Goodbye, Grover’s Corners, Hello U.E.S. Theater

Grover’s Corners, the fictional New Hampshire town where Thornton Wilder set his 1938 play Our Town, likely bears little resemblance to today’s Midtown East, where community theater group St. Bart’s Players will stage their production of the show, which opens Nov. 13.
But members of the close-knit troupe have fostered strong ties on the Upper East Side, where the neighborhood around St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue serves as a home base and hub for the group.
“This sounds cliché to say, but this is a second family,” said Gayle Artino, co-producer of Our Town and a seven-year member of the group. “I’ve gone to weddings, to funerals. We go on vacations together. It comes with all the sadness and happiness and drama that you come to expect from a community.”
The St. Bart’s Players formed in 1927, 11 years before Wilder completed Our Town, his Pulitzer Prize winning text about everyday life in turn-of-the-century New England. It’s a stretch to compare the long-running theater group to the intimate community in the play, though some charming parallels exist.
The show’s director, Adam Fitzgerald, hails from New Hampshire, where Our Town takes place. The first performance of the play he ever saw was a local production, in which his sister played one of the lead characters, the teenaged Emily Webb.
And while there’s no daily milk delivery, the group does have their favorite neighborhood watering hole, Ashton’s Alley on Third Avenue, a few blocks from the church, where they’ve been unwinding after rehearsals for years. The group knows the bartenders, knows the owners. Ashton’s routinely purchases an ad in the St. Bart’s program.
Longtime group member Jim Mullins plays the stage manager, and is reprising a role he first took on more than 30 years ago, when he was new to St. Bart’s. The group is literally a family affair for Mullins; he met his wife, a fellow member, when he joined in 1979. Their daughter is working the lights for the upcoming production. “Most of what is important to me in my entire life I have because of the Players,” he said.
Despite such convivial surroundings, the cast and crew are taking pains to convey the gravity of Wilder’s script. It’s a show that can, in some productions, come across as a “feel-good look back at vintage America,” said Mullins, whose character acts as an occasionally abrupt guide through the world of the play, speaking directly and plainly to the audience. Mullins credits Fitzgerald and his careful analysis of the text with adding intellectual weight to the production.
“This stage manager is very matter-of-fact,” said Mullins. “He’s telling you the facts and some of them are not pretty. It’s very interesting walking that line, not being overly sentimental or overly dark, but being matter-of-fact in a play that, on the other hand, is very lyrically written. It’s hard work, and it’s very rewarding when it works.”
The magnificent St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church provides a home stage for the theater group. The church’s massive, dim nave, vaulted ceilings and Byzantine-style mosaics and inlay offer a curious grandeur to a play that famously has little more than a few chairs, tables and step ladders for a set, and this production takes full advantage of its surroundings. The church’s organist recorded Mendelssohn’s Wedding March for the show’s second act wedding scene, in which the marrying couple stands alone at the church’s altar, while the audience watches from the rows below, like a rapt congregation.
“They aren’t simple-minded,” Artino said of the characters in the play, “But there’s no frills. You say what you mean. And I think the church is a perfect background for that. I think the church informs the gravity of a simple life, and life and marriage and birth and death are all things we take for granted.”
Artino lives on 59th Street and Second Avenue, and recognizes a small-town nature in her neighborhood, and finds a natural parallel between the way lives intertwine in New York and in Wilder’s script.
“We’re all kind of living and dying and breathing in the same small square blocks,” she said. “It’s nice to be able to step back and remember that it’s the people that matter. We can get busy with the hustle and bustle of New York, but I live in a community where I see my neighbors every day and I know their names. It’s nice to remember that that still exists in such a big city.”