STAGE REVIEW : The Old Globe Presents Expansive ‘Our Town’

The Old Globe Theatre goes back to basics this week. “Our Town” opened over the weekend, “Hamlet” arrives later this week.

Edward Payson Call has staged “Our Town” outdoors, in the Lowell Davies Festival Theatre. Thornton Wilder’s beautifully distilled meditation on life and death feels more expansive than usual, but slightly less intimate in the end.

Call emphasizes that the title character is a whole community of human beings, not Emily or George or the Stage Manager. Until the third act, many of the actors who aren’t in any given scene stand on the sidelines, watching and sometimes contributing sound effects.

This device is at its funniest when a visible chorus of actors clucks away as Mrs. Webb’s hens. Later, when George wants a private moment with Emily, the onstage onlookers are virtually voyeurs. George has to stare down a small crowd that has gathered to watch the young couple.

The community of Grover’s Corners ventures into the audience, too, perhaps in an attempt to counter the wide-open outdoor space. Call expanded the role of the young man, planted in the audience, who asks whether anyone cares about social injustice. He now has a girlfriend who sounds humiliated at his question. The pair leaves the theater conducting a noisy row. Later, George and Emily take their stroll home from school via the aisles in the audience.

A tiny musical coda has been added to the first act. Young newspaper carrier Joe Crowell offers a one-phrase reprise of the hymn the church choir was singing earlier: “Blest Be the Tie That Binds.”

The ties that bind human beings do appear blessed in this play. But in the third act, they don’t necessarily transcend death. This particular assembly of the dead appears more weaned away from human concerns than usual. It isn’t just their unflinching straight-out stares; it’s also the way Emily (Cynthia Nixon) behaves, on her way to join them.

Nixon subtly underplays this scene. She indulges in fewer sobs than most Emilys; she appears more willing to let go of life. It’s certainly a respectable choice. The only problem is that there is less sobbing in the audience, as well as onstage.

For those who are accustomed to a waterworks in the third act of “Our Town,” for those who got all choked up just watching a recent episode of TV’s “The Wonder Years” in which a high school put on “Our Town,” this is something of a letdown. Of course this may not apply to newcomers to the play; bring handkerchiefs, just in case.

The cumulative emotional impact of the play also was undercut slightly on opening night by two features which were beyond the theater’s control--and which might vary nightly: airplane noise and a cloud cover. The former problem was more intrusive than usual in this theater, maybe because it seemed odd for the characters to note sporadic train whistles, when the airplane racket is surely louder than any turn-of-the-century train would have been.

The cloud cover was a problem only because it defeated any attempt to cast a spell with actual moonlight, or at least with starlight. The script’s references to moon and stars are one of the best reasons for staging “Our Town” outside, yet they were hardly relevant on opening night.

The third act is enhanced by Peter Maradudin’s lighting. When Emily starts remembering her 12th birthday, the eucalyptuses in back of the stage light up. And the curtain call, using frozen silhouettes followed by a brisk walk into the light of the audience’s applause, is an especially artful touch.

Jerry Hardin’s Stage Manager is generally as calm and folksy as they come, but he has a strikingly fervent moment when he addresses the people who will open the town’s time capsule 1,000 years hence. Nixon and gangly Shad Willingham play Emily and George with classic charm and an ability to straddle adolescence and adulthood. An especially telling moment is early on, when George mentions the farm he will inherit. Emily walks around him, sizing him up with fresh eyes, while he awkwardly drapes his arm, with its catcher’s mitt attached, over his head, awaiting her response.

The rest of the cast meets this theater’s typically high standards.

At the Simon Edison Center, Balboa Park, Tuesdays through Sundays at 8 p.m., through Sept. 30. $24-$27; (619) 239-2255.

OUR TOWN

Written by Thornton Wilder. Directed by Edward Payson Call. Scenic design by Ralph Funicello. Costumes by Lewis Brown. Lights by Peter Maradudin. Musical coordinator Conrad Susa. Sound by Jeff Ladman. Stage manager Robert Drake. With Jerry Hardin, Robert LaPorta, Arthur Morton, Mitchell Edmonds, Jill Andre, Shad Willingham, Roya Shanks, Nicholas Pryor, Teri Ralston, Cynthia Nixon, Sean Sedgwick, Luther Hanson, Ryan Conner, Robert Phalen, Larry Corodemas, Mary Benson, Sheldon Gero, Mark Hofflund, David S. Cohen, Tavis Ross, Georgia Martin, Sue-Anne Morrow, M. Susan Peck, Triney Sandoval, Therese Walden.