OT: Our Town

PREMIERE.COM REVIEW (posted 8/20/03)

When Our Town debuted in 1938, one critic complained that Thornton Wilder's bare stage was merely a stunt, intended to give the play more importance. The bare stage at Manuel Dominguez High School's 2000 production, documented in Scott Hamilton Kennedy's new film, OT: Our Town, is no theatrical hubris. Located in the Compton section of Los Angeles, Dominguez has no money for sets or costumes. It doesn't have a stage, either, and the basketball coach isn't inclined to let the cast use his gymnasium to produce a play. And then there's the question of whether the production will make it to opening night. Unlearned lines, unfinished sets, and missing cast members days before the show opens leave the viewer with more than a little doubt. As one student helpfully points out, "This is the ghetto."

The last play mounted at this fragmented school was more than 20 years earlier, so when Catherine Borek, a 12th-grade English teacher, decides to put on a theatrical production, and not just any play but the most performed play in American theater, the result is confusion. The Compton kids don't see how this drama with its "farm lingo" relates to their lives. Christopher Patterson, playing Mr. Webb, comments matter-of-factly that he feels he doesn't have a father figure in real life but he has to play one in the production. One student was abandoned by her mother, a prostitute; another knows 15 people who committed suicide in the past four years. Tongue piercings, stomach pumpings, police cars, riots at school — Grover's Corners in 1901 this isn't. But in the three acts of the play — Daily Life, Love and Marriage, and Death — the kids find a rhythm with their own lives and they're determined to leave something behind to be remembered by.

Director Kennedy's laudable first feature-length documentary splices footage from the 1977 TV production of Our Town (with Hal Holbrook and Robby Benson) to highlight the differences between the genteel all-white cast of previous productions and the black and Latino version rehearsing in the Dominguez cafeteria. When a folksy Holbrook as the Stage Manager says about Grover's Corners that "nobody very remarkable ever come out of it, as far as we know," it's easy to believe the same about the school. With a stress on basketball, academics and the arts and the kids who like them get shunted aside. OT shows a teacher and a school trying to give those students something to take from their high school experience that they'll feel proud of. At opening night, with every seat in the cafeteria filled, you realize that the students have not only carved out a fledgling drama department in this sports-mad place, they've updated Grover's Corners to Compton. As one cast member says, "OT is ghett-O."

— Sharon Allen Burke