Our Town

Synopsis

Our Town follows the lives and loves of the inhabitants of a fictional New Hampshire town called Grover’s Corners at the turn of the twentieth century. Primary players include the Stage Manager who acts as an omniscient narrator, the Webb family (Mr. and Mrs. Webb, Wally, and Emily), the Gibbs family (Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs, Rebecca and George), and various other townspeople. The first act comprises of daily life of the Grover’s Corners’ residents in 1901, while the second takes place three years later on George and Emily’s wedding day. The play’s third and final act takes place in the town cemetery in 1913, where Emily is being buried after dying in childbirth at age 26. Seated among the chairs are the town dead who discourage the now deceased Emily from revisiting the one day of her life she is allotted. She chooses to revisit her twelfth birthday but cuts her visit short, saying, “I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.” The play ends with George lying prostrate on Emily’s grave while she looks on. As the stars come out over Grover’s Corners, the Stage Manager pulls the curtain closed and wishes everyone a good night.

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Still from an early production of Our Town at Whitman College

Thornton Wilder

Already a literary celebrity and Pulitzer Prize winner at the time of the play’s creation, Wilder’s inspiration for Our Town came years earlier when he was a 23-year-old archeology student in Rome. In a letter to Penelope Fitzgerald, he described a moment of epiphany which came while excavating a first century tomb:

“...while by candle-light we peered at famous paintings of a family called Aurelius, symbolic representations of their dear children and parents ... the street-cars of today rushed by over us. We were clutching at the past to recover the loves and pieties and habits of the Aurelius family, while the same elements were passing above us.”

His vision of a commonality of human experience across time and space took years to be fully realized in the form of a play. After workshopping Our Town in New Hampshire’s MacDowell Colony he continued to work on it at a hotel outside Zurich.

Portrait of Thornton Wilder, taken by the Bridgeport Telegram in 1948

1938 Reception

Our Town by Thornton Wilder was first produced in January of 1938 in New Jersey, enjoying its New York premier in February of that year. Wilder’s piece was extremely innovative for its time. No props or set pieces were used, only chairs, a few tables, and a curtain. Wilder aimed to reject the realism prevalent in American theater which he accused of depriving the audience of its "imaginative participation." By stripping the stage of props and scenery he sought to provoke the audience into participating while acknowledging their non-neutrality.

After its 1938 premier, Our Town would win Wilder his second Pulitzer Prize and go on to become one of the most frequently produced plays in American theatrical history, even becoming a film in 1940. Despite its popularity and acclaim, the play was not above criticism. In the face of mounting conflict in Europe and America’s recent economic depression, some critics decried Wilder for a play they claimed over romanticized small-town American life. While American drama, “at the close of the 1930s, like the country itself as it confronted military conflict, seemed to adopt any form and content that defended the United States against outside threats,” Our Town in Wilder’s vision did not aim to support sentimental notions of isolationism and American exceptionalism. Throughout its initial rehearsal process, Wilder remained adamant that nostalgia and sentiment “had to be eliminated.” His play remains a testament to unadorned appreciation of life’s grand moments as well as its simplicities.

OUR TOWN in Our Town

On November 1st, 2019, members of the cast and crew of Ripe Frenzy along with other Whitman faculty and members of the greater Walla Walla community staged a reading of Our Town at First Congregational Church.