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Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, and Compton, California, are on different sides of America, not to mention the fact/fiction divide. But in some ways, Thornton Wilder’s G-rated turn-of-the-20th-century hamlet and the cradle of gangstah rap are on different planets. Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s surprisingly sweet, smart OT: Our Town, in which two teachers and 24 students at Compton’s Manuel Dominguez High put on the school’s first play in 20 years, has a lot of fun with that. The film moves spryly between shots of Hal Holbrook presiding over a 1977 television production of Wilder’s classic and scenes of daily life in Compton, where the soda fountain is replaced by Dale’s Donuts (a concrete bunker under a giant model of a sugared orb) and hip-hop and gunshots are a more likely soundtrack than the caterwauling of Simon Stimson’s choir. There’s irony here, of course, with Holbrook’s homespun Stage Manager assertions about life and death in Grover’s Corners followed by the kids’ at once proud and resentful invocations of Compton’s ghetto rep. But in the end, the film smells suspiciously like teen spirit, its resilient entourage of African-American and Hispanic thespians bonding despite themselves as they pull off what six weeks earlier seemed the impossible. As teacher Catherine Borek points out, the eternal verities of Our Town apply even in a culture where basketball and badness are supposed to be all that counts. And once the students goose up Wilder’s archetypal valentine to bygone America with projections of their own stereotype-defying real lives, its universality comes through. Opines one young actor, "It’s Romeo and Juliet mixed up with The Cosbys." (90 minutes)
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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