A Haunting Jim Parsons Leads OUR TOWN — Review

Kenny Leon’s production of Our Town is – as might be his calling cards – straightforward and effective. The prolific director is well-suited to Thornton Wilder’s seminal 1938 play, which tracks the daily lives of a small New Hampshire town across twelve years as a petri dish of humanist beauty. Though Leon’s simple staging, which trims the three-act work into a 100-minute piece, could use a few more beats, it succeeds largely because of a terrifically calibrated lead performance.

Jim Parsons brings a wounded gravitas to the role of the Stage Manager that’s perfectly tailored to our end-of-times moment; not so much an authoritative power guiding us through the cosmos of existence, but a weary, wondrous god contemplating and coping with his creation. His narration is clean and often funny, in Parson’s slightly undercutting way, and plumbs moments of deep poignancy, as when he appears to choke up when paraphrasing “what one of those European fellas said: every child born into the world is nature’s attempt to make a perfect human being.”

The two families united in marriage by children George Gibbs (Ephraim Sykes) and Emily Webb (Zoey Deutch) are portrayed well by Billy Eugene Jones and the stupendous Michelle Wilson as the elder Gibbs; Richard Thomas, and Katie Holmes on the other side. But Julie Halston, in a brief comic moment, is reliably memorable as an overeager wedding attendee and, with few lines but a visible universe of pain, Donald Webber, Jr. is utterly haunting as the town choir director who, not “made for small-town life,” drinks himself into oblivion.

He seems to share an existential grief with Parson’s Stage Manager, and the production strikes a similarly melancholy tone. Strewn above the audience is a string of lanterns that extend onto Beowulf Boritt’s wood-paneled set. Look closely and you realize they’re in the shape of a question mark, one whose answer comes when a back wall unveils the cemetery that will house the play’s final act. “We all know that something is eternal,” the Manager muses. Leon’s production, admirably suggests that it’s not just ongoing life, but the promise of death that binds us together.

‍Our Town is in performance through January 19, 2025 at the Barrymore Theatre on 47th St in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.