"Our Town" by Thornton Wilder

When it opened in 1938, the play Our Town by writer and playwright Thornton Wilder received surprisingly mixed reviews. I say “surprisingly” because the play would become a theater success, receive the Pulitzer Prize, and define what was meant by “small-town America” for generations. Yet some critics were concerned, especially with its structure, because Our Town somewhat deconstructed what serious drama had been like. 

The play tells the story of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, just over the state line of Massachusetts and with a population about 2,400. Specifically, it concerns two families who live next door to each other – the Gibbs and the Webbs. Doctor Gibbs is the town’s physician, and Mr. Webb is the newspaper editor. The play’s three acts happen in 1901, 1904, and 1913, three snapshots in time of two families. The story is especially about young George Gibbs and Emily Webb, their initial understanding of “a relationship,” a wedding, and a funeral.

 

What was unusual about Our Town is the character of the Stage Manager, who is the main character in the play. He is the narrator, the minister, the drug store soda fountain operator, and several other roles. He informs, explains, and foreshadows. In Act I, for example, we’re told that Mrs. Gibbs will eventually visit family in another state, catch pneumonia, and die there, her body returned to Grover’s Corners for burial in the Gibbs’ family plot. Yet she’s with us through most of the play. 

 

While some criticized the play’s “sentimentality,” Our Town maintains a strong appeal to the emotions. This is what we often continue to understand as “the real America,” not the artifice and facades of the big cities growing bigger but the farms and small towns, the places where traditional values not only matter but are lived and breathed like oxygen. It’s nostalgic, to be sure, but part of the appeal of nostalgia is the elements of truth and shared experience it contains. 

 

Thornton Wilder

In high school, I saw a production of Our Town at what was then the New Orleans Repertory Theatre. The school’s junior class attended via buses from our suburb to downtown New Orleans; we were reading the play in English classes that year. What I remembered was George and Emily talking to each other at night from their respective bedroom windows, and the actors perched on ladders (the sets in the play are rather simple and stark). Rereading the play 50 years later brings back more memories of that production, especially the graveyard scene.

 

Wilder was a prolific writer. He wrote novels like The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Eighth Day, and Theophilus North; plays and shorts plays, and essays. Two plays remain his best known – Our Town and The Matchmaker, better known under its Broadway and Hollywood musical name of Hello, Dolly!

 

Our Town remains a classic American play, a reminder of who we are as a nation and where we came from.

Top photograph: Frank Craven as the Stage Manager, Martha Scott as Emily Webb, and James Craven as George Gibbs in the original Broadway production.