A review for a show I did sound design for.
Theater review: ‘Our Town’ at the Garden Theatre
Here’s my review of Our Town, produced by Beth Marshall Presents, which will be in the Sentinel later this week.
By Elizabeth Maupin
Sentinel Theater CriticWhen Our Town meets Winter Garden, it may be hard to tell what’s real and what’s theater.
Playwright Thornton Wilder’s description of Grover’s Corners, N.H., sounds an awful lot like Winter Garden, Fla., from the railroad station to the churches to the post office and the row of stores. When somebody speaks of looking up at the stars, you can look up and see the little lights twinkling in the Garden Theatre’s ceiling. And when you hear the sound of the rain on the theater roof, you find yourself wondering: Is it really raining? Or is that just another lifelike theatrical touch?
All of which adds to the feeling of well-being you get from this staging of Our Town, produced by Beth Marshall and directed by David Lee. Performed on the Garden’s high stage, this version is less intimate than others I’ve seen, and every once in a while the acting leans toward the histrionic. Yet the relaxed, genial presence of Christopher Lee Gibson as the Stage Manager sets the tone for an Our Town that reaches out and draws you in.
Nearly everybody of a certain age has seen Our Town, or had to read it in school, and thinks of it as a stale relic of niceness from another time. That’s far from fair to Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, which broke the theater’s metaphorical fourth wall in startling ways and still has more serious things on its mind than sand-lot baseball and strawberry sodas. Despite the color-blind casting, which works perfectly well, Lee’s production doesn’t try to force you to look at Our Town anew. It’s just Our Town, in all its lovely simplicity.
Such simplicity extends to the play’s famous lack of a set, which reads here as a ghost light and a dozen or more mismatched wooden chairs on an empty stage. Recognizable sound effects (by John Valines) alert you to the presence of a horse or a ballgame, and only a malfunctioning center light at one performance last weekend kept you from seeing the play in its elegant plainness.
That’s too bad because the cast is replete with fine actors who couldn’t entirely be seen, and the best of them — Joe Swanberg as Dr. Gibbs, Jamie Middleton as Mrs. Gibbs, Jesse Lenoir as George and Trenell Mooring as Rebecca — find ways to make their characters seem authentic by paring them back. Jennifer Bonner comes across as a little over-dramatic as Emily (who is, granted, pretty over-dramatic), and Lee allows Lenoir a theatrical touch at play’s end that runs counter to the behavior of a stoic New Englander.
But it’s a pleasure to see George and Emily call to each other from the Garden’s Romeo-and-Juliet balconies, and it’s a pleasure to make this journey with the charismatic Gibson, who brings both authority and a kind of low-key wisdom to his role. There’s little New Hampshire shtick here, and no old-timey sweetness. With Our Town, it’s enough that it’s Our Town. Doing it in Winter Garden is just the cherry on the sundae.
Elizabeth Maupin may be reached at emauipin@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5426.
Theater review
‘Our Town’
What: Beth Marshall Presents production of Thornton Wilder comic drama.
Where: Garden Theatre, 160 W. Plant St., Winter Garden.
When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through March 29.
Cost: $22 general, $18 seniors and students.
Call: 407-877-4736.
Online: Gardentheatre.org.
Photos: Top, Christopher Lee Gibson. Middle: Jennifer Bonner and Jesse Lenoir. Bottom: Mike Lane and Christopher Lee Gibson. Photos by Kristen Hanshaw Wheeler.
