As You Like It/Our Town

I went to see two plays today, back-to-back: As You Like It and Our Town.
I bought tickets to As you like it because the actor that played Hamlet in the production I saw last year (who basically showed me why everyone likes Shakespeare so much) is starring in it. Unfortunately, he didn't have a lot of opportunity to show his (considerable) talent. The play was mainly carried by the actress playing Rosalind, who was so full of energy that everyone around her paled in comparison. While the first half was great, both the actors and characters seemed exhausted by the second.
There was some great stage-fighting: there was a particularly good scene, during a wrestling match between Orlando and the wrestling champion, where the surroundings are bare, with a dim lamp swung back and forth over them while they threw punches at each other. The set was amazing: the forest and fields were shown throughout different seasons, and there was also some really interesting lighting, for example in that fight scene.
But the play itself-- the characters, the storyline-- weren't as strong as the presentation. I know Shakespeare has a formula for comedies, in which a billion people end up getting married at the end, but the storylines of some of the couples just felt like filler. There were a lot of unresolved issues, like the relationship between Orlando and his brother, Pheobe and the guy she was forced to marry, and then the fact that the play ended with the announcement that the tyrant king had decided on a whim to devote his life to the church and give back all the land he took. There were also some times where it was obvious that Shakespeare had written segments--and the director had kept them-- in order to give actors enough time to change.
I was really disappointed that, although I started out loving the play, for the last 45 minutes or so of the 3-hour run-time I just wanted it to end.

Our Town was a completely different experience. I went knowing almost nothing about it, except that it was a play set in the early 1900's, and was completely surprised when the actors walked through the audience in jeans. The set was only two tables, and the "stage manager" told the audience exactly what we were supposed to be seeing in the TINY theater: the railroad is over there, the townhall is here and the jail is in the basement, etc. The actors moved between the rows of audience members as if it was part of the stage (and, in fact, two sections of the audience were dubbed the two gardens of the main families.) The actors were incredible: every mannerism and inflection was so genuine that it felt like a live documentary.
The thing that really draws you in about this play is that you have absolutely no idea why it's a play. It's sort of explained part of the way into the first act: you're told by the stage manager that he wants people two thousand years from now to understand what it was like for people in our civilization to sit down for dinner. But the real message becomes clearest in the final act, which is about death. Several actors sit in chairs within the space, representing a graveyard, and one last character who has recently died joins them. Her attempt to revisit life opens her eyes to how humans take life for granted: in the original set, everything was mimed, and so we didn't care about the objects that were there, or the people, just the plot. But when the dead woman goes back to one day in her life, the scene is filled with objects, and costumes, and bacon being cooked on stage. Her frustration that the people she's watching aren't paying attention to each other, or her, or the bacon, reveals the real message of the play: we're always searching for the next thing, whether it's the plot, or our next birthday, or getting married, so we don't appreciate what's right in front of us.
I would definitely recommend this play to everyone.