With his sharp good looks, casual elegance and pleasing purr of a voice, Walter Coppage could command audience sympathy without bothering to act. He does act, though, with force and clarity and such deceptive ease that we never see an actor making choices. We just see the man he's playing. Coppage was especially good — and especially transparent — in director Jeff Church's excellent revival of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. As the Stage Manager who squires us around Grover's Corners, ruefully noting the everyday travails of its residents, Coppage triumphed in a role that sometimes comes across as a narrative device: The Stage Manager guides us to the profundity of the ordinary. A little folksy, a touch amused and always poignant, Coppage affected us as much as the events that he narrated affected him. Not that his Stage Manager let on as to how much he felt. Coppage blinked, once, as he smiled at death and in doing so became human.
