KC Rep shines new light on Our Town — but do we see it better?

I’ve never been so conflicted about such a strong show.

By any individual metric, the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s season opener, Our Town, is a success. The acting is affecting, the staging intimate, the pacing taut but unhurried. Obie Award winner David Cromer, who has staged his vision of Our Town across the country, directs this production with freshness and imagination.

But is Cromer’s flagship modern update really, as Terry Teachout proclaimed in a Wall Street Journal review quoted in every ad for this staging, “genius”? Not in total, no.

To Cromer’s credit, much of his first two acts holds true to playwright Thornton Wilder’s vision: Actors mime their daily business in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, scrubbing imaginary pots or reaching toward an audience member’s nose in lieu of a faucet knob. The stage is illuminated, in a design by Heather Gilbert, by modified houselights — meaning our view of the audience across the aisle is as sharp as our view of the stage. Even the costumes work to point out theatrical artifice; designer Alison Siple selects contemporary street clothes for her actors, allowing young lovers Emily Webb and George Gibbs to tote anachronistic JanSports to the “phosphate” shop after school.

The pace of Act 1 matches the pace of the town, but slow doesn’t mean stagnant. Life in Grover’s Corners may not be stimulating — “There isn’t much culture,” the town’s newspaperman admits — but the days are hardly empty for those who live them.

Jeff Still (as the Stage Manager) offers an extravagant introduction to the town, letting Wilder’s language, and our imagination, do much of the work. Sharp monologues on the town’s past and present from Logan Black (as Professor Willard) and Charles Fugate (as Editor Webb) fill in the gaps. Tension builds line by line, like a slowly inflating balloon.

Act 2 checks in with the town three years later, just after the high school’s commencement exercises. Linsey Page Morton is moving as the precocious and pigheaded Emily Webb, and Derrick Trumbly is energetic and precise as George Gibbs, her devoted but dimwitted suitor. The chemistry between the two actors is palpable, and an extended soda-shop scene between them is one of the most memorable in the play. Every line seems to vibrate with the hopeful fervor of first love.

Having adult actors in the roles only compounds the charm. Morton and Trumbly slip easily back into the stunned, clumsy romance of youth, and their commitment to the roles is complete. “I’m going to change so quick,” George swears to her, and his voice breaks with innocence and intensity.

The rest of the cast is no less capable. Stephanie Rae Roberts and Kati Brazda offer empathetic portrayals of mothers Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb, respectively. Peggy Friesen is hilarious as the easily impressed Mrs. Soames, and Jerry Genochio makes an affable Constable Warren.

Act 3 fills the stage with some of Kansas City’s best actors, taking their places in the town’s graveyard in Wilder’s well-known convention. It’s part of the collective consciousness by now, this somber sequence, but done right it can’t fail to move you. Yet Cromer departs from tradition as the act continues, unveiling a surprise I won’t spoil here, except to say it breathes onstage with jarring sensory richness. It’s a rare moment of theatrical magic, something you’re lucky to experience once in a season. And if you’re like me, you’ll be grateful when the lights dim enough to obscure your cry face.

The price for that spell is high, though. Cromer’s tonal and stylistic gearshift grinds hard, making the very real and rich work of the previous acts ring hollow. The whole production, we realize, has been in the service of this one trick. When it comes, Wilder’s sensitivity to small and subtle lives is engulfed by a slick explosion of pathos.

Great theater lives in a place of discomfort, into which it invites us so that we may together confront uneasy truths about ourselves. Wilder’s Our Town — as overfamiliar as its mere mention may seem — still does this, still probes. But Cromer’s invention doesn’t explore those truths so much as it serves them on a gilded platter, encouraging us to purge our emotions in a moment of catharsis rather than grappling with them bittersweet, as Emily must: “Oh, Earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

I left the Spencer Theatre feeling about this Our Town the same way I feel about artificial sweeteners. Sure, they hit all the same notes as sugar, travel the same neurological pathways in our search for satisfaction. They let us experience pleasure without work, indulgence without guilt. They’re even, yes, genius — a novelty of molecular imagination.

But I’d rather have the real thing.