Our Town
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| Our Town | |
 1938 first edition cover from the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division |
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| Written by | Thornton Wilder |
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| Characters | Stage Manager Mrs. Myrtle Webb Mr. Charles Webb George Gibbs Emily Webb Mrs. Julia Gibbs Dr. Frank F. Gibbs Simon Stimson Joe Crowell, Jr. Howie Newsome Rebecca Gibbs Wally Webb Professor Willard Woman in the Balcony Man in the Auditorium Lady in the Box Mrs. Louella Soames Constable Warren Si Crowell Three Baseball Players Sam Craig Joe Stoddard |
| Date premiered | 4 February 1938 |
| Place premiered | Henry Miller's Theatre New York City, New York |
| Original language | English |
| Subject | Change comes slowly to a small New Hampshire town in the early 20th century. |
| Genre | Drama |
| Setting | 1901 to 1913. Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. |
| IBDB profile | |
Our Town is a three-act play by American playwright Thornton Wilder. The play is set in the fictional community of Grover's Corners, modeled upon several New Hampshire towns in the Mount Monadnock region: Jaffrey, Peterborough, Dublin, and others. Using metatheatrical devices, Wilder sets the play in a 1930s theater. He uses the actions of the Stage Manager to create the town of Grover's Corners for the audience. Scenes from its history between the years of 1901 and 1913 play out.
In his 30s, Wilder lived in the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough in June 1937, one of the many locations at which he worked on the play. During a visit to Zurich in September 1937, he drafted the entire third act in one day after a long evening walk in the rain with a friend. In 1947, the Soviet Union banned Our Town and another Wilder play, The Skin of Our Teeth, for making family life seem "too attractive."[1]
Our Town is a character story about an average town's citizens in the early twentieth century as depicted through their everyday lives (particularly George Gibbs, a doctor's son, and Emily Webb, the daughter of the town's newspaper editor). Our Town was first performed at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey on 22 January 1938. It next opened at the Wilbur Theater in Boston, Massachusetts on 25 January 1938. Its New York City debut was on 4 February 1938 at Henry Miller's Theatre, and later moved to the Morosco Theatre. The play was produced and directed by Jed Harris.[2] Wilder received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1938 for the work.[3]
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[edit] 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 directly. According to the script, the play is to be performed with little scenery, no set and only three props. Wilder was dissatisfied 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."[4] His 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 their neighboring houses' second-story windows.) Says Wilder, "Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind – not in things, not in 'scenery'."[5]
By using archetypes and stereotypes that appeal to families, Wilder makes his play a "timeless classic." Beginning with daily life's routines and necessities, the play reveals an American family's intimate and habitual personal lives. The last two acts gradually represent life's deeper aspects, mostly through George Gibbs and Emily Webb, whose unspoken mutual affection as children blossoms into love, marriage, and death. Act 2 celebrates George and Emily's wedding. The characters analyze the need for human companionship while questioning the institution of marriage. The last-minute apprehension that both Emily and George experience about being married 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 when Emily Webb's ghost time travels back to her 12th birthday. Through this, Wilder conveys life's fundamental meaning and significance, dwelling upon daily life and routine. Also, the author's concept of pursuing life rather than just living it is shown by Mrs. Gibbs's desire to visit France. Later, she obtains the necessary money to go, but she chooses to leave it to George and Emily; this implies either that she, like Emily, failed to appreciate life to its fullest, or that she instead came to enjoy its simple pleasures enough that she no longer needed to go to France. The magnitude of small-town America, with its slow-moving culture and relaxed atmosphere, is examined, and these life lessons are still relevant to today's faster-paced culture, underscoring Our Town's timelessness.
Our Town attempts to express the New England town of the early twentieth century and how change is beginning to affect it. Ongoing industrialization and immigration are alluded to with mentions of "Polish Town." The Stage Manager stresses the famous line, "This is the way we were." Indeed, when Our Town was staged in the late 1930s and '40s, many recognized from personal experience the life and times it depicted. Today's audiences are more likely interpret the play as a story of times gone by, although the daily routines, habits, and rituals in it still exist and help bind our society through a mutual commonality that affect us in a personal way. That Our Town remains a compelling depiction of timeless verities is a measure of Wilder's stature as a playwright.
[edit] Characters
- Main characters
- Stage Manager
- Mrs. Myrtle Webb
- Mr. Charles Webb
- George Gibbs
- Emily Webb
- Mrs. Julia Gibbs
- Dr. Frank F. Gibbs
;Secondary characters
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[edit] Plot
Throughout the play, the Stage Manager conducts the story being told, taking questions from the audience, describing the locations (as scenery is scarce) 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, the owner of a soda shop, and an old woman.
[edit] Act I: 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. During this scene, Editor Webb answers some questions from actors who have been planted in the audience. After a scene within the Congregational Church at a choir practice, 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. Emily's agreement to help George with his schoolwork foreshadows a future relationship. Also on the ladder, George's younger sister Rebecca, talks about the moon and how it might get nearer and near until there's a "big 'splosion", showing George's sister is a curious girl. The subject of "daily life" addressed throughout this act stereotypes the average "American family."
[edit] Act II: 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 his wife like property and never to respect her needs. Mr. Webb then says that he did the exact opposite of his father's advice and has been happy since. Mr. Webb concludes by telling George not to 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 soda, 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, saying she wishes she were dead. However, they both regain their composure, and George proceeds down the aisle to be wed by the preacher (played by the Stage Manager). Mrs Soames is very pleased with the wedding and interrupts the Stage Manager as he recites the wedding vows, loudly voicing her opinions to the audience.
[edit] Act III: Death and Eternity
The setting for Act III is the town hilltop cemetery. The Stage Manager opens this act with a lengthy soliloquy emphasizing eternity, expressed by the survival of Emily's second child after the Emily herself dies giving birth. Emily's coffin is brought to the cemetery and buried, and she emerges from the mourners as a spirit. She joins her relatives and fellow townsfolk in the graveyard, including her mother-in-law, Mrs Gibbs, Simon Stimson, Mrs Soames, Wally Webb and Mr Carter. The dead tell her that they must wait and forget the life that came before, but Emily refuses. Soon Emily's ghost learns it is possible to re-live parts of her past life. Despite the warnings of Simon, Mrs Soames, and Mrs Gibbs, Emily decides to return to Earth to re-live just one day, her 12th birthday, and realizes just how much life should be valued, "every, every minute." Poignantly, she asks the Stage Manager whether anyone realizes life while they live it, and is told, "No. Saints and poets, maybe. They do some." She then returns to her grave. The Stage Manager concludes the play with a soliloquy.
[edit] Awards and nominations
- Awards
- 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
- 1989 Drama Desk Award Outstanding Revival
- 1989 Tony Award for Best Revival
[edit] References
- ^ Staff writers (4 January 1948). "Thornton Wilder Returns to Fiction". The Dallas Morning News: p. 15. "quote: The author has been in the papers recently in connection with Russia's [sic] banning of his two plays, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, on the grounds that the plays make 'family life too attractive."
- ^ "Our Town". Internet Broadway Database. http://www.ibdb.com/production.asp?ID=10441. Retrieved on 2008-07-10.
- ^ The Pulitzer Board (1938). "Pulitzer Prize Winners of 1938". The Pulitzer Prizes. http://www.pulitzer.org/cgi-bin/year.pl?473,26. Retrieved on 2008-07-10.
- ^ Wilder, Thornton. Collected Plays. Preface.
- ^ Lumley, Frederick (1967). New Trends in 20th Century Drama: A Survey since Ibsen and Shaw. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 333. OCLC 330001.
[edit] Further reading
- Wilder, Thornton (1938). Our Town: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Coward McCann, Inc.. pp. 128 pp. OCLC 773139.
[edit] External links
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