Group 1: Our Town [Oral B+ Written A– JMS]
Paul Alzate, Stephanie Bermudez, and Michelle Chan.
“Our Town,” written by Thorton Wilder, is a three-act play that was published in 1938. The play is set in 1901 in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire and explores the lives of people living in a typical American town. The play itself is an allegory of life. The townspeople voice concerns and endure experiences that are universal to Americans of the 1900s, yet its message also reaches out to audiences of a different generation.
In three acts, Wilder journeys through the cycle of life, from the birth of a new life, all way up to the inevitable. The three acts—Daily Life, Love and Marriage, and Death—focus on the main characters, Emily Webb and George Gibbs.
The first act, Daily Life, begins with the Stage Manager, who has a dual role as a narrator (this video clip can further elaborate on this “dual role” the Stage Manager plays). He starts by introducing the audience to the small town, particularly to the Gibbs and Webb families, who live next door to each other. The audience is introduced to a typical day and receives outside information from Professor Willard, a historian, and Mr. Webb, editor of the Grover’s Corners Sentinel. Following this scene, the audience is introduced to the Congregational Church at a choir practice. There the members discuss Simon Stimson, an organist with an alcohol problem. Stimson is symbolic of the dark side of the small town and how the townspeople do not address the problem directly, but rather gossip about it amongst each other. In a way, Stimson is a representation of Wilder’s darker views on humanity. “Daily Life,” the title of the first act, is a stereotypical representation of the average American family.
The second act, Love and Marriage, depicts George and Emily’s romantic relationship. There is a flashback that informs the audience of how their love began and leads up to their marriage. The second act serves as a reminder of how seemingly trivial repetitions (e.g. Wednesday choir, feeding the chickens) make up the simplistic lifestyle in Grover’s Corner. 
Finally, the last act—Death—takes the audience to the inevitable end of a life. Emily dies in childbirth and takes her place in the cemetery, among the dead. Members of the eerie graveyard discuss their lives while speaking in a monotonous voice. It is clear that the more time that passes, the more memories they lose. Here the theme of death is employed as a way of reaching the audience. It is used to show the audience how they fail to enjoy and “realize life while they live it.” The final act serves as the pinnacle of Wilder’s message: who are when you have been stripped of all earthly details and devices?
Although the language Wilder uses in the play is simple, it subtly conveys a message with a deeper meaning. The characters use typical country vernacular, which makes the play more authentic in regards to small-town life. In order to help the audience feel more involved in the story, the Stage Manager breaks the fourth wall by directly addressing the audience. The fourth wall is the imaginary wall between fiction and reality and also what separates the audience from the play in this case.
“Our Town” is involved with two time periods: the early 1900s (1901 – 1913) and the late 1930s-1940s. The story of the play is set in the early 1900s, a time of increasing immigration and industrial developments. From 1900 to 1910, immigration soared from 3.5 million to 9 million. 70% of those immigrants came from Eastern or Southern Europe. Many immigrants came to America primarily because they saw it as a country of opportunity, particularly economic opportunity.
In the play, Wilder mentions the Polish Town “across the tracks” from Grover’s Corners, but does not discuss the undertones of segregation that was brought on by immigration and existed because those families were located “across the tracks.” At the beginning of the play, Dr. Gibbs is returning from the Polish Town after attending to a woman with twins, which suggests that health complications had existed.
The early 1900s was also a time of great industrial changes. The first automobile, Henry Ford’s Model T, was introduced in 1908. In Act III, which takes place in 1913, the Stage Manager tells the audience that gradual changes were happening and though “on the whole, things don’t change much around here,” farmers began to come to town in Fords, replacing the horses and buggies. People began to lock their doors at night even though no one had been burglarized so far. Though changes were happening at a slow pace, life at Grover’s Corners was no longer the way it was when the town was first introduced.
Early on in the play, the Stage Manager encourages the audience to ask Mr. Webb questions about the town. One character, the Belligerent Man, from the audience asks, “Is there no one in town aware of social injustice and industrial inequality?” Mr. Webb says that everyone is aware of this and their town is “hunting like everybody else” for a way the hard working can “rise to the top” and for the lazy and quarrelsome to “sink to the bottom.” This indicates that although Wilder painted Grover’s Corners as a quintessential small town, Grover’s Corners was not excluded from the changes and troubles that affected America as a whole. While social injustice and industrial inequality did not affect Grover’s Corners as much and most likely at a much slower rate, Mr. Webb tried to convey that Grover’s Corners makes an attempt to be as involved as the rest of the country. This could be seen as Wilder’s reference to the Progressive Era (late 1800s to 1920s), a period of economic, political and social reforms.
The play was first performed in 1938, when America was nearing the end of the Great Depression and was on the cusp of World War II. During the Great Depression, many Americans lost their jobs; family income decreased and because of that many families fell apart. Despite the negative impact of the Depression and increasing global tensions, Wilder wanted to remind people to find joy in the smallest events of daily life, despite the harsh realities of the world outside. In his own words, Wilder said, he hoped the audience would “find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.”
Joe Crowell, an extremely bright boy from Grover’s Corners went on to attend Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After graduating at the top of his class with plans to become an engineer, Joe entered the war and died in France. By telling the audience of Joe’s death during the war right after they are introduced to Joe, the Stage Manager subtly compels the audience to reflect upon war, the lives it takes, and whether or not the reasons for war are worth it. This is especially important and very relevant because World War II was on the horizon in 1938. Many of the audience members during the late 1930s were also nostalgic for what used to be before the war and the Great Depression. Grover’s Corners was a town unlikely to be affected by dramatic industrial changes or financial collapse.
A decade before writing “Our Town” Wilder had “ceased to believe in the stories…presented” at the shows he went to. He found the stories at the theater “not only inadequate, [they were] evasive… [they] aimed to be soothing. The tragic had no heat; the comic had no bite; the social criticism failed to indict us with responsibility.” Through “Our Town,” Wilder was able capture the attention of his viewers and force them to reflect upon their own lives—a reaction noted through reviews and critiques which will be analyzed shortly.
Now that we have addressed the matters of plot, story, and social context of the play, we come to the analysis of its content. In a play, or any art form, be it poetry or painting or architecture, content is the meaning of any given art piece. Content is the message the composer of the piece conveys to his audience. Content is also the themes present in a play, themes that could either be extremely personal, meaningful to one person, or those that are universal and transcend cultural, political, and geographic boundaries.
Focusing on Wilder’s play with this framework in mind, we see themes coming up that are universal in nature. Throughout the play, Wilder explores the ephemeral nature of human existence. This theme is explored to great length in the Third Act, where the dead denizens of Grover’s Corners observe the living, taking note of how they squander their lives and the little time they have left on Earth. The use of plain, ordinary clothes for all the characters—even the ubiquitous Stage Manager dresses as if he had picked his clothes at the last minute—and the austere set design of the play emphasizes how much the characters are prodigal in using their time; the audience sees as the characters see, which is not much because the characters are always in a rush in completing their daily routine. Mrs. Gibbs hopes to go to Paris one day, but she always rationalizes the delay by convincing herself that will always be time to persuade her husband of it, and she dies without ever accomplishing that dream. In this act, Emily’s soul witnesses how the living only go through the motions and ritual of life in a hurry and never slow down to appreciate the few things that give life value. After Emily’s ghost revisits a day in her living life, she asks the Stage Manager a poignant question: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?” to which he responds “No.” In Act III, Emily realizes how little the world and our short time on it is truly treasured and laments, “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.” Through Emily’s revelations, Wilder hoped to shake the audience and force them to reevaluate their own lives and whether or not they take many of its joys for granted, never truly enjoying life. In this act, the audience members could see themselves reflected in the living members of “Our Town” and hopefully gain a renewed appreciation for each and every day. Wilder is never preachy about the message he wanted the audience to leave with, and he is successful in a large part because he is subtle, yet never understated.
The importance of human relationships is another theme explored, exemplified by the Stage Manager in Act III when he says the “eternal” lies in human beings and the relationships among them. One of the central points of the plot, the romance between Emily and George, is the pinnacle of human intimacy: a marriage, a type of bond where the couple vows to be with each other until death pulls them apart. In the final act, Emily yearns to be with her family once more, to be among her loved ones. Through this play, Wilder expresses that human relationships and the joy they bring give life a reason to be lived.
The release of the “Our Town” revival was met with high praise. As noted earlier, Wilder’s message was able to reach his audience. A 1938 review from The New York Times revealed that Wilder’s play was “deeply moving,” “philosophical,” and “heartbreaking.” It had a “profound, strange, unworldly significance.” 71 years later on February 27, 2009, the New York Times reviewed the revival of “Our Town” and noted that the play was not “about the evaporated glory of simpler yesteryears,” but rather one that “[whispered] to us the urgent necessity of living in the here and now — which is all anybody in Grover’s Corners ever had, all anybody anywhere really has.” In 2009, the play’s message was just as profound as it was 71 years ago.
Various critics from well-respected journals such as The New York Timesand the Wall Street Journal had nothing but approving words for the David Cromer production of the play. The differences between Cromer’s production and earlier productions are discussed at length in reviews, and the verdict is that the director’s interpretations help to express the themes of the play. Charles Isherwood of The New York Timeswrote that, “The folksy warmth in which the play is often saturated is scrubbed off too. The actors wear contemporary clothes that look as if they’d been pulled out of their own closets…They are you-and-me types, the better to blend in with, well, you and me.” As you can see, according to the critics, Cromer successfully adapts the play for modern day audiences and further breaks down the fourth wall at the same time. In fact, when one watches the play, the line between the audience and actors is blurred, and one forgets that they are viewing a literary creation. Even the acting helps to tumble down the invisible wall: “Mr. Cromer’s seemingly artless anti-acting is central to the effect of this production, in which the wall that separates illusion from reality becomes as porous as the one that separates the actors from their audience.”
Through Cromer’s direction, we come to realize that the plight of the denizens of Grover’s Corners is our plight, and it strengthens Wilder’s message to live life to its fullest extent. Stimson’s cries are that of Wilder’s, where everyone “move[s] about in a cloud of ignorance . . . always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another.” Perhaps one day we will realize that this haunted misanthropist was right, and take heed of his words.
Works Cited
Athinson, Brooks. “The Play.” New York Times 5 Feb. 1938: 18. Web. 07 Dec. 2009. <http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/theater/OurTown.pdf>.
Bryer, Jackson R. Conversations with Thornton Wilder. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992.
Castronovo, David. Thornton Wilder. New York: Ungar, 1986.
Harrison, Gilbert A. The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder. New Haven, CT:
Ticknor & Fields, 1983.
Isherwood, Charles. “21st-Century Grover’s Corners, With the Audience as Neighbors.” New York Times. 27 Feb. 2009. Web. 7 Dec. 2009. <http://theater.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/theater/reviews/27town.html>.
Malcolm Goldstein. The Art of Thornton Wilder. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. 19- 20
Teachout, Terry. “The Genius of David Cromer.” Wall Street Journal [New York City]
27 Feb. 2009: W7. Wall Street Journal. 27 Feb. 2009. Web. 07 Dec. 2009.
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123569296515188161.html>.
Whitfield, Stephen J. A Companion to 20th-century America. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. Print.
Wilder, Thornton. Our Town. New York: Perennial, 2003. Print. Foreword by Donald Margulies
Wilder, Thornton; McClatchy, J. D., ed. (2007). Thornton Wilder, Collected Plays and Writings on Theater. Library of America. vol. 172. New York: Library of America.
