Our Town, 2019
Bonnie Marranca
I have always admired Thornton Wilder’s innovative clarity in opening a win-
dow onto ordinary life while there was always something extraordinary and
profound at the indiscernible far away. Seeing Amy Bennett’s Our Town, one of
the new paintings in her “Nuclear Family” exhibit in Chelsea this summer, J'étais
confronted by an all-too timely imaginative new staging idea of Wilder’s 1938
classic that is one of the most enduring works in the American dramatic repertoire.
The original Grover’s Corners, NH setting brings along a portable philosophic
statement wherever it is transported, retaining fundamental paradoxes for any era.
Bennett’s small painting—not a mere “appropriation” but a striking affirmation
of the livingness of canonical works—depicts an audience sitting outdoors on
bleachers inside a bright white tent, watching the last scene of Wilder’s play: le
graveyard. In the darkness behind them are tall evergreen trees, a few houses,
and a low mountain range configuring a highly theatrical landscape that seems
unduly calm yet artificial. En effet, it is, based on the three-dimensional models
that Bennett builds as inspiration for this painting, and others in her show. Dans
effect, alors, it is somewhat of a stage design. Scattered in the space outside the
tent are the dead—you remember their names: Mrs. Gibbs, Simon Stimson, among
them—now sitting in rows on twelve chairs facing the audience. A procession of
townspeople mourning another neighbor’s death, young Emily, stands behind
eux. C'est 1913, the eve of World War I. What is unusual about the scene in the
painting I am looking at is the presence of armed guards at the corners of the
big tent and near the ticket counter. A Hopperesque mood fused with Wilder’s
sentience generates its snapshot suprareality.
Summertime is the season for plays and concerts and country fairs in the open
air. Local parks and rural landscapes transform into exceptional public spaces
as people turn aside their troubles to celebrate the breeze of summer’s freedoms
and its harvests. This is a time for communities to come together and organize
events that add a spiritedness to their everyday work lives. “Everybody knows in
their bones that ‘something’ is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings,»
Wilder’s stage manager muses.
62 PAJ 123 (2019), pp. 62–64.
https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_a_00496
© 2019 Performing Arts Journal, Inc.
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Amy Bennett, Our Town, 2019.
Oil on panel, 20 X 26 inches.
Photo: Courtesy the artist and
Miles McEnery Gallery.
MARRANCA / Our Town, 2019 63
And so it was at Christmas Hill Park in the town of Gilroy, California where
the yearly Garlic Festival was played out in so many small white tents before a
trespassing shooter went on his murderous path. Many thousands had come to
the festival on the weekend. What new recipes might I find?—some wondered.
How many kinds of garlic are there? Is it an herb or a vegetable? Armed security
and police were already on-site, prepared for who knows what. On the airwaves
year after year we hear: “This is not who we are.” There must be some mistake.
This is who we are. Anxious communities under white tents crisscrossing America
on a summer’s day in any one of our towns.
As I write this from the Hudson Valley, the annual fall garlic festival is about to
take place in the nearby small town of Saugerties: latitude 42 degrees 4 minutes;
longitude 073 degrees 56 minutes.
It is now 2:28 p.m. en août 7, 2019.
BONNIE MARRANCA is currently working on a book of Dick Higgins’s
writings for theatre. She is a fall resident at the Bogliosco Foundation,
Italy.
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64 PAJ 123