Town & country CTM walks on the Wilder side BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	Our Town By Thornton Wilder. Directed by Pamela DiPasquale. With Julie Civiello, Mark Friedlander, and Brian Hinds. Produced by the Children’s Theatre of Maine, at 317 Marginal Way, in Portland, through January 28. Call (207) 828-0617.
	Backstage • Kudos to the thespians of USM! Two of their recent productions have been chosen for this year’s Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival: The Laramie Project, written by Moises Kaufman and directed by Wil Kilroy; and November/December, written by USM student Chris Gyngell and directed by Thomas Power and William Steele. November/December has also been chosen as one of six finalists for the National Student Playwrighting Award. Two fundraiser performances of The Laramie Project will be held January 21 and 22 at USM’s Gorham campus to help get them on the road to the festival. Call (207)780-5151.

Remember Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire? It’s such a classic setting that I’ll bet most of us were taken there, willingly or not, at some point in our youth. That little village endures, and you just might rediscover there the glee of the quotidian, in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, on stage now at the Children’s Theater of Maine.

It’s 1901, and we’re in the company of farmers, the constable, the milkman, and in particular the neighboring families Webb and Gibbs. Their two youngsters, Emily Webb and George Gibbs (Julie Civiello and Mark Friedlander), have taken a shine to each other, and it’s through their quaint courtship that we experience three acts of Grover’s Corners (and of larger allegories): "Daily Life," "Love and Marriage," and "Death."

We wouldn’t know much of this, though, without the help of the Stage Manager (Brian Hinds), the narrator who serves as our guide to the town and a stage mostly devoid of set and props. To avoid cluttering its characters and the ineffable small-town spirit of Grover’s Corners with too much material stuff, Our Town is a play of pantomime. It’s a device that calls for a lot of work on the part of the actors, asking them to string imaginary beans and scarf down invisible breakfasts, and the capable stagecraft of the Children’s Theatre cast makes it easy for us to suspend our disbelief. And when George and Emily lean down to slurp ice cream sodas through imaginary straws — well, gosh, it’s positively effervescent.

In fact, these two besotted youngsters are by far the most sparkling ingredients of this production. Civiello and Friedlander have cultivated a rapport as endearing and awkward, as shy and volatile as youth itself, and Friedlander does a convincing job of juggling George’s thickness with his sensitivity. The red-haired Civiello is nothing less than luminous. She has utterly natural movements and presence, an expressive face, and a melodic, far-ranging voice. She is a true and radiant talent, and I hope we’ll see more of her on Portland’s stages in the years to come.

Among the grown-ups that bustle around in the kids’ wakes, John Hickson as Doc Gibbs and Michael Toth as milkman Howie Newsome both stand out. Hickson delights with great New England dryness and cadence, and Toth draws a fresh smile each time he strains at the lead of the imaginary Bessie to make the morning deliveries.

As the man who introduces us to all these folks and the particulars of Grover’s Corners, Brian Hinds as Stage Manager is as matter-of-fact as a Yankee can be, but he could stand to project a little more affection. It’s as if this Stage Manager rarely pauses to really savor the small-town minutiae that he takes such pains to show us; he often seems more like a news anchor than the wry but gentle guardian of the soul and clockwork of Grover’s Corners. I would have liked to hear more of the sing-song regional dialect in Hinds’s speechifying, but it was really a certain tenderness, a fondness, that I missed in his delivery.

There are reasons that popular feeling for Our Town remains fond — in 2003 Paul Newman led its Broadway revival, a production that was later filmed by PBS — and it ain’t just its 1938 Pulitzer or its New England charm. Thornton Wilder’s best-known play has a reputation for being sweet and life-affirming — and it is — but to actually revisit the play is to remember its odd strains of irony and darkness, and its honest portrayal of both the intimacy and the provincial narrowness that can enwrap a small town. Think of the women’s unfulfilled dreams, or Wilder’s treatment of war deaths, or the fate of the town’s one artist, the musician and drunken choir director Simon Stimpson, who hangs himself in the attic. Wilder’s touch is gentle with these less picturesque topics, but he doesn’t hedge, and much of Our Town’s endurance lies in the script’s fine balance between light and dark.

Ultimately, though, Wilder’s vision is a hopeful one that transcends place, time, and pessimism to entreat us to simply better appreciate the details of our days. "Once in a thousand times it’s interesting," the Stage Manager says of the journey from cradle to deathbed. Interesting or not, Our Town and the Children’s Theatre remind us, we’d best pay attention on the way.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com