Wandering Blind in Our Town

We all wander around blind, stepping on each other's feelings and wasting our opportunities to truly see and love each other. So laments the tormented Mr. Stimson in the third act of Ned Rorem's setting of Our Town. Mrs. Gibbs firmly corrects the frustrated former choir leader, insisting that it isn't always like that, but it's obvious from her strong advice to Emily not to go back and re-live life that she's also seen the mindlessness with which she lived life, and her new awareness stings.

Tonight was the closing night for ISU's production of Rorem's Our Town. It was a beautiful, soul-exposing show, well sung, well staged, well played. Vanessa Ballam's direction illuminated everything, making it glow with the heart one doesn't even see consistently in professional theatre. Scott Anderson with his excellent orchestra made music out of Rorem's complex score (Bravi, tutti!).

The character of Mr. Stimson (Austin Baum in an inspired bit of casting) stood out to me as possibly the most blatant illustration of the mindless, blind living the playwright wants to warn us about. One of those people Mr. Gibbs points out isn't really suited to small town life, Stimson is a man of some cultivation and deep sensibilities who strives to realize a delicate, otherworldly beauty but finds precious little of it in the singing of his choir. Paradoxically, his solitary vision isolates him from the beauty in those around him. "We loved you in our way," Mrs. Gibbs says. As a mortal, it was a love he couldn't receive. Trying to deaden the pain of his loneliness with alcohol, he further blurred his vision of what was present while clarifying his vision of what he was missing. It's a spiral that leads him to take his own life. I understand that spiral. My drug of choice is TV.

Emily (beautifully sung and capably acted by Taylor Schultz) has her own painful experience of seeing life as it truly is. Spoiler alert: it's only with post-mortal clarity that Emily can truly experience the feelings, the hopes, and the pain of those that surrounded her in life. It's all too much for her and she retreats back into the peace of death with its own kind of blindness.

I disagree that we humans lack the capacity to truly see the life and love around us. Many of us can see with our hearts, but the experience is too exquisite and, like Emily, we have to turn away. It takes a lot of strength to live life mindfully and it's not something we can sustain. Our blindness is the most human of our many frailties.

Having only read the play once, I was unprepared for the impact the opera would have on me. I came away from it with a poignant sense of the inevitable. It also struck me that with all of us stumbling blindly around, whether by choice or weakness, it's important for us to make kindness our default response. We can only hope that someone will do the same for us.