Our Town

Gentle viewer, you know everything. You buy a theater ticket if you can afford one. You see Neil Simon off-Broadway where they can afford him, and you hear Arthur Miller say drama’s nearly as dead as opera. You go to the opera where if they can’t act they can sure sing, anyway. At the Westport Country Playhouse, they can’t act and they sure can’t sing (or rather, they can’t speak... the choir singing is passable).

The laws of artistic economy are such that, in the event, Paul Newman comes out at the end after Emily bungles her scene (which is apparently addressed to a plush toy named Toto), Paul Newman as the Stage Manager stands and says the lines which give the play thus transmogrified its meaning, a profound one: “No living beings up there” among the stars, only “chalk and fire. Just this one, straining to make something of itself”, the rest sleeping.

You will not be surprised to hear that the Westport Country Playhouse is raising funds for a new project. A drama school? Building renovation.

Paul Newman ought to have directed it, but there you are...