Upon entering the Open Air Theatre at Regent's Park for the 2019 production of Our Town, spectators were met by onstage bleachers not unlike our own seats for the evening's performance. Director Ellen McDougall and designer Rosie Elnile clearly wanted us to see ourselves in this production, and Elnile's colorful, Gap-casual costuming reinforced the quotidian atmosphere. A tree intruded through Elnile's bleachers, helping to bridge the natural park setting with the theatrical structure. While the Stage Manager told us it was just before dawn, this performance was just before sunset, and this reversal of the daylight hours seemed in keeping with the shift to a contemporary setting and the gender reversal of some roles.As the Stage Manager, played by Laura Rogers, set the scene, she also made McDougall's argument for staging Our Town now, and in the center of London. We were indeed in the town center, with churches nearby, and while the tree piercing through the upstage rows of seating may have been of a different variety, it easily stood in for “a big butternut tree” (Collected Plays 151). With a racially diverse cast of disabled and able-bodied performers, this production engaged further with its London performance site. Did this theater company, this city, this country, need an American text to facilitate such casting choices? Diversity, or the lack thereof on London stages, is routinely debated by critics, spectators, and British theater professionals. The arrival of the American musical Hamilton and its integral diverse casting model in 2017 has caused some positive change in London, and it will likely continue to be a touchstone for subsequent efforts such as that of Our Town to reflect the real diversity of British society.The casting of Cleo Sylvestre as Professor Willard and of Arthur Hughes as baseball player George Gibbs showed the audience what a community might look like were gender, race, and ability no barrier to success. Hughes, an actor with radial dysplasia, plays the athletic George as spirited but unassuming, a young man as eager to play baseball as he is to take over his uncle's farm. Hughes exudes an all-American boy's charm as he subverts the conventional casting of the role. These performances may have also challenged spectators to ask why knowledgeable, talented experts in their fields are routinely portrayed by able-bodied white men on London's stages. Editor Webb's (Tom Edden) reflection on social inequalities challenged the audience to reflect on their own privilege in 2019: “I guess we're all hunting like everybody else for a way the diligent and sensible can rise to the top and the lazy and quarrelsome can sink to the bottom. But it ain't easy to find. Meanwhile, we do all we can to help those that can't help themselves and those that can we leave alone” (161).Wilder's dialogue also took on new meaning because it was spoken in London on 23 May 2019, the same day as the elections for the European Parliament. “Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to” (158), Pandora Colin as Mrs. Gibbs exclaimed, speaking to Thusitha Jayasundera as Mrs. Webb but also to the xenophobic members of the audience. Mrs. Gibbs's dream of traveling to Paris is a dream relatively easily achieved for many Londoners in the audience, but in the context of Brexit, her desire to travel and engage with another culture resonated with new urgency. The Brexit Party won 29 of 73 seats that day, confirming support for the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union. The pleasures of theater in the park on a warm spring evening may have masked any political relevance for some spectators, but McDougall mined her production with multiple provocations, ready for a range of spectators.Playing diligent and sensible Emily, Francesca Henry might have walked out of a tube station into Regent's Park and onto the stage. George anticipates the capital he will have when he acquires his uncle's farm, but as directed by McDougall and performed by Henry and Hughes, it is Emily who possesses the greatest wealth, and George who clearly admires and respects her potential to rise in the future. Henry was brimming with life, and her coltish restlessness raises the stakes for contemporary girlhood. Her Emily was earnest but so real, and her intense feelings in response to her environment suggested not just what such a girl might offer the world, but also what the world stands to lose if girls like this Emily are not nurtured.When Emily double-checks with her mother on the correct size of the beans they are stringing, the lesson in domesticity is clearly insignificant in comparison to Emily's academic achievements earlier that day: “Mama, I made a speech in class today and I was very good. … It was like silk off a spool. I'm going to make speeches all my life” (164). Henry translated Emily's immense joy in her abilities, and showed us her dream of a future as a public speaker. Although Emily will next ask her mother about how attractive she is (and this exchange often helps to develop the spark we have just seen between the soon-to-be couple), as directed by McDougall we instead see the power of Emily's knowledge and growing confidence. She likes learning, knows she is smart and skilled, and is excited to continue being so. George is in her orbit—and she is happy to have him there—but he is not defining her trajectory.Emily's insecurities about her appearance are thus the insecurities that girls still have today, but they are not pivotal in the way they may have been for earlier Emilys. Her question about her beauty, following so quickly from her boastful pride in her scholastic achievement, puts contemporary girls' challenges in relief: should society continue unreasonably to elevate beauty ideals, it will do so at the peril of an intellect like Emily's. McDougall foregrounded women's ability and labor throughout the production. Dr. Gibbs (Karl Collins) is not gently scolding his son for failing to chop wood; he is teaching gender equality, making it clear that it is unacceptable for a young man to delegate his own work to a woman. Rogers's rich, resonant voice helped the Stage Manager to control the female-centered storytelling. She punctuated Wilder's dialogue as much with her voice as with her laser-beam gaze, surveying (and surveilling) the audience. Rogers guided us through McDougall's reading of Wilder's play and was instrumental in her director's efforts to activate the audience.George and his sister Rebecca help with this engagement, as their contemplation of the moon invited us to contemplate a London sunset. “Is the moon shining on South America, Canada and half the whole world?” (171), Rebecca wonders. George supposes it is, and his willingness to acknowledge a global community beyond Grover's Corners sets an example for his audience, who might also acknowledge half the whole world under the same setting sun. Wilder intended this celebration of a universal human experience, and it is an apt choice, in 2019, to encourage British participation in such a celebration. The children's delight and wonder at the world matter, and both Wilder and McDougall use these honest responses strategically at the end of Act 1. The awesomeness of a postman delivering a letter through the universe urged us to wonder at similarly astounding commonplace gestures, including the temporary formation of a community in a theater audience.Act 2 was cleanly and swiftly staged, establishing the ritual of marriage as commonplace as stringing beans or chopping wood. Two pink strawberry ice cream sodas were the first significant props used in the production, and they instantly signaled the sweetness of Emily and George's love. While the couple changed into wedding outfits, it was the pink sodas and colorful confetti distributed to the audience that punctuated the act (Fig. 1). We knew Emily and George would make it to the altar, and bringing in these strong color choices sustained the color and youthful energy introduced in the first act. Offering confetti to the audience and encouraging their participation in the wedding ritual extended the invitation to see ourselves in the community onstage. The wedding reinforced the bond the Stage Manager had persuaded us to establish with the world of Grover's Corners.As directed by McDougall, Rogers nailed the salt of the earth New England character. Dwelling on the eternal in the Stage Manager's Act 3 opening monologue, she pulled us deeper into Wilder's concern with humanity. McDougall proceeded to deliver that humanity, with a fully realized “February 11th, 1899” (203). In a period costume, Mrs. Webb began cooking real eggs and bacon on a nineteenth-century range and accepted clinking glass milk bottles from Howie Newsome in a kitchen lit by kerosene lamps. Emily, in her 2019 clothing, moved through her highly detailed memory. The dim lighting and the sizzle of breakfast frying made the scene vivid so that we might begin to understand Emily's anguish over the beauty in the life she lived. McDougall had been asking us all evening to look, because as Emily says, “It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another” (207). Investing the scene with so much detail, McDougall made her case. We may be missing out by not looking at one another, by not seeing the diversity of the community we live in and appreciating, with the wonder of children, the riches on our doorstep. She dismantled the kitchen scene quickly through Emily's goodbys, again helping us to feel what Emily feels, the rapid pace at which we race through life's pleasures.At the beginning of Act 3, the Stage Manager pointed out that the graveyard is on a windy hilltop, and Emily's plot was at the top of the bleachers. Henry was stunning, a pinnacle spotlit against the trees of Regent's Park, with ensemble members dotted in graves throughout the bleachers below. Henry's joyful, energetic performance surged onward, while the Stage Manager expressed quiet solidarity with the women of the ensemble. Rogers then took Emily's high position, as if she were a cosmic conduit to the world beyond Grover's Corners—as indeed she had been for us, the audience. If we were not already persuaded of our own agency and opportunity as fellow humans, McDougall introduced a final provocation, through the ensemble's singing of a hymn: “Now in this moment, now in this day. God is creating and leading the way. Life is behind us, life is before. We write the story not heard before.” It is the job of theater-makers like McDougall to hold a mirror up to society, and by using Our Town as that mirror she may have been pointing out that while we repeat stories from the past, we can, like Emily, try to write a story not heard before.Our Town reunited McDougall with the designer Elnile, and with Henry as Emily, after the three collaborated on the European premiere of Sarah DeLappe's The Wolves earlier in the theater season, at Stratford East. That production, with its bright green astroturf-inspired design and incandescent adolescent girls, haunted this contemporary Grover's Corners. In filling the stage with girls, DeLappe offered a story not told before, though like Wilder, she celebrates young people's delight over commonplace wonders. She also pierced their world with a sudden death, and like Wilder, used this as an appeal to the audience to emphasize their youth.Watching Emily, George, and their siblings bicker and boast in their brightly colored hoodies in the play's opening scenes was striking at a venue which more often produces productions of Shakespeare's plays or large-scale musicals. Henry, so recently a soccer player in The Wolves, was clearly healthy and bright, and a tall, strong Emily whose power and spirit amplified the tragedy of her death. McDougall honored Wilder with her vital, expansive production and used this to impress on us the absolute necessity of girls like Emily.