Our Town's Town

Illustration by João Fazenda

Jim Parsons, Katie Holmes, Zoey Deutch, and the rest of the Broadway-revival cast meet up in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where Thornton Wilder wrote the original play.

BY SARAH LARSON Published in the September 23, 2024 print edition of The New Yorker, with the headline “Field Trip.”

The Our Town Company at The Peterboro Diner. Photo by Jenny Anderson

On a cloudy afternoon in Peterborough, New Hampshire, apron-wearing workers emerged from a green nineteen-fifties lunch car, stood behind a banner that read “The Peterboro Diner Welcomes You to Grover’s Corners,” and said things like “The beautiful people are coming!” and “Geez, Louise!” Two charter buses arrived and out they came: Jim Parsons, Katie Holmes, Ephraim Sykes, Zoey Deutch, Richard Thomas, and two dozen other cast and crew members of the new Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” which begins previews this week. “Welcome, welcome!” the diner’s owner, Melanie Neily, said. The visitors, after a five-hour drive, gamely greeted their hosts and proceeded inside for lunch; they resembled regular tourists, except for the slightly suspicious glamour of Deutch (Emily Webb) and Holmes (Mrs. Webb), who both wore fashionable sunglasses and bright-marigold tops, and for the hero’s welcome that Neily, a “Waltons” fan, gave to a gracious Richard Thomas (Mr. Webb). Inside, Parsons (the Stage Manager) and Julie Halston (Mrs. Soames), settled into a booth, and a video of “Our Town” with Paul Newman played above the counter. It was the cast’s first meeting, and the director, Kenny Leon, wanted it to be memorable.

The cast goes on a tour of downtown Peterborogh with Gus Kaikkonen. Photo by Jenny Anderson

Wilder wrote some of “Our Town” in Peterborough, at the MacDowell Colony, and the town has proudly claimed it since its première, in 1938. Leon’s production, advertised as “an ‘Our Town’ for our time,” has a diverse cast—many actors of color, a deaf Howie Newsome (John McGinty), a gay Stage Manager—and is set in a kind of Grover’s Corners of the mind. “You take 1938 and run it into 2024, creating a fantastical place called now,” Leon said, swooping his hands together. Leon, who is Black, is sixty-eight, trim, bald, and high-energy. “I think that these people in this play are twenty spirits from every time and place in American history, and they’re coming here urgently to tell us this one lesson that we need to know,” he said. He used to hate the play—“All I saw was, there’s white folk, there’s a small town, they talk in a certain way . . . they have a ladder in the middle of it”—but in 2010, in Atlanta, “I put people from various cultures in it, and I’m saying, ‘Wow, this play is better than I thought.’ ”In 2017, after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, he and Scarlett Johansson organized a benefit reading of the play in Atlanta, with local actors and Marvel actors (Ruffalo, Evans, Downey, Jr.). “We raised half a million dollars, gave it to the people. It was beautiful. That’s when I really, really opened my eyes, and that production let me see how it really was the best American play that I’ve ever read.”

After lunch, the local actor-director Gus Kaikkonen led the group on a tour of downtown Peterborough that evoked “Our Town” ’s opening monologue (“Here’s the Town Hall and Post Office combined; jail’s in the basement”), minus the hollyhocks. “We used to have one stoplight here, and now there are two,” he said. Some details had a documentary quality: Emily and George’s school (“Still exists, on High Street”), the Gibbs and Webb houses (“Big old Victorian houses next door to each other. . . . Wilder didn’t say this one or that one, because he was being cagey about Peterborough”), their first-date drugstore (Wilder was a regular). Others were sui generis. “This used to be the Baptist Church,” Kaikkonen said. “Then it was a marionette opera theatre, run by a wonderful guy. It caught on fire, the whole place burned down, and he lost all of his marionettes, except maybe six that he managed to throw out a window.” (Only Escamillo, from “Carmen,” was saved.)

Actors in front of Veltin Cabin - Wilder’s studio at MacDowell Colony. Photos by Jenny Anderson

The group headed to the bus, for a table read at MacDowell; Kaikkonen told everybody to look out for the cemetery en route, and for Howie Newsome’s house and barns. Holmes, who had popped into a bookstore, boarded the bus and said, “I love this town.”

“Oh, yeah? You want to move here?” Leon said.

“Maybe!” Holmes said. “I’ve already made friends.”

At MacDowell, the group tramped along a forested path to Wilder’s stone cabin.

“Such a luxury to be in the woods!” Deutch said. “I love to be in the woods by myself,” Holmes said. Inside, everyone admired the “tombstones”—wooden tablets signed by each visiting artist, including Wilder in 1937. Then the Gibbs and Webb families, plus Parsons, posed for photographs in front of the cabin, some introducing themselves first. Hagan Oliveras, who plays young Wally Webb, scrambled over belatedly.

“My son!” Holmes said.

The Our Town table read at MacDowell Colony. Photo by Jenny Anderson

“I was taking pictures of frogs!” Oliveras said. Holmes put her arm around him.

At the table read, in the main hall, Leon offered inspiring remarks (“If there’s a God, she’s, like, ‘You know what? . . . There is nothing richer than a real moment with anyone’ ”) and encouraged the actors to be themselves. “If you are a Black person, be a Black person,” he said, to laughter and applause. The table read began.

“This play is called ‘Our Town,’ ” Parsons read. He looked up. “Too gay?” More laughter.

“I think you should lean into your identity,” Leon said.