Townies - Chris Seibert as Emily Webb and Len Lieber as George Gibbs.

Reportedly, much of the rationale for Cleveland Public Theatre's revamping of Thornton Wilder's beloved classic Our Town was that the play had become too familiar from the decades of high schools performing it literally as written, and that it needed to be radically deconstructed to be contemporarily effective.

By that logic, perhaps the next time the Cleveland Orchestra undertakes "Pomp and Circumstance" — a high-school graduation staple generations before the 1938 Our Town even hit Broadway — it ought to be reorchestrated for kazoos, set to a hip-hop beat and played backwards. Wouldn't that reintroduce Elgar to calcified ears?! Hey, how about Beethoven's chestnut Fifth scored for electric can opener? That dreary old Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto revivified by cutting every other note and — what an inspiration! — eradicating the violin entirely.

Then again, maybe the best way to reinvigorate traditional classics is for both genuine and would-be performance artists to honor the genius of the works' originators by basing their revivals on the principle that these masters knew infinitely more about the conception, formulation and construction of their creations than any possible interpreter ever could.

Wilder, for instance, might have warned CPT director Raymond Bobgan that eliminating Our Town's Stage Manager narrator, and parceling his lines out among the rest of the cast, not only does away with one of the most memorable characters in American dramatic literature, but tears the conceptual heart out of the play. The emblematic commentator is there to provide dramatic specific gravity, to represent the timeless nature of small-town existence, and, as St. Peter's stand-in, to dispense all present and future knowledge of all the villagers' presents and futures. To haphazardly cede that privileged knowledge to a generality of characters only assures the utter deflation of the work's fabled poignancy.

Just as fatally whimsical is morphing the play's shyly charming juvenile George into a 68-year-old munchkin, out of some incomprehensible notion of having the characters appear, instead of contemporaneously, rather at the age they theoretically died. Beyond turning the legendary drugstore courting scene between George and young love Emily into a dirty-old-man-stalks-child travesty ("Can I buy you a soda, little girl?"), it completely robs the classic of the fundament of its tragedy — its radiant innocence.

There's abundantly more impertinent activity at CPT — lots of everyone restlessly milling about, incessantly moving and habitually tossing chairs at one another. Even when the celebrated ladders that represent George and Emily's second-floor bedrooms appear, they first have to be put through a ritual ballet of twisting, revolving and somersaulting. What all these aerobics and furniture-moving have to do with Wilder's precious tribute to the ineffable beauty of ordinary life and death is a puzzle only terminal insomniacs will want to pursue. Moreover and regrettably, as the actors serve purely as functionally as the ambient furniture, they are, for the most part, equally anonymous and interchangeable.

A wise drama teacher once imparted some profound counsel to a group of us directing students eager to certify our brilliance by adding obvious improvements to the imperfections of such second-raters as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekhov. "Never condescend to a superior intellect," she cautioned. That's a caution that ought to be a red light.

arts@freetimes.com