Our Town
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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] It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1938.[2]
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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. According to the script, it is to be performed with little scenery and no set and only three 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."[3] 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'"[4]
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."
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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 ladder, 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."
[edit] 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).The fact that it is raining on the day of their wedding symbolize the life that Emily and George will have together. Already it shows that the life will be a misery.
[edit] 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.
(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. Music for the film was written by Aaron Copeland.)
[edit] Characters
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Main Characters:
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Rest of Cast (not in order of appearance):
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