Our Town
Frequent flyers here might have noticed I just read the novel Shark Heart1. Well in that book the husband, Lewis, is a playwright and theatre teacher who stages a production of Our Town. He is unable to continue before rehearsals are finished, so has to watch the final play from the audience, unable to contain himself.
Something I never wrote about here was that I just watched Ethan Hawke’s great TV mini-series The Last Movie Stars, about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. In that he touches on Newman’s late-in-life production of Our Town, so between that and the book I felt like I really should check it out.
This isn’t quite a filmed stage play, in the sense that there is no audience and the cameras move freely around the stage more like they would in a movie. But it’s definitely more of a stage production than a piece of cinema. True to the source material it’s a play-within-a-play set in a fictional theatre with barely any scenery or props beyond a few chairs.
The narrator of the piece is the stage manager, in this case played wonderfully by Paul Newman. He tells a day-in-the-life story of a small town in America and the families within it. Births, weddings and deaths - stories of love and loss.
Again true to the source material it’s told dryly and without sentimentality, which is not easy to pull off but is important to the core function of the play that reveals itself toward the end.
As to how it relates to Shark Heart, I’m really glad I saw a production of Our Town because the feeling of inevitability and trying to push against nature is present in both. Habeck makes Our Town a core feature of the first act of her book, perhaps more so than I had realised at first.
As a film, it’s always great to see Paul Newman and he lends a real sense of poignancy and gravitas to the role, but the rest of the cast do a lot of the heavy lifting. I’m not that familiar with the play but my instinct would suggest that maybe Emily was a bit gutless here, but perhaps I’m being too harsh.
A solid production of an old (new to me!) favourite.