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Our Town is a three-act play by American playwright Thornton Wilder. It is a character story about an average town's citizens in the early twentieth century as depicted through their everyday lives. 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.

Wilder wrote the play while in his 30s. In June 1937, he lived in the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, one of the many locations where he worked on the play. During a visit to Zürich in September 1937, he drafted the entire third act in one day after a long evening walk in the rain with a friend, author Samuel Morris Steward.^[1]

Our Town was first performed at McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey on January 22, 1938. It next opened at the Wilbur Theater in Boston, Massachusetts on January 25, 1938. Its New York City debut was on February 4, 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] In 1946, the Soviet Union prevented a production of Our Town in the Russian sector of occupied Berlin "on the grounds that the drama is too depressing and could inspire a German suicide wave."^[4]

Background [link]

The play is set in the fictional community of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, modeled upon several towns in the Mount Monadnock region: Peterborough, Jaffrey, Dublin and others. The narrator gives the coordinates of Grover's Corners as 42°40′ north latitude and 70°37′ west longitude, which is in Massachusetts, about a thousand feet off the coast of Rockport.

Our Town's narrator, the Stage Manager, is completely 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 minimal 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."^[5] His answer was to have the characters mime the objects with which they interact. Their surroundings are created only with chairs, tables, and ladders. For example, the scene in which Emily helps George with his evening homework, conversing through upstairs windows, is performed with the two actors standing atop separate ladders to represent their neighboring houses. Says Wilder, "Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind – not in things, not in 'scenery.' "^[6]

Characters [link]

Main characters

• Stage Manager – a narrator, meta-commentator, and guide through Grover's Corners. He joins in the action of the play periodically, as the reverend at the wedding, the soda shop owner, a local townswoman, etc., and speaks directly to Emily after her death.
• Emily Webb – arguably the main character; we follow her from a precocious young girl through her wedding to George Gibbs and her early death.
• George Gibbs – the boy next door, a kind but irresponsible teenager who matures over time and becomes a responsible husband, father and farmer.
• Frank Gibbs – George's father, the town doctor
• Julia (Hersey) Gibbs – George's mother. She dreams of going to Paris, but doesn't get there. Dies later while visiting her daughter in Ohio. She saved $350 for the trip from the sale of an antique furniture piece, but ultimately willed it to George and Emily.
• Charles Webb – Emily's father, editor of the Grover's Corners Sentinel
• Myrtle Webb – Emily's mother

Secondary characters

• Joe and Si Crowell – local paperboys. Joe's intelligence earns him a full scholarship to MIT where he graduates at the top of his class. His promise will be cut short on the fields of France during World War I, according to the Stage Manager. Both he and his brother Si hold marriage in high disdain.
• Simon Stimson – the choir director and church organist. We never learn the root cause of his alcoholism and later suicide. He is still bitter and cynical beyond the grave.
• Howie Newsome – the milkman, a fixture of Grover's Corners.
• Rebecca Gibbs – George's younger sister. Later elopes with a traveling salesman and settles in Ohio.
• Wally Webb – Emily's younger brother. Dies of a burst appendix on a Boy Scout camping trip.
• Professor Willard – a rather long-winded lecturer
• Woman in Auditorium – concerned with temperance
• Man in Auditorium – concerned with social justice
• Another Woman in Auditorium – concerned with culture and beauty
• Mrs. Louella Soames – a gossipy townswoman and member of the choir
• Constable Bill Warren – the policeman
• Three Baseball Players – who mock George at the wedding
• Joe Stoddard – the undertaker
• Sam Craig – a nephew of Mrs Gibbs who left town to seek his fortune.
• Dead Man
• Dead Woman
• Mr. Carter
• Farmer McCarty
• Bessie – Howie Newsome's horse (visible to the characters, but not the audience)

Plot [link]

The Stage Manager guides the play, taking questions from the audience, describing the locations (as scenery is sparse) and making key observations about the world the play creates.

Act I: Daily Life [link]

The Stage Manager introduces the audience to the small town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, and its residents as a morning begins in 1901. Joe Crowell delivers the paper, Howie Newsome delivers the milk, and the neighboring Webb and Gibbs households send their children off to school. The Stage Manager brings out a long-winded professor to talk about the history and pre-history of Grover's Corners, Editor Webb gives a few notes on local political and religious affiliations and fields questions from the audience about alcoholism, social injustice and culture. After school, George and Emily exchange a few words, and Emily self-consciously asks her mother if she's pretty. The Stage Manager mentions that a time capsule is being laid in the cornerstone of a new bank in town, and noting the lack of information about the common people of ancient cultures, he resolves that a copy of this play will be placed inside. Moving to the evening, Emily whispers homework hints to George through their open windows. On their way home from choir practice, Mrs Gibbs, Mrs Webb and Mrs Soames discuss Simon Stimson, the choir director with a reputation for being a drunkard. Doc Gibbs teaches George a lesson in responsibility, and young Rebecca frets that the moon will strike the earth, causing "a big 'splosion".

Act II: Love and Marriage [link]

Three years pass and George and Emily prepare to wed. The day is filled with stress. Howie Newsome is delivering milk in the pouring rain while Si Crowell, younger brother of Joe, laments how George's baseball talents will be squandered. George pays an awkward visit with his soon-to-be in-laws. Here, the Stage Manager interrupts the scene and takes the audience back a year, to the end of Emily and George's junior year. Emily confronts George about his pride, and over an ice cream soda, they discuss the future and their love for each other. George resolves not to go to college, as he had planned, but to work and eventually take over his uncle's farm. 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 whole affair, as she turns to the audience and gushes.

Act III: Death and Eternity [link]

The Stage Manager opens the act with a lengthy monologue emphasizing eternity, and introduces us to the cemetery outside of town and the characters who died in the nine years since Act Two: Mrs Gibbs (pneumonia, while traveling), Wally Webb (burst appendix, while camping), Mrs Soames, and Simon Stimson (suicide by hanging), among others. We meet the undertaker, Joe Stoddard, and a young man Sam Craig who has returned home for his cousin's funeral. We learn that his cousin is Emily, who died giving birth to her and George's second child. The funeral ends and Emily emerges to join the dead. Then Mrs. Gibbs tell her that they must wait and forget the life that came before, but Emily refuses. 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. She finally finds it too painful, 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. The saints and poets, maybe – they do some." She then returns to her grave, beside Mrs. Gibbs, watching impassively as George kneels weeping at her graveside. The Stage Manager concludes the play, reflecting on the probable lack of life beyond Earth, and wishes the audience a good night.

Awards and nominations [link]

Awards

• 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
• 1989 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival
• 1989 Tony Award for Best Revival

Adaptations [link]

Hal Holbrook as the Stage Manager in the 1977 TV adaptation.

The play has been adapted numerous times:

• Our Town on May 12, 1939, as the 23rd episode of The Campbell Playhouse. Narrated by Orson Welles as the Stage Manager, with George Craven as George Gibbs, and Patricia Newton as Emily Webb, et alia.
• Our Town (1940 film), adaptation starring Martha Scott as Emily and William Holden as George Gibbs, with a musical score by Aaron Copland. Many members of the original cast repeated their roles in this film, although the ending was drastically changed so that Emily lived.
• Our Town (1940 radio), on May 6, 1940, a radio version was performed by many of the same film actors for Lux Radio Theater.
• Our Town (television), a live musical 1955 TV adaptation on Producers' Showcase starring Frank Sinatra as the Stage Manager, Paul Newman as George Gibbs, and Eva Marie Saint as Emily. The first and only musical version of the play to be telecast (so far).
• Our Town, a 1977 television adaptation of the play, starring Hal Holbrook as the Stage Manager, Robby Benson as George Gibbs and Glynnis O'Connor as Emily Webb.
• Grover's Corners, a 1987 musical adaptation performed at the Marriott Theatre.
• Our Town, a 1989 telecast of a Lincoln Center stage production starring Spalding Gray, Frances Conroy, Penelope Ann Miller, and Eric Stoltz
• Our Town (2003 film), a made-for-TV adaptation of a 2002 Broadway revival starring Paul Newman, this time as the Stage Manager
• Our Town (opera), an operatic version of the play with music by Ned Rorem
• An award-winning revival of Our Town opened at the Barrow Street Theatre on February 26, 2009. The production was directed by David Cromer, who also performed the role of Stage Manager for much of the show's run. Upon closing, the production had played four preview and 644 regular performances, making it the longest-running production of the play in its history. In addition to Cromer, other notable actors who performed in the role of Stage Manager included Helen Hunt, Michael McKean, Jason Butler Harner, Stephen Kunken and Michael Shannon.^[7]

References [link]

Further reading [link]

• Wilder, Thornton (1938). Our Town: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Coward McCann, Inc.. pp. 128 pp. OCLC 773139. 

External links [link]

• Our Town at the Internet Broadway Database
• Our Town 1940 film; free download at archive.org
• Two authorized productions on DVD
• Cummings Study Guide of "Our Town"