Featured photo by Daniel Rader.
For the first time in more than 20 years, Our Town is back on Broadway — and in this revival, it comes with a splash of queer representation. Kinda.
Our Town is the quintessential small-town Americana play. Originally penned by Thorton Wilder in 1938, the show follows the lives of the citizens of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, at the turn of the 20th century. The play zeroes in on George Gibbs and Emily Webb, neighbors turned spouses over the course of their lives. In Act I, they start to fall in love. In Act II, they get married. In Act III (spoiler alert for a 90-year-old play), they reckon with death.
Our Town is as poignant and relatable a story now as it was then, but this new production does take conscious steps to expand who the play is speaking to. Though many previous renditions of Our Town have presented Grover’s Corners as an all-white community, this revival reimagines it as a racial melting pot: The Gibbs family is Black, while the Webb family is white, and the show’s ensemble of townsfolk is just as diverse.
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Director Kenny Leon addressed his ideas for the production in his director’s note. “What if we let 1901 be inclusive and representative of all the time since the birth of our country up until the present day,” Leon wrote. “In this production, time is then and now with the intention of speaking to the people sitting in the theatre today.”
This Grover’s Corners is diverse in ways beyond race, too. John McGinty, a deaf actor, shines as milkman Howie Newsome. Seeing townsfolk casually engage with him through sign language as he completes his morning deliveries speaks to the heart of Leon’s vision of community: Grover’s Corners’ nonchalance toward Howie’s deafness and toward the idea of an interracial marriage in 1904 feels almost utopian. It’s a bit of historical revisionism we can all get behind, but it does raise a question or two, especially for queer viewers: If the folks of Grover’s Corners are accepting beyond the conventions of their time, why aren’t queer folks visible in this community, too? Does it happen that this version of Grover’s Corners has no queer folks, or does the play simply not give us the chance to see their stories?
The production doesn’t set out to answer those questions or likely even to raise them. Still, as a queer audience member, it’s natural to look for yourself on stage. Here, queer eyes will likely fall on Jim Parsons, who stars as the Stage Manager, the play’s narrator and the audience’s guide through Grover’s Corners.
Is Parsons’ take on the Stage Manager queer? Not explicitly, but meta-textual knowledge can fill in those gaps. Off the stage, Parsons is openly gay, and many of his recent projects have embraced his sexuality, including Mother Play on Broadway earlier this year and movies like Spoiler Alert and The Boys In The Band.
Of course, Parsons being gay doesn’t automatically mean his character is, too. That’s where the text itself comes in. The Stage Manager has always felt queer: an outside observer, in love with a small town but never actually taking part in its story beyond fleeting moments. They’re reminiscent of the queer folks who grew up in places like Grover’s Corners across America, who had to leave in order to be themselves, but who never stopped loving the less-than-kind places that they’re from.
Then there’s Wilder himself, the playwright behind Our Town, who is widely speculated to have been a closeted gay man, though he never came out before his death. He never married (lending a bit of meta irony to Our Town’s assertion that “most everybody in the world climbs into their graves married”), and as such, surely didn’t see himself in his play’s central narrative of building a traditional heterosexual family. Instead, could the Stage Manager be Wilder’s self-insert if Our Town does, in fact, have one?
None of those questions have clear answers, and it’s up to audience members to decide for themselves if this Stage Manager speaks to their queer experience. What is clear is that this production strives for inclusivity: director Leon said it himself.
Inclusion, though, is tricky without editing Wilder’s original words. The play is a product of its time: It depicts the world before 1938, and of course, it can’t imagine a future beyond that. A revival can shift lots about a story, including the way its characters look, but to be faithful to its source material, it can’t change the words they say or their actions. How could queerness be part of any version of Our Town, shy of gender-swapping one of the main characters or costuming the Stage Manager in Pride merch?
Many of the show’s themes are universal, regardless of race, gender, or sexuality. We all experience love. We all experience grief. We all experience the weight of our families’ expectations and the relief and devastation of meeting them or letting them fall off our shoulders. But as any marginalized person can tell you, explicit representation means worlds more than a vague sense of inclusion. This production of Our Town tells us to search for ourselves on stage rather than saying, “Here you are!” Of course, not everything is about or for LGBTQ+ folks — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
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Despite the advances of past seasons, the pendulum on Broadway has swung the other direction, leaving queer and trans representation behind.
This revival of Our Town is a faithful yet imaginative production of a classic play. It hits all the right notes and its message of valuing our short time on earth tugs at the heartstrings as painfully now as it did in 1938. Leon’s aims for inclusion are admirable — and, for the most part, are wildly successful. The love story at Our Town’s core is beautifully executed by actors Zoey Deutch and Ephraim Sykes, and there’s no question that this is the most diverse Broadway production of Our Town to date.
But for a production to be inclusive and representative of every version of America from its conception to the modern day is a Herculean task, and the text of Our Town may not be up to the challenge. Then again, who’s to say what Our Town is capable of? This 2024 production is the play’s fifth Broadway revival. Maybe in its sixth, we’ll discover a Grover’s Corners that lets queer folks live full lives, not just watch them from outside of the action.
Our Town is playing at the Barrymore Theater on Broadway through January 19. Tickets are available here.
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