Lyric Stage Boston

Our Town

By Thornton Wilder

Directed by Courtney O’Connor

September 19 – October 19, 2025

Lyric Stage Boston opens its 2025-2026 season with a pitch perfect production of Our Town. The cast is uniformly excellent, the timing is smooth, Courtney O’Connor’s directorial hand is firm without ever being overbearing. Truly, an excellent production.

For anyone who managed to eke through high school without having read Our Town, it’s a 1938 anchor in the American canon. Three discrete days in Grover’s Corner, New Hampshire, spread across a dozen years. The Stage Manager delivers almost half the narrative as townspeople go about their lives with spartan dialogue. Day one is May 6, 1901, in which we meet an array of local folk, both proud and small, and savor the romantic stirrings of teenage George Gibbs and his lifelong neighbor Emily Webb. Act Two, three years later, is Emily and George’s wedding day. Act Three, nine more years on, takes place in the town cemetery on the day when Emily, died in childbirth, joins a number of folks we previously met who already reside there.

Our Town is a parable about the need to pay attention. When the deceased Emily demands to revisit a day in her life, she’s frustrated—astounded—how everyone is so caught up in their insignificant moments they miss the big picture. A worthy idea for a play to investigate.

The problem, for me, with Our Town is that the audience is held at such a distance from the characters that we don’t fully feel the tragedy. The Stage Manager is the first filter of abstraction. Then, there’s the set. Our Town is almost always played on a minimal set (I saw one production with only an array of Thonet chairs). Lyric employs a series of curved plinths before a kind of backyard fence. The pieces get shuffled around to suggest a kitchen, a church choir, a cemetery, but really, they neither warm nor inform the proceedings. Finally, there’s the sheer number of characters. So many that none rise beyond caricature. There’s something fundamentally chilling about a play in which five characters are buried by Act Three and no one in the audience would even consider a tear.

I wonder if perhaps Our Town is actually a precursor to Theater of the Absurd, such is the dissonance between our intuitive desire to experience small town American life as communal and caring, whereas in the play all the caring appears to be nothing more than play acting against the reality that no one is connecting with anyone else at all.

Lyric’s playbill calls Our Town, “An American Classic for our time.” In that, I fully agree. The play wears a veneer of homespun happiness, but scratch beneath the surface and everyone is isolated, fearful, and alone. Which pretty much sums up USA 2025.

The Lyric has created a terrific production…of a play I’d rather not see.