by Thornton Wilder
As narrated by the Stage Manager (Spalding Gray), George Gibbs (Eric Stoltz) and Emily Webb (Penelope Ann Miller) grow up, marry, and face life and death together in the small town of Grovers Corners, New Hampshire at the turn of the century.
A play of universal values, Our Town represents life, love, death and the hereafter as experienced by the people of a small town. The lack of recognizable scenery and properties allows each viewer to create an individualized version of the idyllic small American town.
A main question raised by students usually is "Why did he take away all the scenery?" In Wilder's time, the stage was usually so full of scenery, there was hardly room for the actors. It became more important to have "things" there than the story and the words. By stripping away all the extras, and focusing on essentials, Wilder is able to show and teach with his piece, rather than put on a spectical of scenery. He felt the words were the power of the piece, not the decorations. "Our Town" is all about what is most important in life, the little things in life.
Reviewer: Lawrance M. Bernabo from The Zenith City: Duluth, MN United States
The "New York Times" review by brooks Atkinson of of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" in 1938 called it "a hauntingly beautiful play." The play is considered a classic portrayal of small-town American life, set in the town of Grover's Corner, New Hampshire. We follow the lives of George Gibbs, a doctor's son, and Emily Webb, the daughter of the newspaper editor, through their courtship, marriage, and Emily's death in childbirth. However, the style of "Our Town" is sometimes considered more striking than the substance because of its lack of props and scenery. The play features a narrator, the Stage Manager, who sits at the side of the unadorned stage and explains the action to the audience.
Wilder makes it clear he is trying to convey the simple sanctity of everyday life, a theme that is certainly found in Wilder's novel "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" (1927), which looked at the lives of five persons who died in the collapse of a bridge in Peru in the 18th century. The key exchange comes between Emily, who asks "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?--every, every minute?" "No," the Stage Manager responds, "The saints and poets, maybe--they do some." Obviously that is the lesson Wilder wants to impart to his audiences and the big question today is whether the frantic change in the pace of life we see a century later has made Wilder's point incomprehensible to most American audience.
"Our Town" is an important American drama, not because it was considered innovative or because it won the Pulitzer Prize, but because it represents the last gasp of American lyricism in the 20th century. World War I transmuted the Realists into the Modernists, writers like Hemingway and Steinbeck, whose response to the horrors of modern warfare was to elevate the subjects of literature to loftier grounds. In a world where men die or are maimed for life by poisonous gas, bombs dropped from airplanes, or machine guns, a new significance of meaning needs to be created. By such standards "Our Town" pales in comparison to the works of Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. But if you put Wilder's play in historical and cultural perspective, then I think its greatness remains assured.
reviewer: bob wilcox
merican small-town life back in 1938, and we all must have seen it a half-dozen times since we acted in it in high school. It should have no surprises for us. By now, I know not to expect merely an affectionate, wryly humorous dramatization of a Norman Rockwell vision of life. That nostalgic view colors many moments, but darker colors creep in too -- sudden deaths of young people in war and pestilence, small-town small-mindedness about people who are different, the fear and pain caused by a morally repressive ignorance about sex -- in short, the full recognition that life as we live it never seems as sweet as when we remember it.
For Our Town is a play about remembering our lives. And watching it this time, in the current production by the Clayton Community Theatre, I noted that for the play's first audience in 1938, this play set some thirty years earlier was a play about their own younger days and their lives with their own parents. That's not true for us.
reviewer: Macey Levin
Wilder's play cautions us to appreciate the opportunity to live a life in a highly imperfect world amidst a mysterious universe that probably does not even acknowledge our existence.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Our Town depicts pathos set against a background of centuries of time, social history, and religious ideas. As the Stage Manager (who functions as a Greek chorus in the drama) says: "This is the way we were in our growing-up and in our marrying and in our doctoring and in our living and in our dying."
Our Town is not just about Emily and George and, indeed, is not just about a small town in northern New England a hundred years ago. Our Town is a play about what we (and Thornton Wilder) thought America and Americans were. As we are about to take a head-long leap into the next century we are forced, not only to look ahead to what we might become, but to turn and look back at what allowed us to arrive at this threshold of the new millennium. The characters in Our Town tell us what they knew of life, its pain and hope; its simplicity and truth. Thornton Wilder believed that life was meaningful only when lived with full awareness of the value of the present moment. For nearly 60 years Our Town has demonstrated to its audiences the peril of not doing exactly that.
Shortly before Wilder's death, The New York Times said:
Wilder's plays are now more than ever in rhythm with our changing habit of theatergoing... He relates the moment to eternity, seeks the infinite in the immediate, finds the universe in each grain of wheat. His plays have not so much been 'revived' over and over again, as they have almost continuously stayed alive among us.
Wilder's frank theatricality and simplicity illuminate patterns of human experience that remain unchanged in the face of progress.