A great play is always welcome. Thanks to Prime Stage for letting Thornton Wilder's spare, feeling "Our Town" speak to us again so intimately, with its essentially American accent, of love, life and death.

The danger is that the result can look like a cliché. It's hard to remember how revolutionary "Our Town" was in 1938, with its ostentatiously bare stage, intrusive Stage Manager, direct address to the audience, staccato rhythm and inexorable march from daily life to love and marriage to . . . well, as our guide says, "I reckon you can guess" what the final act must be.

That's what's breathtaking about Wilder's spare, self-confident play. It starts out cozy as kittens but ends up with painful loss. It telescopes life into its essence, with no dawdling over all the getting and spending, aspiration and pursuit that clog our lives but won't look like much in the long run.

Unfortunately for the play, bare stages and direct address have become commonplace, partly because of Wilder's success. And his small-town truths and familial pieties can look like greeting card sentimentality, unless we're reminded of the hard, clear-eyed truths of the play's spine.

On this, I give Prime Stage a middling grade. In its 13th year, the company is a young people's and family theater, with a mission of "bringing literature to life." Its creative powers cover a broad range, often stiffening a community theater cast with professionals. Here, they're somewhat closer to the community theater end of the spectrum -- as might seem appropriate to a play all about community life.

Certainly director Mark Calla and his cast of 13 (actually a bit skimpy for this play) do well by the play's charm. They get that heartfelt Hallmark sentiment. But they do less well by the dark truths.

Gregory Caridi's Stage Manager is emblematic. Gracious and smiling, he moves the tale along. But he lacks a peremptory crispness; ultimately it's not clear just what sort of tale he thinks he's telling us, and why. And Molly Jones' Emily Webb, so good as she matures into youthful marriage, tears a passion to tatters in the final scene. Simpler would fit Wilder far better.

Along the way, KDKA's Jon Burnett (disclosure: I often appear with him on Pittsburgh Today Live) is an appealing Doc Gibbs, though he needs to project a bit more. (By the way, this is not his Pittsburgh stage debut.) John Feightner is crisply fine as Editor Webb, and Douglas Baker is properly naïve as his son, George. Robin Beruh and Diana Ifft chatter and bustle convincingly as the two mothers.

It's an odd choice to stage the play in the round, which pretty well negates Wilder's carefully cultivated bare stage detail. Or maybe we've seen so much spare staging it's impossible to capture that barebones feeling today. Some of the required miming calls attention to itself with its awkwardness. Why are the audience voices recorded, rather than live?

And I question the occasional updating of the text -- they certainly didn't talk about "native Americans" in 1938! You might as well change the assertion that "people are meant to go through life two by two." The Stage Manager waves a cell phone. It should all be in period.

But the play remains, indomitable. Ted Pappas at the Public Theater, which once occupied this same Hazlett space, talks of the "essentials" of American theater. "Our Town" is as essential as they get.

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