Our Town rocked

I saw the Sunday matinee yesterday with my mother. The play has found its groove.

All during rehearsals, my mother kept telling me that the definitive production of this show was the Paul Newman one on Broadway. After the first intermission, she sighed happily, and said, "Tom Skerritt is so much better than Paul Newman as the Stage Manager. Paul was a little regal for this role. Tom is affectionate. Homey. Willing to throw away lines. And what a treat, to get to see a production where everyone is the right age for the role."

After the second intermission, she said, "This Intiman production is better than the Broadway production. Your father would have loved that scrim. And those tall ladders. That whole act was beautiful. I am so glad I lived to see this." She wiggled her butt happily back into the seat. She didn't leave during either of the intermissions. "I don't want to miss a moment of this one, Rachel."

For me, it was incredible seeing the show with -- as is often true on Sunday matinees -- a mostly elderly audience. They liked act 1. They warmed up to act 2, the wedding, especially to the parents' vantage. But they loved act 3. They're all about that tender membrane between living and dying. They listened to the Stage Manager as if he was their long-lost older brother. THIS was the act that interested them -- the one with the graveyard, and the flashback; the making sense of death.

Standing ovation at the end. Quiet crying people walking out. A cast who still, perhaps, have no idea how stunning the production is that they are involved in, but was happy to get the ovation.

The Intiman put a lot of preparation into this show -- from getting funding for a full cast of 24, to setting up an extra-long student matinee run (sold out a month before we opened), to raising the budget for hiring someone like Tom Skerritt. They are repollinating America with our own texts. Most people don't see theatre. They haven't seen this play. But because of a couple years of focussed intention, thousands of people are now getting to.

We don't know what we're in, while we're in it.