The Verge Theater Company opened its season Thursday with Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” directed by Mara Lindqvist and lightly adapted so that Grover’s Corners now has a brewery on Main and a median home price that makes the Stage Manager weep quietly into his clipboard.

Act One proceeded conventionally until Professor Willard, played by MSU adjunct Dale Houser, delivered the geological history of the region and added that the soil composition makes septic systems “a real conversation starter at closing.” Several audience members nodded.

The real friction arrived in Act Two when Emily Webb, played by sophomore Kestrel Moon, asked whether anyone ever realizes life while they’re living it. From the third row, a voice called out, “Only when the appraisal comes in low.” The theater went quiet. Lindqvist later said the line was not in the script.

Intermission found the lobby divided into predictable camps. Longtime residents clustered near the sparkling water, comparing memories of when the Webb house lot would have cost three head of cattle. Newer arrivals stood by the kombucha, checking Zillow on their phones. Both groups agreed the Gibbs family’s kitchen renovation looked “very achievable.”

“I’ve shown that house,” said Carla Rinsky, a broker with Big Sky Dream Properties, standing near the emergency exit. “The foundation has stories. The inspection report has more.” She declined to elaborate but accepted a business card from the actor playing George Gibbs, who graduates in May and needs a backup plan.

The third act, set in the cemetery, featured the dead residents of Grover’s Corners reflecting on the living. In this version, they mostly complained about property taxes and the way the new four-story development on North 19th blocks the view of the Bridgers from the burial plots. Mrs. Gibbs, played by retired schoolteacher Helen Voss, noted that her great-granddaughter now commutes from Belgrade. “She calls it ’living in Bozeman,’” Voss said. “We call it driving.”

The production runs through August 23. Tickets are sliding scale, which the program notes means “pay what you can, but please know the theater’s rent tripled last year.” Opening night ended with a standing ovation and three separate arguments in the parking lot about whether the Stage Manager’s final monologue was about mortality or zoning. The Stage Manager, played by local carpenter Tom Asher, drove home in his 1998 Subaru. He lives in the same rental he’s had for twelve years. The landlord has not raised the rent. “Yet,” Asher said. “The word is yet.”