Our town, p.1
Our Town, page 1
Dedication
To Alexander Woolcott
of Castleton Township, Rutland County, Vermont
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword by Donald Margulies
Addendum to the Foreword of the 75th Anniversary Edition
Our Town: A play in three acts
Characters
Act I
Act II
Act III
A Nephew’s Note
Overview
Readings
Pre–Our Town
1: A Wedding: Wilder Encounters a Superstition
2: Life, Death, and Understanding in Wilder’s Earlier Fiction and Drama
Fiction: “Once Upon a Time . . .”
Drama: “Good-by, Emerson Grammar School”
3: Our Town in the Making: Four Drafts
“M Marries N”: The Birth of the Play (1935)
Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, “Latitude 71° 37´, Longitude 42° 40´” (1937)
“Good Night to You All, and Thank You” (1937)
“I’ll Run for Something”: George Gibbs’s Political Aspirations (1938)
4: The Writing of Our Town: Here and Abroad
Our Town on the Boards
5: In Production: Sample Images
The McCarter Theatre, Princeton, New Jersey (1938)
The Broadway Program (1938–39)
Two Original Cast Photographs (1938)
6: The Playwright Discusses His Play
“Sense of the Whole”
“A Village Against the Life of the Stars”: Our Town’s First Preface
“Take Your Pencil . . .”
7: Wilder vs. Harris: Before and After
Before: Wilder’s Critical Response to Harris’s Directing Choices
After: Wilder’s Notes to Harris Regarding Subsequent Productions of Our Town
Special Features and Legacy
8: Wilder as Actor
9: Wilder as Adviser
10: Wilder Abroad
News from Abroad: Letter to Amos
L’Envoi
11: Final Thoughts: “Value above All Price . . .”
Acknowledgments
Source Material and Subsidiary Works
About the Author
Also by Thornton Wilder
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
You are holding in your hands a great American play. Possibly, the great American play.
If you think you’re already familiar with Our Town, chances are you read it long ago, in sixth or seventh grade, when it was lumped in a tasting portion of slim, palatable volumes of American literature along with The Red Pony by John Steinbeck and Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. You were compelled to read it, like nasty medicine force-fed for your own good, when you were too young to appreciate how enriching it might be. Or perhaps you saw one too many amateur productions that, to put it kindly, failed to persuade you of the play’s greatness. You sneered at the domestic activities of the citizenry of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, and rolled your eyes at the quaint-seeming romance between George Gibbs and Emily Webb. You dismissed Our Town as a corny relic of Americana and relegated Thornton Wilder to the kitsch bin along with Norman Rockwell and Frank Capra.
You may have come around on Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life actually owes a great deal to Our Town), and you may now be able to credit Rockwell for being a fine illustrator even if you can’t quite bring yourself to call him an artist, but Wilder is another story. In your mind he remains the eternal schoolmaster preaching old-fashioned values to a modern public that knows far more than he does, and you remain steadfast in your skepticism of his importance to American literature.
You are not alone.
I have a confession to make: I didn’t always appreciate the achievement of Thornton Wilder, either. Like many of you, I had read Our Town when I was too young and had seen it a few times. I thought I knew it and, frankly, didn’t think much of it; I didn’t get what was so great about it. That is, until I happened to see the 1988 Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Gregory Mosher, an experience which remains one of the most memorable of my theatergoing life. I was so mesmerized by its subversive power, so warmed by its wisdom, so shattered by its third act, that I couldn’t believe it was the same play I thought I had known since childhood. I went home and reread the masterpiece that had been on my shelf all along, and pored over the text to see what Mosher and his troupe of actors (led by Spalding Gray as the Stage Manager) had done differently. As far as I could tell, they had changed very little. I was the one who had changed. By the late eighties, I had entered my thirties and had a foothold in life; I had buried both my parents; I had protested a devastating war; and I had fallen in love. In other words, I had lived enough of a life to finally understand what was so great about Our Town.
“The response we make when we ‘believe’ a work of the imagination,” Wilder wrote, “is that of saying: ‘This is the way things are. I have always known it without being fully aware that I knew it. Now in the presence of this play or novel or poem (or picture or piece of music) I know that I know it.’”
Wilder was right: I believed every word of it.
One of the many joys of teaching is that you get to introduce students to work you admire. Since you can never relive the experience of seeing or hearing or reading a work of art for the first time, you can do the next best thing: you can teach it. And, through the discoveries your students make, you can recapture, vicariously, some of the exhilaration that accompanied your own discovery of that work long ago.
I teach playwriting to undergraduates at Yale. In addition to weekly writing assignments and a term project, my students read, and together we dissect, a variety of contemporary American and English plays (all personal favorites)—Harold Pinter’s Betrayal; David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross; John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation; three plays by Caryl Churchill: Fen, Top Girls, and Mad Forest; Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Wallace Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon; Chris Durang’s Marriage of Bette and Boo; and Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror among them—each of which provides rich areas for discussion about structure, character, event, theme, story, style.
A few years ago I added Our Town to the list. I schedule it at the end by devious design: after our semester-long exploration of What Makes a Good Play, I sneak in a truly great one. Only I don’t tell them it’s a great one. “Why did you assign this play?” they demand to know. “Nothing happens.” “It’s dated.” “Simplistic.” “Sentimental.”
I have them where I want them. Now I can give myself the pleasure of persuading them that they’ve got it all wrong, that the opposite of their criticisms is true: Our Town is anything but dated, it is timeless; it is simple, but also profound; it is full of genuine sentiment, which is not the same as its being sentimental; and, as far as its being uneventful, well, the event of the play is huge: it’s life itself.
Like many works of great art, its greatness can be deceptive: a bare stage, spare language, archetypal characters. “Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind,” Wilder wrote, “not in ‘scenery.’” Indeed, he begins the play with: “No curtain. No scenery.” It is important to recognize the thunderclap those words amounted to. Consider the context: The play was written in 1937, when stage directions like that were still largely unheard of in American dramaturgy. The season Our Town graced Broadway, the other notable plays were now-forgotten boulevard comedies by Philip Barry and Clare Boothe (Here Come the Clowns and Kiss the Boys Goodbye, respectively), and melodramas by now-forgotten playwrights E. P. Conkle and Paul Vincent Carroll (Prologue to Glory and Shadow and Substance). Wilder alone was challenging the potential of theater. An old-fashioned writer? Thornton Wilder was radical! A visionary!
In his 1957 introduction to Three Plays, Wilder wrote of the loss of theatergoing pleasure he began to experience in the decade before writing Our Town, when he “ceased to believe in the stories [he] saw presented there. . . . The theatre was not only inadequate, it was evasive. . . . I found the word for it: it aimed to be soothing. The tragic had no heat; the comic had no bite; the social criticism failed to indict us with responsibility.” (Has our theater really changed all that much since Wilder wrote those words? The same claim could be made today, given the “soothing” fare that dominates a Broadway where the “serious” play is the anomaly.)
Stripping the stage of fancy artifice, Wilder set himself a formidable challenge. With two ladders, a few pieces of furniture, and a minimum of props, he attempted “to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.” Actors mimed their stage business; a “stage manager” functioned as both omniscient narrator and player. These ideas were startlingly modern for American drama in 1937. True, Pirandello broke down the conventions of the play fifteen years earlier, in Europe, in Six Characters in Search of an Author (the world premiere of which Wilder attended), and in the United States in the decade before Our Town, O’Neill tested the bounds of theatrical storytelling, with mixed results, in Strange Interlude. But with Our Town, Wilder exploded the accepted notions of character and story, and catapulted the American drama into the twentieth century. He did for the stage what Picasso and Braque’s experiments in cubism did for painting and Joyce’s stream of consciousness did for the novel. To mistake him for a traditionalist is to do Thornton Wilder an injustice. He was, in fact, a modernist who translated European and Asian ideas about theater into
By 1930, Wilder, who started his writing career as a novelist, had begun experimenting with dramatic form. Influenced by the economy of storytelling of Noh drama, he boldly compressed ninety years of a family’s history into twenty minutes of stage time in The Long Christmas Dinner. His 1931 one-act, Pullman Car Hiawatha, which brings to life with a minimum of scenery a section of a train car and some of its passengers, reads as a marvelous rehearsal for many of the ideas he put to confident use in Our Town; it is also a fascinating play in its own right. In it, Wilder is in remarkably fertile fettle: chairs serve as berths in the Pullman car; actors represent the planets and passing fields and towns (including a Grover’s Corners, Ohio); a stage manager is present (there’s one in The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, too); a ghost makes an appearance, that of a German immigrant worker who perished while helping to build a trestle the train crosses; and, perhaps most strikingly, a young woman—a prototype for Emily—dies unexpectedly on the journey. The woman cries to the archangels Gabriel and Michael, who have arrived to escort her to her final destination, “I haven’t done anything with my life . . . I haven’t realized anything,” before accepting her fate. “I see now,” she says finally. “I see now. I understand everything now.”
Anyone who dismisses Our Town as an idealized view of American life has failed to see the impieties and hypocrisies depicted in Wilder’s vision. “Oh, Mama, you never tell us the truth about anything,” Emily bemoans to her mother.
Simon Stimson, the alcoholic choirmaster, is a brilliant creation, buffoon and tragic figure all at once. He is not a stumbling town drunk designed for easy laughs; rather, he is a tortured, self-destructive soul whose cries for help are ignored by a provincial people steeped in denial. In the tragedy of Simon Stimson—a suicide, we learn in Act III—Wilder illustrates the failure of society to help its own and the insidiousness of systematic ignorance. “The only thing the rest of us can do,” Mrs. Gibbs opines about Stimson’s public drunkenness, “is just not to notice it.” We may laugh at her Yankee pragmatism but it is also chilling.
The perfection of the play starts with its title. Grover’s Corners belongs to all of us; it is indeed our town, a microcosm of the human family, genus American. But in that specificity it becomes all towns. Everywhere. Indeed, the play’s success across cultural borders around the world attests to its being something much greater than an American play: it is a play that captures the universal experience of being alive.
The Stage Manager tells us the play’s action begins on May 7, 1901, but it is as specific to that time as it was, no doubt, to 1937, and as it is to the time in which we’re living. The three-act structure is a marvel of economy: Act I is dubbed “Daily Life,” Act II, “Love and Marriage,” and Act III, “I reckon you can guess what that’s about.”
The simultaneity of life and death, past, present, and future pervades Our Town. As soon as we are introduced to Doc and Mrs. Gibbs, the Stage Manager informs us of their deaths. Minutes into the play and already the long shadow of death is cast, ironizing all that follows. With the specter of mortality hovering, the quotidian business of the people of Grover’s Corners attains a kind of grandeur.
When eleven-year-old Joe Crowell, the newsboy, enters, making his rounds, he and Doc Gibbs chat about the weather, the boy’s teacher’s impending marriage, and the condition of his pesky knee. The prosaic turns suddenly wrenching when the Stage Manager casually fills us in on young Joe’s future, his scholarship to MIT, his graduating at the top of his class. “Goin’ to be a great engineer, Joe was. But the war broke out and he died in France.—All that education for nothing.” How could anyone accuse Wilder of sentimentality when he, like life, is capable of such cruelty? In just a few eloquent sentences he captures both the capriciousness of life and the futility of war. The war Wilder referred to, of course, was the Great War—the world was between wars when he wrote Our Town—but the poignancy of the newsboy’s fate is felt perhaps even more exquisitely today, in light of all the death and destruction the world has endured since.
Note the audacious and surprising ways in which Wilder has structured his acts; he interrupts the narrative flow of each with a stylistic departure. In Act I, Professor Willard and Editor Webb offer discursive sidebars about the geography and sociology of Grover’s Corners, a device reminiscent of the collagist technique of newsreel and newspaper snippets employed by his contemporary, the novelist John Dos Passos, in his U.S.A. trilogy.
At the start of the second act, it is three years later, George and Emily’s wedding day. The Stage Manager interrupts the frantic preparations to show us “how all this began. . . . I’m awfully interested in how big things like that begin.” And he takes us back in time to the drugstore-counter conversation the couple had “when they first knew that . . . they were meant for one another.” Once that seminal event is re-created, we return to the wedding itself. Emily, the bride with cold feet, plaintively asks her father, “Why can’t I stay for a while just as I am,” expressing the ageless, heartbreaking, child’s wish to prolong the charmed state of childhood and stave off the harshness of the adult world.
The passage from Love and Marriage to Death is as abrupt and wrenching as it is in real life. The people whose vitality moved and amused us before intermission are now coolly seated in rows in the town cemetery. Mrs. Gibbs, Simon Stimson, and Mrs. Soames, “who enjoyed the wedding so,” are all dead now, as is Wally Webb, whose young life was cut short by a burst appendix while on a Boy Scout camping trip.
Much as the soda-fountain flashback is the centerpiece of the second act, Emily’s posthumous visit to the past in the middle of Act III provides the emotional climax of the play. Newly deceased while giving birth to her second child, Emily wishes to go back to a happy day and chooses her twelfth birthday. The dead warn her that such a return can only be painful. The job of the dead, they tell her, is to forget the living. Emily learns all too quickly that they are right and decides to join the indifferent dead. Her farewell is one of the immortal moments in all of American drama:
Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners . . . Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking . . . and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths . . . and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
Wilder modestly wrote, “I am not one of the new dramatists we are looking for. I wish I were. I hope I have played a part in preparing the way for them.” He was wrong about not being one of the “new dramatists.” In some respects he was the first American playwright. The part he played in preparing those who followed—Williams, Miller, Albee, Wilson (Lanford), Wilson (August), Vogel, to list a few—is incalculable.
“The cottage, the go-cart, the Sunday-afternoon drives in the Ford, the first rheumatism, the grandchildren, the second rheumatism, the deathbed, the reading of the will,”—it’s all here, all in Our Town, all the passages of life.
If you are new to Our Town, I envy you. A joyous discovery awaits you.
Welcome—or welcome back—to Our Town.
—Donald Margulies
New Haven, Connecticut
Addendum to the Foreword of the 75th Anniversary Edition
A little more than ten years ago, when I first approached the daunting task of writing a foreword to Our Town, the after-shocks of 9/11 were still being felt; my reading of the play at that time was very much colored by that calamitous event. Thornton Wilder’s 1938 meditation on life, love and marriage, and death in a small New Hampshire town in the early part of the twentieth century seemed to illuminate uncannily the experience of being alive in the twenty-first. (Indeed, there was a resurgence of interest in the play and a spate of productions worldwide, including David Cromer’s revelatory mounting in 2009.)
Today, as I contemplate the play anew for this addendum, a different horror casts its shadow over the pages of Our Town: the massacre of twenty children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. When that terrible incident occurred, just a few weeks prior to this writing, I couldn’t help but think of Our Town. Maybe it was the New England setting with the universal-sounding Newtown standing in for Grover’s Corners. I imagined a typical, tranquil town, peopled with decent citizens, suddenly seeing their world shattered and their beloved children brutally, inexplicably, taken away from them. The simple truths about family and community Wilder wrote about seventy-five years ago seemed to articulate the enormity of this contemporary tragedy.
