Our Town by Thornton Wilder

Life is small and simple: a movement from childhood to death in one fluid motion; from birth to the afterlife; from high-school baseball and math problems, into marriage and the grave. Such is life in fictional Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, a small American town where controversy and conflict amass to gossip and small-talk. For the past two weekends, MiraCosta College Theatre presented Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize winning Our Town, directed by Tracy Williams. The play featured student and alumni actors alike. Although this is one of the most reproduced and staged plays to date, MiraCosta offered a pleasant production.

The main focus of the play is on two neighboring families: the Gibb's and the Webb's. We learn through our guide and narrator, a Garrison Kiellor-esque stage manager (played by Bernard X. Kopsho), who's who in Grover's Corners and what they do - from the milkman to the drunken choir director. Most of the action revolves around the relationship between George Gibbs (Ryan Kidd), a fun-loving, upcoming high school baseball star, and Emily Webb (Hayley Palmer), a serious and homely student.

We watch them grow in love and marry, eventually leading to tragedy and the final revelation of how precious life is. The story is simple, as is the resultant and revitalizing message it presents. Though written nearly 50 years ago, the play is honest, and a reflective view on daily life.

The production is basically void of props, as the script commands, thus the actors necessarily must pantomime for nearly the entire production. This adds to the airy, ghost-like mood of the stage; leaving the audience to use their imagination and accept the non-reality they are viewing; yet, it is at odds with the imagination by performing nothing supernatural nor unusual until the final tragi-comic death of an idea, and person. At times the miming could've used steadier hands, but in the end it worked along with the acceptance of college-level acting; and the ignorance of awfully unnecessary accents..

The staging was bare and open, a macrocosmic microcosm - a small world enclosed by invisible walls. There are basically two props: two tables, one 'in' each house. The costumes weren't spectacular, nor should they have been; what the characters wore neither distracted the audience, nor disrupted the mental idea of small-town America, c. 1907.

The overall success of the play has little to do with the acting, which was the cliché stagy, exuberant, and exaggerated acting expected and easily accepted for productions of this size and importance, in the grand scheme of things. Nor does the success lie in the staging; nor an outstanding lead role or performance (of which there seemed to be none, merely main focal points of characterization amongst a uniform whole); nor in the entertainment value, as there is little to be said about how much excitement really occurs.

The play is a success because of the message, which is clearly portrayed and related on stage. Due to the overall nature of the play, I would recommend giving it a chance; one doesn't feel as if time was wasted after viewing, simply that time was in a comfortable dawdle, taking a breather and reminding us that life exists outside of the theatre. The moral of the story: life is beautiful and ugly and short and long and full of trials, etc...Simply: life is what you make it, regardless of the fact there have been and most likely will be millions upon millions more of you.