Our Town by Thornton Wilder

Our Town is a three act play by Thornton Wilder which is, perhaps, the most frequently produced play by an American playwright. The play is set in the fictional community of Grover's Corners, modeled after several New Hampshire towns in the Mount Monadnock region: Jaffrey, Peterborough, Dublin, and others. Using meta-theatrical devices, the play is set in a 1930's theater. Through the actions of the Stage Manager, the town of Grover's Corners is created for the audience and scenes from its history between the years of 1901 and 1913 play out. Wilder, in his 30s, lived in MacDowell Colony in Peterborough in June, 1937, one of many locations where Wilder worked on the play. The third act was drafted entirely in one day during a visit to Zurich in September of 1937 after a long evening walk in the rain with a friend.^[1][2] Image File history File links Our_town. ... Image File history File links Our_town. ... Image:Thorntonwilderteeth. ... Image:Thorntonwilderteeth. ... For other uses, see New Hampshire (disambiguation). ... Mount Monadnock, or Grand Monadnock, is a peak in southwestern New Hampshire, United States, which has drawn attention for years by its relative isolation from other mountains. ... The MacDowell Colony is an art colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, Founded in 1907 by Marian MacDowell, wife of composer Edward MacDowell, largely with donated funds. ...

Our Town is a story of character development that details the interactions between citizens of an everyday town in the early 20th century through their everyday lives (particularly the lives of George Gibbs, a doctor's son, and Emily Webb, the daughter of a newspaper editor). Our Town was first performed at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey on January 22, 1938. It next opened at the Wilbur Theater in Boston on January 25, 1938. Its New York City debut was on February 4, 1938 at Henry Miller's Theatre, and later moved to the Morosco Theatre. The play was produced and directed by Jed Harris.^[3] It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1938.^[4] McCarter Theatre is a not-for-profit, professional company on the campus of Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. ... Nassau Street, Princetons main street. ... Boston redirects here. ... New York, New York and NYC redirect here. ... is the 35th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1938 (MCMXXXVIII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Henry Millers Theatre was a Broadway theatre at 124 W 43rd Street, between Broadway and 6th Avenue New York, NY. It was designed by architects Paul R. Allen, and Ingalls & Hoffman. ... The Morosco Theatre was a legitimate theatre located at 217 West 45th Street in the heart of the theater district in midtown-Manhattan. ... TIME cover featuring Harris Jed Harris (born Jacob Hirsch Horowitz in Lviv, Austria-Hungary) (February 25, 1900 - November 15, 1979) was a renowned Austrian-American theater producer and director, and writer of film. ... The Pulitzer Prize for Drama was first awarded in 1918. ... See also: 1937 in literature, other events of 1938, 1939 in literature, list of years in literature. ...

Background

Our Town's narrator, the Stage Manager, is completely self-aware of his relationship with the audience, leaving him free to break the fourth wall and address them. According to the script, it is to be performed with little scenery and no set or props. The reasons spring from Wilder's own dissatisfaction with the theatre of his time: "I felt that something had gone wrong....I began to feel that the theatre was not only inadequate, it was evasive."^[5] The answer was to have the characters mime the objects with which they interact. Their surroundings are created only with chairs, tables, and ladders. (e.g. The scene in which Emily and George share homework answers through their windows is performed with the two actors standing atop separate ladders to represent elevated windows of neighboring houses.) Wilder says, "Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind—not in things, not in 'scenery'"^[6] Stage management is a sub-discipline of stagecraft. ... The fourth wall is the imaginary invisible wall at the front of the stage in a proscenium theater, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play. ... Theatrical scenery is things that are used as setting for a theatrical production. ... In mathematics, a set can be thought of as any collection of distinct objects considered as a whole. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...

Wilder's use of archetypes and stereotypes appeal to average families and make this play a "timeless classic." Beginning with the routine and tiny necessities of daily life, the audience is exposed to the intimate and habitual life of a real American family. The last two acts gradually represent deeper aspects of life using George Gibbs and Emily Webb, whose unspoken mutual affection as children blossoms into love, marriage and death. Act 2 celebrates the marriage of George and Emily. The characters analyze the need for human companionship while questioning the institution of marriage. The last-minute apprehension Emily and George feel about their marriage represents a universal theme of young people wanting to grow up quickly while still craving childhood's relative certainty and security.

Our Town's strong grasp on its audience lasts through the finale of the play, when the ghost of Emily Webb travels back in time to her 12th birthday. Through this, Wilder conveys the meaning and significance of the little things in life. The theme of daily life and routine is once again brought back into the play. The author's concept of pursuing life is also brought up with Mrs. Gibbs's desire to visit France. Later in the play she obtains the money necessary to go, but she instead leaves the money to George and his wife; implying that either she, like Emily, did not appreciate life to its fullest, or instead that she came to enjoy the simple pleasures enough that she didn't need France. The magnitude of small town America, with its slow-moving culture and relaxed atmosphere, is revealed. Because these life lessons are relevant even to today's fast-paced culture, the timelessness of Our Town is underscored.

Our Town also attempts to encapsulate the New England town of the early twentieth century, with its ongoing industrialization and immigration, alluded to in the mentions of "Pole Town." The Stage Manger also stresses the famous line "This is the way we were."

Plot

Throughout the play, the Stage Manager conducts the story being told, taking questions from the audience, describing the locations and making key observations about the world he or she creates for the audience. This "man of the hour" also plays several different but key roles within the story he or she tells, such as a preacher and the owner of a soda shop and an old woman.

Act One ("Daily Life")

The play begins with the Stage Manager providing a description of the town. After this are scenes within the Gibbs' and Webbs' homes of both families preparing their children for school. The Stage Manager then guides the audience through a day in the life of the town. He also has Professor Willard, a long-winded local historian, and Mr. Webb, editor of the Grover's Corners Sentinel, talk about the town. After a scene within the Congregational Church, Mrs. Webb, Mrs. Gibbs, and Mrs. Soames discuss Simon Stimson. Stimson is the church organist with a reputation for being a drunkard. Due to his non-conforming nature, he is often the subject of the town's gossip. Although a relatively small role, Stimson is Wilder's voice for some of his darker views of humanity. The act also includes a scene in which George and Emily discuss school, and Emily's agreement to help George with his schoolwork foreshadows a future relationship. Also on the letter, George's younger sister Rebecca, talks about the moon on how it might get nearer and near until there's a "big 'splosin", showing George's sister is a very curious girl. The subject of "daily life" addressed throughout this act stereotypes the average "American family." Congregational churches are Protestant Christian churches practicing congregationalist church governance, in which each congregation independently and autonomously runs its own affairs. ... In modern usage, a stereotype is a simplified mental picture of an individual or group of people who share a certain characteristic (or stereotypical) qualities. ...

Act Two ("Love and Marriage")

Three years pass and George and Emily announce their plans to wed. The day is filled with stress, topped off by George's visit to the Webb family home. There, he meets Mr. Webb, who tells George of his own father's advice to him, to treat Emily like property and never to respect her needs. Mr. Webb continues to say that he did the exact opposite of his father's advice and has been happy since. Mr. Webb concludes by telling George to never take advice from anyone on matters of that nature. Here, the Stage Manager interrupts the scene and takes the audience back a year, to the end of Emily and George's junior year. Over an ice cream, Emily confronts George with his pride and they discuss the future and their love for each other. The wedding follows, where George, in a fit of nervousness, tells his mother that he is not ready to marry. Emily, too, tells her father of her anxiety about marriage. However, they both regain their composure and George proceeds down the aisle to be wed by the preacher (played by Stage Manager).

Act Three ("Death")

Introduces the location: a graveyard atop a hill overlooking Grover's Corners. Sam Craig, who describes Emily as his cousin but seems to be George's cousin, and Joe Stoddard, the undertaker, are walking through. Emily, after dying in childbirth, is being buried here today. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the living, the dead observe the living while seated in their "graves." Among the dead are Mrs. Gibbs, Mrs. Soames, Simon Stimson, and Wally Webb, Emily's brother. Emily soon joins them. As Mrs. Gibbs tells them of Emily's death during childbirth, Mrs. Soames makes the remark, "My, wasn't life awful--and wonderful," a line that somewhat summarizes the whole play, showing that life has both its upsides and downsides and that we never really notice the importance of our lives while we live them.

Emily finds that she is able to relive moments in her life and, against the advice of Mrs. Gibbs and with the help of the Stage Manager, decides to relive a day in her life. Mrs. Gibbs advises Emily that if she is to pick a day to relive, she should pick one that is insignificant; the reasoning behind this suggestion is that not only will Emily relive the day, she will also observe the day with the knowledge of the future. Emily decides to revisit her twelfth birthday. She is initially overwhelmed with joy but quickly succumbs to tears when she realizes how much she took for granted when she was alive and how quickly life speeds by. She says "We don't even have time to look at one another." After one last look at Grover's Corners and being alive, Emily tells the Stage Manager she is ready to go back to the graveyard. She asks, "Doesn't anyone ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?" The Stage Manager responds. "No. Saints and poets, maybe; they do some." Wilder emphasizes that we, while we live, seldom appreciate the precious details in our lives.

Back in the cemetery, Simon Stimson, who committed suicide by hanging himself in the attic, reveals the bitterness of his soul, remarking that life was full of ignorance and blindness. Mrs. Gibbs reassures Emily that Simon's bitter view "ain't the whole truth and [he] knows it." Stars are mentioned as a metaphor of life and how it is always changing, always evolving. Here Wilder addresses life's ongoing cycle: the so-called circle of life. While looking at the whole picture, the dead understand how minuscule human life is, especially when comparing it with the millions of years it takes for the light of stars to travel to earth. The play drives home its moral when George Gibbs approaches Emily’s grave and collapses in tears. Emily, watching this, is saddened and amazed at how the living "don't understand." The play closes with the Stage Manager making a few comments about how tomorrow is a new day--the implication being that we, the audience, the living, should live every minute. For other uses, see Suicide (disambiguation). ...

(In the 1940 film version, for which Wilder wrote the screenplay and was given complete script control, Wilder agreed to a happier ending in which Emily dreams her death, but does not actually die.)

Analysis

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With a folksy, storytelling stage manager as our guide, we soon learn that young George Gibbs is an up-and-coming baseball star, while Emily Webb is a conscientious, serious-minded student. As the two grow up, they fall in love and marry, but shortly thereafter, they face tragedy, and Emily comes to realize how precious life is. Our Town was originally created to represent the cycle of life, namely life, death, and rebirth.

The third act is unusual in that it has a surrealistic and grim atmosphere in contrast with the relatively realistic and optimistic tone of the first two acts. It is also the most philosophical of the three, perhaps serving as an interpretation on how ordinary life connects with eternity: "Way down deep, there is something that's eternal about every human being," the Stage Manager says. In this act, Wilder confronts the enigma of death and the beyond, and also on how life's simplicity can be its most unusual element. Furthermore, according to the dead characters in Act III, their time in the living has already been spent, and they hence must look forward to "eternity" — an abstract concept that cannot be defined within the boundaries of the living world. This implies that life is actually only a starting point for the great experience of the afterlife, focusing on time-based events and superficial human interactions before ascending to a higher level of understanding and/or fulfillment. For other uses, see Afterlife (disambiguation). ...

Uplifting as Our Town is, taken as a whole, Wilder nonetheless confronts the darker side of the realities of life at the turn of the century: Julia Gibbs, wife of Dr. Gibbs, dies of pneumonia after 20 years of marriage; Wally Webb, the editor's son, dies of a burst appendix on a boy scout camping trip; Joe Crowell, Jr., the paper boy, an honors high school student and MIT graduate, dies on a World War I battlefield ("all that education for nothing," the Stage Manager says); Simon Stimson, the church organist, a depressed alcoholic, hangs himself; and our lovely female lead, Emily Webb, dies following the birth of her second child. Does the embittered Stimson reflect Wilder's darker personal vision? His small, but prominent role, is suggestive. “The Great War ” redirects here. ...

In essence, the play as a whole could be viewed as a commentary on the general nature of life as a unique and precious experience. The production's large, black stage is almost totally bare (per the script), leaving the actors to pantomime the majority of their actions, and other members of the cast - sitting at the stage's periphery throughout the show - produce sound effects for window shades, snapping beans, a horse, milk bottles, and clucking chickens. Overall, the effects are well-executed in terms of timing, and the convention works well to underline the play's inherent artifice.

Characters

Adaptations

It was adapted into a film in 1940 starring William Holden as George and featured original music by Aaron Copland. Another film in 2003 starring Paul Newman as the Stage Manager. It was also made into a television musical starring Frank Sinatra as the Stage Manager, and Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint in their only musical roles. One hit tune came from this production, "Love and Marriage," sung by Sinatra. Year 1940 (MCMXL) was a leap year starting on Monday (link will display the full 1940 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... William Holden (April 17, 1918 – ca. ... Aaron Copland Aaron Copland (November 14, 1900 – December 2, 1990) was an American composer of concert and film music, as well as an accomplished pianist. ... Year 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... This article is about the American actor and race team owner. ... The musical film is a film genre in which several songs sung by the characters are interwoven into the narrative. ... Sinatra redirects here. ... This article is about the American actor and race team owner. ... Eva Marie Saint (born July 4, 1924) is an Academy Award-winning American actress. ...

Several more television adaptations followed, none of them musicals:

• One in 1959, based on a then-recent revival with Art Carney as the Stage Manager

• One acclaimed videotaped production in 1977 made especially for television with Hal Holbrook as the Stage Manager

• A Lincoln Center production televised in 1989 with Spalding Gray in the role.

• Our Town was featured as a junior high school play on the television series "The Wonder Years," during the episode "On the Spot."

• Most recently, another highly acclaimed television production in 2003 again starring Paul Newman, but this time as the Stage Manager. This was also based on a stage production, and was executive-produced by Newman's wife, actress Joanne Woodward.

• The 1940 film version drastically altered the play's ending.

• A new stage musical adaptation entitled "Grover's Corners," in development since the mid-1980s, was workshopped in New York City in the mid-1990s.^[7]

• The Opera Our Town (opera) music by Ned Rorem and libretto by J. D. McClatchy was performed by Fox Theater.

Year 1959 (MCMLIX) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Arthur William Matthew Carney (November 4, 1918 – November 9, 2003) was an Academy Award-winning American actor in film, stage, television, and radio. ... Bottom view of VHS videotape cassette with magnetic tape exposed Videotape is a means of recording images and sound onto magnetic tape as opposed to movie film. ... Also: 1977 (album) by Ash. ... Harold Rowe Holbrook, Jr. ... The Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center. ... Year 1989 (MCMLXXXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday (link displays 1989 Gregorian calendar). ... Gray in Grays Anatomy (1996). ... The Wonder Years is an Emmy Award-winning US American television dramedy created by Carol Black and Neal Marlens. ... Our Town is a 2003 film adaptation of a play of the same name by Thornton Wilder. ... Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward (born February 27, 1930) is an Academy Award, Golden Globe, Emmy award winning American actress. ... Year 1940 (MCMXL) was a leap year starting on Monday (link will display the full 1940 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Our Town-a three act opera by composer Ned Rorem and librettist J. D. McClatchy. ... Ned Rorem (born October 23, 1923) is a noted American composer and diarist. ... J.D. Sandy McClatchy (1945-) is an American poet, literary critic, and editor of the Yale Review. ... The Fabulous Fox Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia is one of the grand movie palaces built in the United States in the 1920s. ...

References

1. ^ Wilder, Thornton; Rice, William; Burns, Edward & Dydo, Ulla (1996), The letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN 0300067747 
2. ^ Steward, Samuel & Toklas, Alice (1977), Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 0395253403 
3. ^ IBDB. Our Town. Retrieved on August 5, 2006.
4. ^ Pulitzer.org. Pulitzer Prize Winners of 1938. Retrieved on August 5, 2006.
5. ^ Wilder, Thornton. Collected Plays. Preface.
6. ^ Lumley, Frederick. New Trends in 20th Century Drama: A Survey since Ibsen and Shaw. Page 333.
7. ^ Other Shows

• Wilder, Tappan. Afterword from Our Town, A Play in Three Acts. Perennial Classics, HarperCollins, New York, NY, 2003.

Image:Thorntonwilderteeth. ... Samuel Morris Steward (1909-December 31, 1993), also known by the pen name Phil Andros, was a novelist and tattoo artist based in Oakland, California. ... Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Collected Stories can refer to: Collected Stories, a 1996 play by Donald Margulies Any of several books which gather the shorter works of a single author under one title or volume. ... Henrik Johan Ibsen (March 20, 1828–May 23, 1906) was an extremely influential Norwegian playwright who was largely responsible for the rise of the modern realistic drama. ... George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856–2 November 1950) was a world-renowned Irish author. ...

External links

• Themes from Our Town
• Sparknotes: Our Town
• CliffsNotes: Our Town
• Our Town on the Internet Broadway Database