Jim Parsons, Katie Holmes and Kenny Leon on Broadway’s “Our Town”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Next, the culture block. A Broadway revival of an American classic aims to remind us of the importance of connection. For the first time in over 20 years, “Our Town” has returned with a star-studded cast. The Thornton Wilder play follows the lives of two families in a small town in New Hampshire at the turn of the 20th century. And now, Tony Award winning director Kenny Leon is reimagining it for a modern audience. And he’s joining Michel Martin, along with actors Jim Parsons and Katie Holmes, to discuss their spin on a timeless tale.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Kenny Leon, Katie Holmes, Jim Parsons, thank you all so much for joining us.

KATIE HOLMES, ACTRESS, “OUR TOWN”: Thanks.

JIM PARSONS, ACTOR, “OUR TOWN”: Thanks for having us.

KENNY LEON, DIRECTOR, “OUR TOWN”: It’s so good to be here. Yes.

MARTIN: You know, “Our Town” is a staple of, you know, high school theater companies and community theaters. Katie and Jim, I’m going to start with you two because I know you were theater kids. Did you ever see the play when you were growing up? Do you remember it?

PARSONS: I did not see a production of it. No.

MARTIN: You never saw it? Katie, you never saw it?

PARSONS: No.

HOLMES: I never saw it. I had never read it. I knew that Paul Newman had done it. But that was the extent of my knowledge.

MARTIN: Wow. But — OK. Kenny Leon, what about you? You saw it, right?

LEON: I used to hate to play. I used to hate to play. I said, oh, my God, there’s no diversity. It’s like, is that the way the world looks and that’s the way they sound?

MARTIN: As a kid, as a theater kid, you saw it in high school, I guess, and you thought, what’s up with that?

LEON: Yes. Well, my class integrated my school in St. Petersburg, Florida. So, it was the first year that black students were in school with white students. And there was no vision for the black students to be in a play that was not meant for black students. And I only started seeing myself in it in the year that the hurricane was in Puerto Rico and Scarlett Johansson and I got together and did a fundraiser, and we used to play “Our Town, but I cast it the way a black man would see the play along with the people from the Marvel cast. And I was like, oh, my God, it’s a huge, beautiful, wonderful play there. If I ever do this play, I’m going to cast it the way I see it and I’m going to make it look like America. And flash forward all these years later and you get Jim Parsons and Katie Holmes and this wonderful cast we have, it’s one of the best plays ever written. And so, it’s us meeting Thornton Wilder where he meant for it to be.

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PARSONS: The name of the town is Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, just across the Massachusetts line. Latitude 42 degrees, 40 minutes. Longitude 70 degrees, 37 minutes. The first act shows a day in our town. The day is May 7, 1901.

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MARTIN: So, Jim Parsons, you’re the audience’s guide through Grover’s Corners. What does being the stage manager mean to you?

PARSONS: My understanding is that — or my opinion is that it’s partially Thornton Wilder. I believe that it’s more than any other character in the play. It’s as much his voice as it is — as anybody else’s. And I really firmly came to believe that it really is a role that is whoever is playing it. I mean, the level of honesty that this play starts with in its words. I mean, the first line in the play is, this play is called Our Town, and it was written by Thornton Wilder. It’s like, you kind of give up the lie, as it were, from the moment the lights come up. His job the entire time is to keep being the conduit between you, the audience, and these actors who are portraying these characters. It was higher a degree of honesty than I was perhaps used to. It was — I’m not really hiding behind very much as a human up there, I have to be honest. You know, it’s not my words, but it’s as much me as I can muster as with somebody else’s words. And that’s been a wonderful challenge, and I think that it’s been a wonderful growing experience for me, and I hope that it’s been a rewarding one for the audience.

MARTIN: Katie, what about you? You play Mrs. Webb. She is a wife, a mother of two. She’s very much absorbed, you know, in the details of daily life, and she’s the — one of sort of the two principal families that ground the play her — the primary storyline centers on your daughter, Emily Webb, and George Gibbs, the neighbor’s son, they fall in love and so forth. For people who don’t know the play, why does this relationship matter?

HOLMES: I think what I have found in playing this character, because it — at first she, she felt a little far away because it’s, you know, the place for the early 1900s and there’s this scene between Mrs. Webb and Mrs. Gibbs where it’s very obvious that these two women, their lives are dictated by what their husbands allow them to do, and this is before women could vote. And, you know, one could look at these women as, you know, they just don’t have the freedoms of the lives that we women have today and, oh, poor them. Well — but in the process of really understanding the play and taking on this character and also really enjoying the friendship between Mrs. Webb and Mrs. Gibbs and the joy of these women. And the honor that Mrs. Webb seems to have of nourishing her family and taking care of them and the love language of cooking for them every day and the beauty that — she’s using her hands. She’s using her hands to pull those beans to make dinner, to be there, to love. And the journey of her relationship with her children to me is just a part of the overall theme of life. We’re all a part of this process of time and, you know, we’re planting, things blossom, there’s a passing, and the same is happening for us.

MARTIN: I don’t know if you read reviews, if you don’t, I apologize, but I just want to read a little bit from The New York Times review. The reviewer wrote, if you think of the play as small, sweet, or old fashioned, I respectfully offer that you have the soul of a rock. In any good enough production, “Our town” is titanic beyond, time and brutal. Brutal. So, can I just hear from each of you about that? Kenny, do you want to start?

LEON: Right before the pandemic I was doing a play on Broadway, “A Soldier’s Play.” And Broadway shut down. And I felt like our industry will be the last thing that will come back. The only thing I knew was that if it ever came back, the play that I had already signed a contract to do was to do our talent. And I said, what does that look like? What do you really know about that? And so, you go from the pandemic, you go from where we were divided and separated from each other, away from the good in us, the joy in us, the love in us, and I conceptualized this production on my porch, back porch, thinking about “Our Town” being a metaphor for our world, our country, our time, our people, our community. And I felt that Thornton Wilder wrote a love letter. He didn’t know it, but he was writing a love letter to the future. So, every generation of this play is different. I really like sort of reached down and handpicked the people that I thought could help me translate this version of “Our Town” to our world and hopes that our politicians would hear it, our communities would hear it, but more importantly, our people sitting next to each other, black and white, brown and yellow would get it and say, you know what? When we’re doing our good, we could be beautiful. We could be joyous. And we haven’t gotten there yet. And so, every night, I’m hoping more and more people come to see this play in hopes that we’re — all could be in the pursuit of a much more beautiful place and focus on the good in us.

MARTIN: Jim, what do you think — I mean, you’re — as the stage manager, you’re on stage for, gosh, most, if not all of the play and you see the audience, and I’m just wondering if you have a sense of what moments move them or how they respond to it?

PARSONS: There’s two things in our production that have surprised me. One is that it’s frequently a much funnier play than I think some people, including myself, were prepared for. And it’s also some of the most intense silences I’ve ever heard from a thousand people in an audience before. I think you could pick many things that you think are brutal in this play. The one that comes to me the most is that for two acts, you watch all this daily living and moving and shuffling around that we do. And by the end of the play, part of the message seems to be, all of that was going on was kind of what blinded us to really seeing each other while we are here at the same time. And that’s brutal, in my opinion. But I also think that when Emily, the character, asks if anyone ever sees it all, every moment, and the stage manager says, no. The saints and poets, maybe they do some, but no. I don’t think that’s as brutal as it is forgiving. I think, to me, the message is this is the fact of what it is to be alive, but there’s also nothing to be done about it too much. You know, you try and connect, try and love, but forgive yourself for all the ways in which you’re going to fail to miss all these human moments because that’s what it is to be on this Earth.

MARTIN: Katie, one of Jim’s first lines in the play is no one remarkable ever came from this town. And I just wondered, what did that bring out for you and how did you think about that?

HOLMES: Our society for years has valued remarkable people and the people who stand out as though it’s a free pass for more time or something else. And what I think this play is trying to remind the audience is that we are all involved in life and nobody can escape all of the parts of life and they are beautiful, and they are hard, and I love that and I love that sense of community as well, there’s no division in this town. And I think, again, when we start separating people, the successful, the non-successful, there’s a gap all of a sudden. But what unites us is we’re — we are in this together, and we all do feel the same things. And this play, I think, reminds people that, yes we’re all doing this too. Also, I wanted to bring up what I think what happens with this play is, you know, the moments where there’s — everyone freezes and these characters start to have these feelings. And I think with great plays, this — there — you allow for the confusion of the human experience, which is, I don’t know what’s happening. Or like George, like one minute, he’s afraid to get — he doesn’t want to get married and the next minute he’s fine. And that confusion starts to seep in. And that is the human experience and human nature. And then by the end, it didn’t really matter anyway. You know what I mean? Not really, but I mean, it just — we keep leading the audience to that ending, that is the journey of life.

MARTIN: So, near the end of the play, Emily asks that famous question, do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? I did want to ask if working with this material made any of you feel differently about the small moments in your lives.

PARSONS: Oh, I think without a doubt. I mean, I think that a lot of people in the world and a lot of people in this rehearsal room were the kind of people who were trying to find ways to do exactly that with or without this play. But I think it’s been impossible. And I think that our group dynamic when we’re together, all 28 of us every night, not just on stage, but off stage, the way we feel about each other gives credence to the idea that we’ve all been affected by that. I see everything differently. And I want to also, kind of relate, to that took Kenny’s insistence that we all bring ourselves to these roles, I’ve never had a director insist so much on that for the entire cast. And the more we’ve played this and the more I’ve gotten to know everybody through the process, like Katie as an example, that Mrs. Webb is Katie’s Mrs. Webb. There are a million ways you could say those lines, there are a million presentations and tones you could have it, it is pure Katie. And I hope that my stage manager is the same way. And I — the more we’re doing this, the more I think that that’s as powerful an element about this particular production as anything else about it is that every part is being spoken as much as possible very genuinely from the individual that’s there.

MARTIN: Katie, what about you? Is there anything about working with this material that made you think differently about those small moments?

HOLMES: Yes, absolutely. I noticed in my own life just really being present. And when I start to feel like — even in general, like if I’m like, oh, God, I got to rush to the show, am I running late? And I just go, nope, I’m not going to do that. I’m actually going to enjoy my shower. You know, I’m going to stay where I am. And I feel like it has made me also really see people and also, I think because this play offers you the opportunity because it’s so solid, you can go in one night and be like, oh, I think that line means this and you can just kind of, you know, play a little — play with it a little bit. And I’ve noticed that now in life, I am not reacting to things so quickly because I go, oh, wait, there’s a lot of different ways to comprehend this, think about something. And there’s a lot of ways now that I can communicate with people. I can — you know, I’m just going to take a beat because it’s all up for interpretation. You know, what’s important is how we treat one another. And how can I look at this situation and make the best choice?

MARTIN: So, before we let you go, Kenny, I want to go back to the speech that you gave on opening night. You talked about the experiment of being an American. You said, you know, it’s an experiment about humanity over millions and millions of years, but it’s an experiment. It’s an American experiment, and we ain’t got it right yet. But Lord, let’s not go back. And this is our opportunity. This is our opportunity to straighten it out. And the reason that I’ve raised that is that, you know, you started working on this play before the election that just happened. For many people this has been a shocking and challenging experience. But I do wonder whether you feel there’s something that it says now that is different in light of all the feelings that have been brought forward because of what we’ve just gone through?

LEON: As an American artist, I think this is absolutely the time where we feel most empowered, and this is the time where we have to have a voice, and it also reminds me — the last few weeks reminds me that we are all — just like in “Our Town,” we’re really all tied together. Nothing changed after election. We’re still all really tied together. I’m the grandson of sharecroppers and slaves. And, you know, and we went through civil rights. We went through reconstruction and went through Rodney King. We went through so much and we’ll survive this. And when I think about how young this country are and how many millions and millions of years Thornton Wilder talks about compared to this little small bit of time, we still — we just got further to go. And we’re all tied together. And sooner or later, we’ll learn from our scholars and our artists and our passionate hearts. We will. So, we are Americans and we had many people before us to fight for us, to live for us, to stand for freedom and democracy. The war has not changed. The war still is freedom and democracy, and every generation has to stand up for it. And by God, I’m standing up for it every night. Every time I direct something, every time I write something, and I’m trying to engage with artists who are thinking the same. And America belongs to the all, not to the one, not to the some. So, this forever forward. It’s our town. It’s our world. It’s our country.

MARTIN: Kenny Leon, Jim Parsons, Katie Holmes, thank you all so much for talking with us.

PARSONS: Thank you.

LEON: Thank you.

HOLMES: Thank you.