The La Jolla Playhouse opened its 2001 season with Thornton Wilder's minimalist meditation on life, death, and what remains. Directed by Michael Greif, the production is competent but marred by a choice that upstages everything. Emily Bergl and Carson Elrod, as Wilder's de-romanticized romantic leads Emily and George, brim with innocence and, in later scenes, stark experience. While actors mime onstage tasks, offstage actors, visible in the wings, made accompanying sounds. When a rooster's supposed to crow, an actor crows.
Milk bottles jostle.
A long metal sheet makes thunder. A final drop of soda gets slurped through an offstage straw. These radiolike sound effects pull the ear and the eye from the stage. People crane their necks to watch them, and in no time noisemaking, far less demanding than what Wilder wants us to consider, becomes a form of directorial avoidance behavior. The sounds give Our Town a cutesy postmodern layering.