Speaking The Plain Truth OUR TOWN

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Plays can prove themselves to be lasting literature in two ways. Some, like Hamlet, show a protean adaptability that allows each interpreter to find a different theme or message. Others, like Our Town, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a robustly funny Broadway revival that opened last week, say much the same things in every production, yet manage to do so with a seemingly inexhaustible freshness. Actors and directors, predictably, tend to prefer the protean kind of play, because it gives them greater opportunity to display creativity and intelligence. But audiences can be just as happy with the second kind, rediscovering time and again the undiminished pleasures of work that speaks the plain truth.

When Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town in the midst of the Depression, he expressed a beleaguered nation's nostalgia for simpler times. The passage of five decades has only sweetened the attraction. As the serenely uneventful first act unfolds, spectators may find themselves daydreaming of moving to a village where everyone says hello and no one locks his door. But in the third and final act, as the shade of young Emily Webb returns from cemetery hill to re-experience her twelfth birthday, Wilder convincingly argues that what makes all life look enticing is the distance granted by memory or imagination. As lived moment to moment, he contends, human existence is mostly ritual, habit and numb unawareness. Rather than be wistful for the life that is no longer, or never was, we should be open and venturesome in the time we have. The message is simplicity itself, yet its wisdom is so powerful that it has been echoed -- if never improved upon -- in countless sermons and self-help books.

This revival, staged by Gregory Mosher, director of the Lincoln Center Theater, cannot entirely recapture the liberating novelty that the first audiences found in Wilder's disdain for sets, props and other devices of illusion. But the production vividly evokes both his playful belittling of narrative and the irresistible appeal of his storytelling. Monologist Spalding Gray brings a feisty and brooding quality to the customarily benign stage manager: if his halfhearted attempts at a New Hampshire accent fail, the laughs he evokes are both frequent and authentic to the text. Film actors Eric Stoltz (Mask) and Penelope Ann Miller (Biloxi Blues) portray the young lovers, and it is hard to imagine that their soda-shop infatuation scene has ever been performed better. Miller, though, is not quite up to the last act's demands of kittenish adolescence combined with otherworldly grace. The rest of the 27- member cast is solid, and Peter Maloney is memorable as Emily's jocular yet practical father.

Our Town is yet another quasi-commercial undertaking by the nonprofit Lincoln Center company, joining its productions of Sarafina!, Speed-the-Plow and Anything Goes in currently drawing crowds on Broadway. Despite grumbling by competitors about union concessions and unfair competition, Lincoln Center has made a major contribution. At a time when most other producers condescendingly offer fluff, it has shown that mainstream ticket buyers have better taste.