[In the following review of the Washington, D.C., Arena Stage production of Our Town, Erstein praises Wilder's play for its wisdom and humor, and applauds this production for bringing out the darker, bolder elements of the play.]

There are plays so brimming with wisdom, humor and Americana that community-theater groups and high-school drama societies embrace them eagerly. As a result, most professional companies tend to shy away from these oft-seen treasures.

Thornton Wilder's Our Town fits this bill. And yet, fortunately, Arena Stage keeps returning to it. In this, the stage's 40th season, the current production is the company's fourth offering of the play. Arena may have a weakness for this homespun look at life and death in Grover's Corners, N.H. (pop. 2,642), but the presentation that opened Wednesday evening is a tower of strengths.

Chances are you have seen—or been in—one of those well-meaning amateur productions that encrust Our Town with a patina of sentimental goo. If so, that is all the more reason to see the small-town tale played for all its darker, bolder values as director Douglas C. Wager renders them.

Yes, the first act still seems to spring full-blown from a Norman Rockwell cover for the Saturday Evening Post. And yes, the second-act soda-fountain scene where teen-agers George Gibbs and Emily Webb discover they were meant for each other is still one of the sweetest statements of young love ever placed on a stage.

But it is in the third act, set in a hillside cemetery and in the afterworld, that Wilder's grip takes hold. Of course it is a play about love and marriage. More than that, though, it is a haunting meditation on accepting death and letting go of life.

If the broad outlines of Our Town are rather conventional, one might also forget how much Wilder was a theatrical experimenter. In his inspired creation of the narrating Stage Manager and the character's folksy interplay with the audience, the author exuberantly chipped away at the “fourth wall” barrier between production and patrons.

Nowhere is that more easily accomplished than in the intimacy and informality of the four-sided Arena.

In part because this play is one of the centerpieces of Arena's 40th anniversary season, it features the welcome return of two past members of the Arena family. Robert Prosky, a veteran of 23 seasons here and two previous stints as Wilder's Stage Manager, embraces the role with an easygoing, seemingly effortless lack of guile.

Mr. Prosky begins the evening as himself, with a charming communal introduction. Then he slips into a rustic sports jacket and a New England accent to begin the play. We are in the palms of his hands for the next 2 1/2 hours.

Chances are they were describing Mr. Prosky as “avuncular” when he was in high school—the first time he ever played the Stage Manager, as he informs us. If he was destined for older character parts before his time, the reverse of that coin is the radiant Christina Moore, who probably will be able to play ingenues for the rest of her life.

As Emily Webb, this diminutive performer is thoroughly captivating and entirely believable as a teen-ager perhaps half her actual age. Her Emily is poised and full of self-assurance, which makes her unsteady, soda-fountain voyage into uncharted recesses of the heart all the more endearing. Later, when Emily trespasses over the border between the living and dead for one last visit to Grover's Corners, pain and confusion is registered movingly on the actress's face.

David Aaron Baker plays George Gibbs as a young man giddily in love. His George is no match for Emily in intelligence and he is reduced to being even sillier in her presence. The two of them perched atop ladders, moonstruck in the New Hampshire night, is another of the production's memorable images.

Of the large supporting cast, Halo Wines (Mrs. Gibbs) and Tana Hicken (Mrs. Webb) have their roles and their families firmly under control. Although some of the company's New England accents take a back seat to Mr. Wager's culturally blind casting approach, the look of this diverse Grover's Corners helps deepen the universality of Our Town.

Scenically, Thomas Lynch's design is pure simplicity—a quilted floor, wooden chairs around the perimeter and leafy tree branches in the sky. Our Town was intended to draw on our imaginations and Mr. Lynch refuses to upstage that resource.

Instead, sound effects executed by Mr. Prosky's quartet of “assistant stage managers” provide aural images. Shadowy lighting by Allen Lee Hughes foreshadows the play's darker side. The authentic period costumes by Marjorie Slaiman recall that earlier era without evoking nostalgic sentimentality.

As the Stage Manager says, he plans to include a copy of the play in a cornerstone for the new Grover's Corners bank. This, of course, is Wilder immodestly but accurately predicting the lasting power of his creation.

By the time Arena Stage celebrates its 80th anniversary, chances are the company will have presented Our Town a few more times. But it is unlikely that it will better this heartfelt, direct and transcendent production.