‘Our Town’ is as poignant and powerful as ever in American Theater Group production

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Stacey Linnartz and Carrie Keating, center, with other actors in American Theater Group’s production of “Our Town.”

The actors in The American Theater Group’s current production of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play “Our Town — which will be at The Union Arts Center through Nov. 2 and then move to The Siemenski Theater in Basking Ridge, Nov. 6-9 — casually walk up the theater’s aisles in their street clothes, at show time, as if they are regular audience members. Some chat with each other, or wave to people they know in the audience. They then walk onto the stage, grab their costumes from racks, and go backstage to change. Some of them are introduced to the audience by name.

It is a clever move by director Merete Muenter, echoing Wilder’s idea that even though “Our Town” takes place in a specific, vividly sketched place — the fictional town of Grover’s Corner, New Hampshire, in the early 20th century — it really applies to all people in all towns, everywhere, and at all times. We could all be those unassuming characters onstage.

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Timothy Ware-Hill in “Our Town.”

“Nice town, you know what I mean?” says the narrator, whom Wilder called the Stage Manager (played here by Timothy Ware-Hill). “Nobody very remarkable’s ever come out of it, so far as we know.” Just like so many places, filled with so many ordinary people.

“No curtain. No scenery,” wrote Wilder in the original script. And Muenter says true to his minimalistic vision, though she does add some distinctive touches, including some drama-enhancing original music, by Keith Levenson. Like most directors who have overseen productions of “Our Town” over the last 87 years, though, she does not want to make many changes to a play that is pretty much perfect as it is — and as profound as anything that any American playwright has come up with.

It makes you think about nothing less than the purpose of our country when the Stage Manager takes us on a tour of the Grover’s Corner graveyard and says: “Over there are some Civil War veterans. Iron flags on their graves… New Hampshire boys… had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than 50 miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name, friends — the United States of America. The United States of America. And they went and died about it.”

“Our Town” is not primarily a political play, though. It is about the joys and sorrows of everyday life, whether it is being lived in a big city or a nondescript little town like Grover’s Corner. Wilder follows two families who live next to each other: The town’s general practitioner, Dr. Frank Gibbs (Rudy Martinez), his wife Julia (Stacey Linnartz) and their children George (Chase Pittman) and Rebecca (Carly Giuliano); and the town’s newspaper editor, Charles Webb (Jamie LaVerdiere), his wife Myrtle (Gabrielle Lee) and their children Emily (Carrie Keating) and Wally (Lucca James Riley).

In the first two acts (condensed here into a single act, with no intermission), the newspaper and the milk get delivered every day; the mothers concentrate on their children and the household chores, while the men do their jobs. High school classmates George (a star baseball player) and Emily (a star student) fall in love with each other and get married.

Mistakes are made, but lessons are learned: When Dr. Gibbs gently but firmly lets George know that he has been spending too much time on baseball, and not helping out enough with the wood chopping … well, George does not have to be told twice.

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From left, Jamie LaVerdiere, Chase Pittman and Gabrielle Lee in “Our Town.”

Yet all is not always idyllic. The church organist and choir leader, Simon Stimson (Robert Vaias), for instance, has a drinking problem that seems to be getting worse. Still, life grinds on, with all its routines, nagging frustrations and occasional victories — until the third act, which takes a turn toward the tragic, and the cosmic.

Even if you have never seen “Our Town” before, you have a hint of what is coming, when the Stage Manager tells us, at the start of Act 2, “The First Act was called ‘The Daily Life.’ This act is called ‘Love and Marriage.’ There’s another act coming after this: I reckon you can guess what that’s about.”

The trickiest — and most crucial — role in “Our Town” is the Stage Manager. He has got to be folksy and down-to-earth, but also all-knowing, and a bit mysterious. You have to feel he could sit down with these characters at the Grover’s Corner diner and have a pleasant meal with them — but he also has to stand apart, and make his authority and his wisdom clear. Ware-Hill gets the mix just right.

It is always a good time to see “Our Town,” of course. But this quietly assured production comes along at a particularly good time. With our current political problems, it is impossible not to yearn for the more compassionate, less contentious time that Wilder depicts. If only we could get our politicians to spend a night at The Union Arts Center or The Sieminski Theatre …

The American Theater Group will present “Our Town” at The DMK Black Box Theatre at The Union Arts Center, through Nov. 2, and at The Sieminski Theatre in Basking Ridge, Nov. 6-9. Visit americantheatergroup.org.

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