Comment on Theater review: 'Our Town' is broadly entertaining in Sooner Theatre-OU production in Norman

Theater review: 'Our Town' is broadly entertaining in Sooner Theatre-OU production in Norman

By John Brandenburg, For The OklahomanNORMAN — A straightforward, streamlined version of “Our Town,” broadly entertaining yet serious when it needed to be, with superb period costumes making up for minimal, portable props, is being staged at Sooner Theatre. The Sooner Theatre and University of Oklahoma production of Thornton Wilder’s masterful evocation of Grover’s Corners, N.H., was performed Friday in three acts, several years apart, beginning on “May 7, 1901.” Leavening proceedings considerably were folk-gospel, group-sing, musical interludes, performed on stage between acts, as well as when spectators were taking their seats, or rising to cheer and drive home. Tom Huston Orr was just folksy enough in a no-nonsense New Hampshire kind of way as the “Stage Manager,” not only narrating the play but filling several parts, good-humored but all business, his sleeves often rolled up. Indeed, Orr sometimes seemed to know the town’s past and future with a kind of cosmic detachment, almost like that of the dead quietly talking to each other, sitting in the graveyard, in the play’s unforgettable final act. Keeping the town’s history from becoming dry facts, like those propounded by a professor before being cut off, was the drama enacted by the son and daughter of two leading families who are next-door neighbors. Ryan Echols as George Gibbs and Kasey Weir as Emily Webb were utterly disarming in these roles, climbing up tall step ladders, representing their upstairs rooms, to communicate with each other about homework, using signals. Echols was naively appealing and just hesitant enough, especially on his wedding day, as George, the high school star athlete, who gives up baseball and agricultural college to marry Emily, and start farming. Weir was wonderful as the school’s brightest pupil, but had her best scene expressing the anguish of Emily after she dies in childbirth and returns to Earth to relive a childhood birthday, then cuts short her visit. Supporting these small-town star-crossed lovers with telling, understated performances were Mateja Govich and Alissa Mortimer, as George’s parents, and David Cricklin and Jennifer Osborn, as Emily’s. Govich, whose character also is the town doctor, was at his best telling George that being a farmer may mean doing chores he shirks at home, while the newspaper editor played by Cricklin gives George the good advice not to follow his father-in-law’s advice! Doing mundane things like stringing beans on a bench, Osborn and Mortimer also had their moments, especially when the latter articulates Mrs.Read more on NewsOK.com

 

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