“Our Town” at Pittsburgh Public Theater

The Pittsburgh Tatler: I’ll admit, I had some trepidations about going to see Our Town. It’s such an old chestnut of a play, sedimented (for many of us, I suspect, and certainly for myself) with memories of a first reading or viewing in junior high school, when we likely most connected with Rebecca Gibbs’s amazed recounting of the address on the letter that zooms out from the micro of Grover’s Corners to the macro of the “mind of God.” I feared I would find the play clichéd, treacly, sentimental, cloying, old-fashioned, out-of-date, irrelevant, or – god forbid – just uninteresting. I’m happy to report that the Public’s production of the play is none of these; on the contrary, under Ted Pappas’s restrained direction, the large ensemble renders Thornton Wilder’s classic in an engaging and wry manner.