Spider's Web/Theater Barn/New Lebanon

ABE PHELPS' SET has intense, dark green walls and wainscoting dotted with red plush side chairs. It suggests right away that the evening may deliver impact along with familiar Agatha Christie comforts. And it does. Mostly.

For a while, audience brains are engaged in filing away the web data that rat-a-tats from the stage (no, not that kind of data--the spider's kind--the plot kind). But eventually, under the care of charming Melissa Macleod Herion as Clarissa, endearing John Trainor as Sir Rowland and keen, importuning John Philip Cromie as the investigating officer, characters come shining through.

"Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure," says one of the characters in Thornton Wilder's “Our Town,” and the magical thing about seeing it under the Tent at PS/21 in Chatham is that, if you look up and to your right, there's the moon in the sky. I don't know what a potato moon looks like, but it should look like what the audience saw the other night during Walking the dog Theater's exquisite production of the venerable play.

As the Stage Manager, David Anderson is our amiable guide through the lives, loves and deaths of the people of Grover's Corners; part Greek chorus, part Godlike figure, he wanders about the stage commenting on the action, interviewing the characters, imparting words of wisdom. With minimal sets and virtually no props, the characters go about their daily lives in what may seem to us now to be an idealized version of a small American town at the turn of the 20th century. But there is a reason this play has endured through the generations; it speaks to universal truths in a folksy, accessible way while maintaining the pure poetry of its language.