GREAT PERFORMANCES AWILDER, WISER ’OUR TOWN’

Sally Campbell had never been a fan of Thornton Wilder’s classic play, Our Town. In fact, the Dallas native had never seen a professional production of the play in its entirety.

This year, she finally had her chance. As house manager of the Lincoln Center Theater’s revival of Our Town, she watched the production’s last dress rehearsal. “I was completely astonished by what I saw,” she says.

Especially riveting, she feels, was actor/ writer Spalding Gray in his role as Stage Manager. “Spalding is a born storyteller,” she says. “He brought an entirely different point of view to the play. He didn’t sentimentalize it – and, as a result, it became tremendously moving, instead of sugary and sentimental.”

Unlike earlier actors who played the Stage Manager as folksy and benign, Gray brings an unexpected and contemporary edge to the role. “I don’t see the play as a sentimental play,” he says. “I think the Stage Manager’s role is to step in and cut the sentiment when it’s right on the verge. I think of the Stage Manager as a kind of go-between between the audience and the piece.”

As set forth by playwright Wilder, Our Town is devoid of scenery and props. It is played out on the bare stage, with the Stage Manager serving as guide. He introduces us to the citizens of Grover’s Corners and the ordinary events that make up their lives. Young love, marriage, death- all are transmuted by Wilder into what Brooks Atkinson called a “universal reverie.”

Critics and the public applauded the production for its fresh interpretation of Wilder’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play. In a letter to The New York Times, writer Garson Kanin called it “arguably the best production the play has ever had” Our Town played to full houses for 21 weeks at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre, received five Tony nominations and won the award for best revival.

This month, Channel 13 viewers have the opportunity to see this acclaimed production. Part of this fall’s Great Performances, funded locally by the 500 Inc., Our Town airs on Sunday, November 5, at 2 p.m. Penelope Ann Miller, who was in Biloxi Blues, and Eric Stoltz, from Mask, star as Emily Webb and George Gibbs, the young couple who are at the center of the play. KERA is a founding member of the Great Performances consortium.

As for Sally Campbell, a University of Dallas graduate who holds a master’s of fine arts degree from Southern Methodist University, she’s now working on a pre-Broadway tour of The Circle, a Somerset Maugham play. But she fondly remembers her work on Our Town and looks forward to seeing the play again on public television.

“There’s a lovely, humane truth about the script,” she says, “which is why it’s been performed in high schools and community theaters and in professional productions for so many years. Seeing it converted me from a cynic to a real fan of the play.”