'Our Town' comes to Hammonton, literally

Imagine the strong, proud engine of a steam train, the visible crankshafts and gears like rippling muscles driving the wheels as it pulses along the tracks. It pulls a row of polished passenger cars, inlaid with wood and handcrafted upholstery, and teeming with people, well-dressed and well-mannered, as they embark on a three-week passage across the country.

That image sprang to mind after seeing the Eagle Theatre's sincere production of Our Town, Thornton Wilder's part homage to, part indictment of small-town life in the first two decades of the 20th century. This staging coincides with the 150th anniversary of Hammonton, N.J., in which the playhouse sits, and for which this run reimagines the world of Wilder's fictional Grover's Corners in favor of Hammonton.

But just as no one now expects a cross-country journey to span weeks, Our Town now, without losing its charm, appears more like an anthropology project than an attempt at drama.

Partly fault Wilder's script. A Stage Manager (the affable and gracious Charlie DelMarcelle) speaks plainly to the audience, describing the layout of Hammonton. He introduces characters, all of them in designer Sean Quinn's plain (yet well-kept) wool suits and functional dresses of 1905 small-town America.

Their lives consist of commonalities: day-to-day living in households that still tend gardens and raise chickens for food, a constable's reassuring stroll from dawn until dusk, town gossip, idle talk of the weather, each morning punctuated by a whistle announcing the 5:45 train to Philadelphia. Couples pair off and marry, start families, and die, garnering little meaning in the journey.

Ted Wioncek 3d's straightforward direction crafts a modest and admirable elegance from these routines and rhythms, buttressed by fine performances from Jared Michael Delaney (town doctor Frank Gibbs) and Leonard C. Haas and Mary Lee Bednarek (as newspaper editor Charles Webb and his wife, Myrtle). Maggie Griffin Smith (as their daughter, Emily) adds youthful exuberance and joy, her character embodying an individuating (yet all too common) hope that lends a tragic note to both the story and this production.

The strong ensemble engrosses just enough to suppress the stark differences that define the America of Wilder's youth from today, a far cry from whenever it was we waylaid the innocent, eager esteem for a simple life. No doubt the homogeneity of his times gave this play a common sounding board and lent it a tragic sense ("does anyone really experience life as they live it") that seems a little too oft-said today.

In Act One, DelMarcelle's Stage Manager announces the town will preserve a time capsule in the cornerstone of its new bank. In it, he places a copy of this play so future generations will know how the typical man and woman carried out their day-to-day lives. Were it not for a fine production like the Eagle's, I should think to keep it there, like a train at the Smithsonian, a piece more history than timeless art.