Review of OT: Our Town (2002) by Edith N — 21 Jul 2006

Though I now live in Washington State, I grew up in Los Angeles County. My older sister's calculus teacher, in fact, lived in Compton, despite being practically transparent, he was so white. And what's more, he lived there during the riots.

So Compton, I remember. It's not home, quite--I lived in a much more suburban area, for a start--but my high school was relatively urban, and we did have both gangs and gang violence. And again, I lived in LA County during the riots. In fact, I caught the last 260 running north when they started, one of my more vivid memories of high school.

My sophomore English teacher, the following year, was deeply obsessed with [i]Our Town[/i]. We saw three versions of it. Two PBS versions and the movie from the '40s, which raised our ire for the changed ending. My Odyssey of the Mind team that year managed to combine [i]Our Town[/i], [i]The Skin of Our Teeth[/i], and our actual required Classics work--not to mention my least favorite of the three--[i]The Old Man and the Sea[/i]. We spent literally months of my sophomore year informing us in Robby Benson's strident tones that we wanted to be fahmehs on Uncle Luke's fahm.

I don't know how much the rest of the class identified with it, but I always did. I was a thoughtful child, and adolescence definitely didn't lessen that. Then again, no one I knew had yet been shot. (That changed the next year.) There was no doubt that I would go to college. There was little chance, especially given my social life at the time, that I would become pregnant and drop out of school.

But what [i]OT[/i] shows us is, contrary to expectations, the sweet, thoughtful play from the 1930s--which won a Pulitzer in 1938--is actually timeless. It's true that life has changed since 1938, and that life in Compton probably wasn't like life in Grover's Corners even then. However, the issues Thornton Wilder deals with never really change. People get born, grow up, get married, and die. Grover's Corners in 1902 has a lot more in common with Compton in 2002 than anyone but me seems to have expected.

One last thing--this film would've been greatly improved with fewer extreme closeups. We didn't need to see every pore, guys.