturbed squirrel squawks at us from the walnut tree. We clink glasses.

Stephen says, "This is ours."

I take that in for a moment.

He sips his champagne and turns to gaze at our new house. “I don’t usually own things this junky.”

a moment in the day: sky

Home appraisal day. Yet another day along the process in which our hopes and expectations surrounding buying the house could crumble. But how amazing and impossible to have gotten this far. At the same time, I've been building a book. Which has meant reading submissions, choosing stories, rejecting stories, editing stories, ordering stories, all of which felt impossible this time last year and here I am on the other side, in final discussions about titles and subtitles with the publisher as the galleys are being prepared.

I walk Nicholas in the morning. Down the marble stairs, through the grand entryway of the apartment where Stephen and I have lived for ten impossible years. Can it really be ten years? Out though the front door, and we turn to the right, stepping under trees. There's a curious sizzling sound, like rain in the tree leaves, but that can't be. I stop and try to figure out where it's coming from. I finally bother to look down. Tiny spots all along the pavement. Step out from under the tree and put my hand out, and there it is, no question: impossible rain coming down from this sky.

anonymous theater's the real inspector hound

OK, now listen to me. If you get a chance to see an Anonymous Theater production, GO. I wish I could tell you all about it and at the end post a link to information about other performances, but this was a one-night-only affair. All I'm going to say is, be on the lookout for the next. I have just had the most fun I've had in a long time.

Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound is such good material, you kind of can't go wrong, but couple it with Anonymous Theater, and you add an extra layer of serious fun. If you don't already know what it is, an Anonymous Theater production is staged entirely with the actors (as you can probably figure out from the name) anonymous. This means not only does the audience not know who the actors are as they sit right there in the seats until their cues, but the actors themselves don't know who they're playing against. All the rehearsals are performed one-on-one with the director. So by the time the cast comes together for the one-night-only performance, it's just as fresh and new to them as it is to you.

Director Darius Pierce (who's also a fantastic and well-known Portland comedic actor) started things off with some remarks and some thank yous, an explanation of Anonymous Theater for any uninitiated, and when he was done speaking I leaned over to my friend and date for the evening and said, "His talk alone is worth the price of admission." Already we were laughing more than you do watching some comedies.

Then the show started. A darkened theater, the sound of birds, and suddenly out of the audience, up pops our first actor. The applause turns to laughter as she goes running down the side of the theater to take her place on stage.

Along with The Real Inspector Hound, we were treated to the ten-minute play On the Porch One Crisp Spring Morning, by Alex Dremann. You think maybe the extra ten-minute play is going to be a throwaway. Oh, but contraire.* It was a hilarious mini-drama between a mother and daughter who happen to be... spoiler alert... spoiler alert... double agents. Or triple agents. Maybe. Or maybe not. It's one  perfectly convoluted thing after another, and the two women in the piece (sadly, I can't remember their names, and of course the names are not on the program!) played it with a lovely mix of energetic rage and subtlety. My date for the evening is a writer who has just finished a gorgeous memoir that deals a lot with her own very odd mother, and it was such fun to hear her laughing with relish through the whole piece.

Seriously, when The Real Inspector Hound began, I was worried that it wouldn't be as funny as On the Porch. But the whole evening was smart, clever writing and laughs all the way through. And as I said before, the Anonymous part of it adds a lovely extra layer of energy. I was actually nervous as the lights dimmed and we waited for the first actor to pop up, as if it might turn out to be me. Then, with every actor who jumped up in his or her seat and started running to the stage, I just felt more and more energized.

The way the actors all ran down the aisles, grabbing their props from tables at the base of the stage as they went, added to the liveliness of an already fast-paced, lively play. At times the actors had some fun with the Anonymous-Theater-ness of it all (for instance the housekeeper finding that the apron she'd just picked up from the prop table didn't fit, and finally chucking the thing), and you were never sure if these moments were improvisations or moves planned out between actor and director. Here and there, the actors, witnessing the show fresh, couldn't keep from smiling, themselves.

Stand-outs among the actors. For me, they were... well, unfortunately, again, I can't remember any of the names that were announced at the end of the show (partly because the audience was applauding so vigorously I couldn't always hear). The woman who played Mrs. Drudge. Beautiful timing, sharp-as-a-tack delivery. And the guy who played Simon Gascoyne. Fabulous, particular physical comedian. I so enjoyed watching him that I was very disappointed when he... um, spoiler alert... died.

Or... spoiler alert... the first of him died.

You see, halfway through the show... OK, wait. I suppose I should explain some things first. The Real Inspector Hound is a play-within-a-play kind of play. At the beginning, you're introduced to two theater critics sitting in an audience. You get a bit of their story as they wait for their show to start and then the play, a murder mystery, starts to unfold in front of... both you and the critics watching from their seats at the side of the stage. Hilarity ensues - or continues to ensue... it never stops ensuing - and in a crazy, but beautifully orchestrated twist that would take entirely too long to explain, halfway through the show, the play-within-a-play starts over from the beginning as one of the critics gets pulled into the production. He is now Simon Gascoyne. The murder mystery goes forward a second time with this new Simon.

What audacity, to stage most of an entire play twice in one show. And how fascinating. The Real Inspector Hound is a player's play. An actor's delight, especially when the actors are witnessing the thing fresh, themselves. How interesting to watch two completely talented, completely different actors play the same part.

Actors playing actors, actors playing theater critics playing actors, critics discussing tropes and tropes discussing the world, love, mystery and murder. Layer upon layer. And as I said: especially when produced by Anonymous Theater. Not only is it a play within a play, but it's like an Anonymous Theater within an Anonymous Theater. I started to fall down a laughing vortex, a rip in the space-theater continuum. Here I was, a blogger playing a theater critic, Watching and laughing and trying to find meaning while the audience (and I) laughed at the theater critics trying to find meaning. And the meaning was nothing more than (and most importantly nothing less than) an evening of uproarious laughter, shared with a theater full of people and a good friend. The music of her laughing all tangled up with mine all tangled up with everyone else. There's nothing better.

-

For more information on Anonymous Theater, check out their website here.

*Yes, I know the phrase isn't actually, "oh, but contraire." It's a family thing.