Annie D. | Pittsburgh City Paper

Member since Oct 16, 2017

Contributions:

  • Posted by:
    Annie D. on 10/16/2017 at 2:47 PM
    It seems to me that the author is not very familiar with Thornton Wilder, his life, his intentions, and his body of work. It's a correct read to say that Wilder used the specific to address the universal (which I'd argue this production has done to great effect). Wilder was also a blazing social critic, a polyglot, and a very modern thinker who frequently employed multicultural characters and multiple languages in his plays to glean the universal from the specific, most notably in The Skin of Our Teeth. He also vehemently rejected the theatrical realism--a viewpoint deeply against the grain for his time--that Hoover seems so convinced is mistakenly missing from this production. It never surprises me to hear people who read Our Town once in high school to ascribe Wilder's work and intentions to a 19th-century postcard of white pastoral America, but it does surprise me to hear this interpretation from a theater critic. Wilder was always one of the most forward-thinking of American writers who very much intended a socially relevant bent to his work -- so much so that the best of his work was greatly misunderstood and/or underperformed during his lifetime. It does a great disservice to his vision to consign his work to static history now that he's gone.