‘Our Town’: Kenny Leon’s Broadway Revival Reinvents Grover’s Corners For the Modern World

Anna Tingley

20 September 2024 at 1:53 pm·3-min read

Kenny Leon, the creative force behind a new revival of “Our Town” on Broadway this fall, wasn’t always a fan of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play. ”There was no diversity in the town,” the Tony-winning director recalls thinking after seeing a student production in high school. “I just wasn’t drawn to it. I didn’t see the universal things in it.”

Years later, in 2002, when he founded his nonprofit True Colors Theatre Company, his first move was to make “Our Town” look more like most towns in America. “I’m gonna take ‘Our Town’ and put a lot of people in it — different races, different cultures, across genders, everything,” Leon remembers thinking. “I did it, and that’s when I knew it was the greatest play ever written.”

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But getting that version to Broadway took decades, one that required a sign-off from Wilder’s estate. Set in a small American town called Grover’s Corners in the early 20th century, the three-part play traces two neighboring families, the Webbs and the Gibbses, over the course of 12 years. The primary storyline centers on George Gibbs and Emily Webb, who in the first act spark a childhood friendship that evolves into a romance and, ultimately, marriage. It’s a journey that takes them from wide-eyed kids to worldly adults. Wilder uses their story to make a central point: The fleeting and fragile nature of life is what makes it so bittersweet.

These existential themes, striking in their simplicity and devastating in their truth, helped cement “Our Town”’s status in the pantheon of American plays. But even classics benefit from a fresh perspective. In Leon’s “Our Town,” the Gibbses are a Black family, with Ephraim Sykes as George and Michelle Wilson as Mrs. Gibbs. Meanwhile, Zoey Deutch makes her Broadway debut as Emily, alongside Katie Holmes’ Mrs. Webb. The milk boy, Howie Newsome, is played by John McGinty, a Deaf actor.

“The Big Bang Theory” actor Jim Parsons, who takes on the iconic role of the Stage Manager in the new rendition, remembers Leon’s first direction for him: “I want you to play the Stage Manager as yourself.”

The Stage Manager is an all-knowing narrator who breaks the fourth wall to comment on the characters and their motivations, in the process telling a universal tale of love, loss and regret. “It reminds me of how some actors feel about being offered Hamlet,” Parsons says. “There’s something epic about it and, in a way, something frightening.”

Parsons follows a string of bold-faced names who have played the storyteller, including Hal Holbrook, Henry Fonda and Paul Newman. But luckily for Parsons, Leon had little interest in previous productions. “I purposely didn’t watch them,” Leon says about the play’s other Broadway revivals. “I didn’t really care about that, because the play spoke so clearly to me as to what it was.”

Instead, Leon used the original 87-page script as a compass, taking advantage of its famously bare-bones set to create his own version of Grover’s Corner.

The reimagining also shuns props, allowing the production to rest on the shoulders of the characters alone, which is why Leon’s larger, more diverse cast is not just a concession to modern sensibilities — it helps drive the action. “It added all these layers and communications and relationships that we’re allowed to explore because of our differences,” Wilson, the first Black actor to play Mrs. Gibbs on Broadway, says.

The eclectic cast is part of what makes Leon’s version of “Our Town” feel less like a revival and more like a rediscovery. “We gotta treat ‘Our Town’ as if it was a world premiere,” he says, aware of the difficulties of launching a play, even one as beloved as Wilder’s drama, on Broadway. “We get one shot to do this, so we can’t treat it like it’s something that’s already existed.”

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